"How Did You Learn Kanji?"

I had a friend in 2011 who also lived in Japan and was also learning Japanese. Like me, he hoped to be fluent one day. I told him that I was going to learn all 2136 common-use kanji by making up a mnemonic story for each one. He laughed at me, of course. I don’t blame him.

But this slightly convoluted method is the thing that took my Japanese kanji knowledge from beginner to advanced.

So here is the story of how I studied kanji, some suggestions for kanji practice, plus some advice from another friend who took a totally different approach to me. I hope you’ll find it useful!

Learning kanji takes time

Written Japanese uses a mix of three “alphabets” - hiragana, katakana, and kanji (Chinese characters).

Individual hiragana and katakana characters indicate sound only - the hiragana character あ makes the sound “a”, but it doesn’t have any meaning by itself. (Just like how the letter “B” doesn’t have any meaning by itself - it’s just a sound).

Kanji, on the other hand, indicate meaning as well as sound. For example, the kanji 木 means “tree”; 重 means “heavy”.

To read Japanese fluently, a student must be able to understand at least 2000 kanji. There is even an official list of the 2136 kanji that all Japanese children learn by the end of secondary school, called the jōyō kanji (常用漢字, meaning “regular-use kanji”).

The task of learning at least 2000 kanji is a major undertaking - even for Japanese people. That’s why students in Japan continue learning the jōyō kanji  right up until the end of high school. And traditional methods of learning kanji tend to focus on rote memorisation, which is very inefficient.

The Heisig Method

When I got serious about learning kanji, in 2010, I did a bit of googling and stumbled across people talking about “the Heisig method”. This is the kanji study method introduced by James W. Heisig in his popular (and somewhat controversial) book ‘Remembering the Kanji I: A complete course on how not to forget the meaning and writing of Japanese characters’.*

The Heisig approach can be summed up as follows:

1) Learn the meaning of kanji
2) Learn the meaning of radicals
3) Memorise how to write kanji by making up descriptive mnemonic stories

You’ll note that reading kanji (how to pronounce them) does not feature on this list.

1) Learn the meaning of kanji

Heisig argues that before learning the readings of any kanji characters, it is more efficient to first learn the meanings. To this end, he gives each kanji an English keyword. For example, the kanji character 行 means “go”, so Heisig gives it the English keyword “going”.

By learning the meanings of kanji, the learner can guess at unfamiliar words.

I got to show off this ability years later in Okinawa, when my good friend Karli and I were looking at some artefact:

“What’s it made of?” she asked.

“I think it’s ivory.”

“Fran, why the hell do you know the Japanese word for ‘ivory’?”

“I don’t,” I said, pointing at the sign which had the word 象牙 on it. “But this one (象) "means ‘elephant’, and this one (牙) means ‘tusk’.”

2) Learn radicals

Heisig also puts a lot of focus on learning radicals - small parts which make up kanji. (He calls them “primitive elements”, but radicals is a more commonly-used term).

Radicals are the building blocks of kanji, and by learning to identify these constituent parts, you can “unpick” new and unfamiliar characters. Knowledge of radicals is also very helpful for looking up kanji in a dictionary.

For example, the kanji 明 (meaning “bright”) is made up of the two smaller parts 日 (“sun“) and 月 (“moon”). If the SUN and the MOON appeared in the sky together, that’d be pretty BRIGHT, right?

3) Make mnemonics

Using these radicals, Heisig argues that by making vivid and memorable stories, you can remember even complex kanji easily.

A common and simple example of a kanji mnemonic is 男, the character for “man”. The top half of this kanji is 田 “rice field“, and the bottom half is 力, “power”. So here’s the image: A MAN is someone who uses POWER in the RICE FIELD.

(If you’re not great at making up mnemonics, you can do what I did and copy other people’s funny stories from the Kanji Koohii website).

4) Practice writing by hand - from memory

Heisig says that in order to learn to read and recognise kanji characters, you should practise writing them. But rather than just copying them out endlessly, you need to use the power of active recall. He tells the student to use flashcards to test yourself on your ability to write the character from memory.

So for instance, on the front of the flashcard you have the word “man”, and then you recall the story ("oh yes, the POWER 力 in the RICE FIELD 田”) and write the kanji out from memory: 男.

The controversial part is the suggestion that you should do all of this work - make up 2000+ mnemonic stories, and learn to handwrite each kanji from memory - before learning how to read (i.e. pronounce) any of the kanji.

In practice, most students will be studying Japanese at the same time. (Who’s using the Heisig method to learn kanji, but not also learning the Japanese language? Nobody, I reckon.)

Combining the Heisig method with Anki

Heisig’s book was first published in 1977, so he suggests using paper flashcards. But the method really comes into its own when you use it with a flashcard app. I’l talk about Anki here because it’s the app I used.

Anki is a flashcard app that uses the principle of spaced repetition to make practising with flashcards as efficient as possible. Put simply, spaced repetition means the app decides when you need to see a flashcard next, based on how recently you got it right.

I used Anki for years, both for vocabulary practice and for kanji writing practice. It’s actually the reason I got a smartphone, in 2011.

You can make your own flashcard decks (a “deck” is what Anki calls a set of cards) with Anki, or you can download decks that other people have made. I used a deck that someone else made, but I edited it a bit.

On the front of the each card, I had the Heisig keyword. In this case, Heisig’s keyword is “eat”. This is a good keyword, as the kanji 食 means “eating” or “foodstuff”, and 食べる (taberu) is a verb meaning “to eat”. So, the idea is that you see the word “eat” and have to remember how to write the kanji:

How this works in practice

I probably practised writing kanji like this every day for about 15 minutes, for about a year and a half in 2010-2011. Essentially, that’s how I learned to write Japanese.

And by learning the meanings of kanji, suddenly all those signs and labels all around me (I was living in Japan by this time) started to have meaning.

Outside my flat there was a sign with the word 歩行者 on it. I knew that 歩 meant “walk”, 行 meant “go”, and 者 meant “person”. That’s how I learned that 歩行者 means “pedestrian”. I didn’t know how to read it aloud, but I knew what it meant.

The school that I worked at was an eikaiwa gakkou, an English conversation school. On the front of the school was the word 英会話. I knew that 英 could mean “English”, 会 meant “meet”, and 話 meant “talk”. I also knew that the character 英 could be read as ei, because it was in the word 英語 (eigo, the English language). And that 話 could be read as wa, because it was at the end of 電話 (denwa, telephone). So from this I could guess that 英会話 was ei-something-wa… and I knew the word eikaiwa (English conversation), so I asked my boss if 英会話 was “eikaiwa” - yes.

I was vegetarian when I first moved to Japan, so I spent some time scouring packages in supermarkets to work out whether I could eat things or not. I knew that the radical 月 could mean “meat” or “flesh”, and I knew that 豕 meant “pig”, so I could guess that 豚 was probably “pork” or “pig”. I didn’t know the word for pig, or the word for pork. But I could guess that I probably didn’t want to eat something with 豚 in it.

In other words, the Heisig method works - when combined with other Japanese study.

(Incidentally, I don’t “teach” Heisig because it’s a bit weird, and not for everyone. But I don’t teach kanji through rote memorisation either. I use an integrated approach - I want students to learn the meaning of individual kanji, and the readings of whole words, and to learn kanji in context as much as possible. But I still think that Heisig is a great self-study method, and if you’re interested, you should check out his book*).

Post-Heisig

As my Japanese got better, I no longer associated the kanji with English keywords. When I saw the kanji 食 I’d think of the meaning - something to do with eating or food - but not necessarily Heisig’s keyword. So later, on the front of each card, I added an example word containing the kanji, which is written in hiragana. In this case, the word is たべる (taberu; to eat), and to test myself, I have to write out the word 食べる (i.e., not just the individual kanji):

I also have the stroke order on the back of the card, so that I can check straight away if the stroke order I wrote out is correct or not. I added these by screenshotting the stroke order diagram in takoboto, the dictionary app I use on my phone.

(I used to be a bit lazy about stroke order, but since I started teaching Japanese I have spent some time correcting my bad habits).

The stroke order diagram is good for checking that you’re handwriting the kanji in the correct way, too. A common mistake learners make is copying typeface fonts, but many kanji look quite different when handwritten to how they look in type.

In December 2019, I decided to dust off this (very neglected) Anki deck and do some handwriting practice, every day for a month. For twenty minutes every day, I’d go through flashcards and test myself on whether I could handwrite the kanji.

I really enjoyed the routine of practising kanji again. I find kanji practice surprisingly relaxing. I mentioned this to some students, and they (well some of them anyway!) said they find kanji writing practice relaxing, even meditative. Little and often is probably key.

Find something you enjoy, and do it every day forever

Years later, I was out for dinner with an American friend in Japan. We were looking at the kanji-filled handwritten menu, and I realised that his Japanese reading was really quick - much faster than mine. “How did you learn to read kanji?” I asked him.

“Er, I dunno. Just, reading books I guess? For, like, years.”

It probably doesn’t matter too much how you study kanji. To be honest, I’m not sure that the Heisig method is better than any other. It worked for me, but if you put the time in, there are other methods of learning kanji that might work just as well.

The key thing is to find something that works for you, and spend a little time on it every day. And if your friends laugh at you, try and ignore them! One day they might be asking you how you did it.

Related posts

• How to Use Anki to Not Forget Vocabulary

• The Five Best Books for Learning Kanji

• “How Did You Learn Japanese?“

• Why Does Japanese Have So Many Alphabets?
  

Links

Links with an asterisk* are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you, when you click through and buy the book. Thanks for your support!

• James W. Heisig’s ‘Remembering the Kanji I: A complete course on how not to forget the meaning and writing of Japanese characters’’ *

• Anki (desktop; iOS; android)

• Kanji Koohii

Watching Japanese TV Every Day for a Month (Or, What to Do When Things Don't Go To Plan)

In my second year of university, when I should have been revising for my Japanese exam, I borrowed the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫 Mononoke-hime) from a friend and watched that instead. It was way too fast for me, and I didn’t understand anything. I think I literally caught about two words.

It definitely didn’t help with my exam. If anything it just left me feeling a bit discouraged. I should have watched Mononoke with subtitles. Or, probably, I should have watched something easier.

I gave up on watching Japanese films for a while after that. But later on, I discovered Japanese TV, and found it a fun and interesting way to develop my listening skills.

As one of my monthly challenges this year, I decided to watch Japanese TV every day for a month. I thought this would be easy – I already watch quite a lot of Japanese TV.

But just like my exam “revision”, it didn’t exactly go to plan…

Week One – A Promising Start

I spent the first week of September helping my brother move house. I had the week off work, I wasn’t doing any lesson prep or teaching, and I had good chunks of time to myself each day. It was easy to watch an episode or two of Japanese TV every day.

I watched The Naked Director (全裸監督 zenra kantoku), a Netflix series about the life of Japanese adult video director Toru Muranishi. These episodes are 45 minutes, so I’d watch one a day, or half an episode a day if I was short on time.

Tip: Don’t feel obliged to watch whole episodes. Half an episode is better than nothing.

Watching Japanese TV every day was going to be easy, I thought.

Week Two – Branching Out

Back home in Brighton, the following week, I watched some of Atelier (アンダーウェア andāwea, meaning Underwear), another drama series. Atelier is about a young woman, Tokita-san, who works for a high-class lingerie shop in Tokyo’s Ginza district. It’s a gentle, chocolate-boxy show about Tokita’s relationship with her intimidating boss.

I started watching Atelier when it came out in 2015, got bored and came back it this month. I watched about six episodes again this time, and then got bored again.

One of the great things about Netflix, of course, is that it has a wide range of shows, so you can jump about and find something you like. You don’t have to commit to watching in the same way that you would if you were buying a TV series or paying to rent it from a DVD shop (remember those? I do.)

Tip: If you get bored, stop watching and try something else!

I moved on to Netflix’s Terrace House (テラスハウス, terasu hausu).

(Interestingly, テラス (terasu) is the Japanese word for a balcony, so the “terrace house” of the title is a fancy modern house with a balcony, not a UK “terraced house”, which is a house built as part of a row of houses.)

Terrace House is a housemate-format reality TV show. Unlike other house-based shows, though, it’s slow-moving and meditative. There are no “evil” tasks or conflict-inducing rule changes.

The housemates are allowed to come and go as they please. They go to work. Not much really happens. No one is voted out, and mostly they seem to sit around talking about what to have for dinner.

It’s delightful, and from my students I know it’s pretty popular among learners of Japanese.

The format of Terrace House is great for comprehension, too. You watch the intro, which previews the action and shows you what’s going to happen. Then the action happens. Then the studio cast discuss what’s happened. Then we preview what’s coming up on the next episode. This is great for comprehension, because key points are repeated.

It’s a bit like this sketch:

Of course, reality TV is great listening practice for natural speech. It’s how real people speak, in fairly real situations. If you find natural speech fast or difficult to follow, try watching with subtitles.

Tip: turn the subtitles on. It’s not cheating to watch with subtitles! If you’re at intermediate level or above, try watching with Japanese subtitles.

I also watched a beautiful film, 聲の形 (koe no katachi, A Silent Voice), which was recommended to me by several of my students. It’s an animated teen drama, following the relationship between a deaf girl and a hearing boy, and exploring themes of bullying, disability and redemption.

If you liked Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (君の名は, kimi no na wa), you should definitely watch A Silent Voice:

Things were going well!

Week Three – Forgetting

I went vegetarian when I was ten. A few months later, my friend’s sister decided she was going to be vegetarian too. But then the next week, out for a meal, she forgot and ordered spaghetti bolognese. Once her meal came, she remembered that she was supposed to be vegetarian and was quite upset.

I found this totally baffling. How could she forget something so important? How could someone forget that spaghetti bolognese isn’t vegetarian? Why didn’t her parents question it when she ordered? None of this made sense to me.

I was similarly surprised, in the middle of the third week of September, to remember that I was supposed to be watching Japanese TV every day. I hadn’t watched any Japanese TV for four whole days. Not only that, I even hadn’t noticed I hadn’t done it. I just completely forgot.

I’m usually a pretty organised and disciplined person, so this was an unpleasant surprise. September is a busy month for me, as my new courses start, and this year was particularly busy, as I had other things going on too.

But what to do now?

When you realise you’ve “failed” at a challenge you've set yourself, you basically have two choices.

Option one is to give up. There was no way for me to turn back time and achieve what I set out to do – to watch Japanese TV every day in September. So, I figured, I could just quit, and take it easy for the rest of the month.

Option one was pretty tempting, especially when I started to think about why I had managed to forget that I was supposed to be doing this challenge.

I think the key problem was that watching Japanese TV is not really a challenge for me. I don’t mean that it’s not difficult – obviously I don’t understand everything. Or that I have nothing to learn – I do.

But I already watch TV most days, and I watch quite a bit of Japanese-language TV, so watching Japanese TV every day was not enough of a change in habit. I did it for half the month, and then I forgot I was supposed to be doing it.

The other monthly challenges I’ve done have been harder, and yet I managed them. Speaking Japanese without being in Japan required planning, effort, early mornings and occasional bribery. Reading Japanese books every day, I needed to have a book on me at all times. Even playing Japanese video games every day required me to work out when I was going to squeeze 20 or 30 minutes out of each day.

But watching Japanese TV when I get home from work just feels a bit too similar to watching English-language TV when I get home from work.

Tip: don’t make your goals too easy, or you may find that they’re not motivating.

Option Two was to keep going, and see how it went. I figured that even if I didn't clock up the hours I was hoping for, it would probably still be more Japanese TV than I would have watched otherwise.

I decided to keep going.

Week Four - Taking a Detour

At the weekend, I watched five episodes of Terrace House (2.5 on Saturday, 2.5 on Sunday. See, the half episodes do add up).

I also watched another Japanese film, Tokyo Sonata:

Japanese TV started to crop up everywhere. A colleague asked if I was into Kore-eda films. The new term started, and I overheard my new beginner students talking about Terrace House. My STEP 2 students swapped recommendations for easy Japanese shows to watch. I went for a walk with a friend, and she told me she’d been exploring the Japanese side of Netflix.

As for me? I might watch Princess Mononoke again some day, now that I can understand it.

It’s good to make a plan for your language learning, but it’s ok if the plan doesn’t work out. Taking a detour can be more interesting anyway.

How to Practise Japanese by Playing Video Games Every Day

Earlier this year, I was telling a friend about the various monthly challenges I set myself to practise Japanese.

“What are you going to do in July?”

“I might try writing every day, like a diary or something? Or I might watch Japanese TV every day…”

“Fran, watching TV every day doesn't really sound like a challenge.”

“…or I might play video games every day.”

“That definitely doesn't sound like a ‘challenge’ to me.”

“…all the more reason to do it, right?”

Who says challenges have to be challenging? I played Japanese video games for about 20 minutes a day for a month. Here’s what I learned: six reasons to play video games in a foreign language. 

This is not really a “how to” post. I’m not going to tell you how to “learn Japanese in a week just by playing video games” or to claim this is a “quick route to fluency” (it’s not, namely because there is no quick route to fluency, just an endless and potentially very enjoyable road trip).

Instead, I’m just going to share some reflections on the very fun experience that was playing Japanese video games every day.

In July, I played the second and third Gyakuten Saiban (逆転裁判) games. (I’ve played games one and two before, a few years ago.)

The English title for the series is Ace Attorney. I mostly use the Japanese names here, because I play the games in Japanese, and I don’t know the English names.

I also played some bits of Life is Strange, another story-based game. Life is Strange isn’t a Japanese game, but as with a lot of video games, you can just switch the language to Japanese. But mostly I played a lot of Gyakuten Saiban, so I’ll talk about that here.

What is Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney)?

Gyakuten Saiban is a Japanese visual novel adventure game based in and around courtrooms. In the games I played, you play as Naruhodō Ryūichi (his name in the English-language version is Phoenix Wright), a defence attorney who fights for justice for his clients.

Put simply, the aim is to win all the cases by shouting “objection!” at appropriate points, finding contradictions in evidence, and therefore ensuring your defendant is found “not guilty”.

What kind of language level is it?

The Gyakuten Saiban games are suitable for students of Japanese at the advanced level. If you’ve played the game in English before and have intermediate level Japanese, you could probably give it a good go.

If you’re a beginner, this one’s not for you. Try tabikaeru (旅かえる, ‘Travel Frog’) instead.

Practicalities

I started playing on Nintendo DS, but switched to playing the iOS port, on an old iPhone 5.

I played the game every day for at least 20 minutes, by putting the phone in my bag and playing it when I was waiting somewhere, on a bus, or having lunch. Probably, if I’d tried to play the DS every day, I would have forgotten and left it at home.

I don’t really like phone games, but the iPhone has no connectivity. So it functions as a little hand-held, and without the distraction of phone notifications going off.

Six Great Things About Playing Japanese Visual Novel Games 

1) Vocabulary you would not otherwise encounter

Just off the top of my head, here is a short and incomplete list of words I have learned from playing Gyakuten Saiban:

検事　　けんじ　　　　public prosecutor​

異議　　いぎ　　　　　objection

刑事　　けいじ　　　　police detective

拘置所　こうちしょ　　prison

裁判所　さいばんしょ　court

裁判官　さいばんかん　judge

矛盾　　むじゅん　　　contradiction, inconsistency

逆転　　ぎゃくてん           turn-around, reversal

This is not useful vocabulary for my day-to-day life (unless I have a run-in with the Japanese judicial system anytime soon). 

But it’s precisely because this vocabulary is not particularly common, that I hadn’t encountered it before.

Just like books, video games introduce you to new and interesting vocabulary you might not encounter in everyday life.

And sometimes, understanding that vocabulary will be entirely necessary in order to progress in the game…

2) Solving riddles

The great thing about Gyakuten Saiban, from a language-learning perspective, is that the gameplay mostly revolves around finding contradictions in evidence.

For example, a witness on the stand says they saw the victim being stabbed in the chest. But the autopsy result shows that the victim was stabbed in the back!

In order to move on in the game, you have to find this contradiction and present the evidence in order to show that the witness is lying.

You don’t need to understand everything that’s going on at all times, but you do need to understand (in this example) the words for “chest”, “back”, “cause of death” etc.

In this way, playing a text-based video game in Japanese is a little like taking a test (a really fun one). The game is testing your understanding of what’s going on. If you don't understand, you can’t go any further.

(Image source: Nintendo)

3) A non-boring way to learn vocabulary

Video games are a great way to learn new vocabulary in a fairly natural way.

Let’s look at another example from Gyakuten Saiban. You’re examining a crime scene. You select an item in the scene, and the game tells you what that item is called. If the item is useful, you’ll probably see it again, and its name will be mentioned again and again, cementing the word in your mind.

If it’s not a useful item in the game, you might not see it again, but that’s ok too. We’re here to play the game, not to memorise a boring list of useless vocabulary. 

And if the word is one that the writers think may be unfamiliar to the player, there’s usually a younger character around to help out…

4) The younger assistant role

Naruhodo, the main character, has an assistant and friend named Mayoi (Maya, in the English version).

Shu Takumi, creator of the games, explained the presence of Mayoi as follows:

“I thought that, rather than investigating alone, it would be more fun for the player to have someone with them from whom they could get advice.”
(Source)

Mayoi is a great character – a good friend to Naruhodo, and a really fun sidekick character. Their interactions are one of my favourite things about the games. She’s also young and sometimes naïve, which means she serves an important practical purpose.

She asks Naruhodo how names and difficult kanji are read. And when new or difficult concepts come up, Mayoi is there to ask what things mean and to require explanation. This is super helpful.

(Image source: Famitsu)

5) Video games are basically books

Gyakuten Saiban is a visual novel game. There’s really quite a lot of reading required.  

But the text is accompanied by visual explanations – pictures and animated sequences, so I think it’s easier to understand than a conventional novel. 

And compared to most books, it’s very dialogue-heavy. Almost all of the text is dialogue. That’s good, because dialogue is how people speak.

You can learn a lot by reading narrative stories, but you won’t learn how people speak unless you’re exposed to a lot of dialogue and conversation.

6) You don’t have to understand everything

This game is very pun-heavy. Honestly, I don’t get all the puns. But that’s ok. When you learn a foreign language, you need to be prepared to not understand everything. I probably wouldn't get all the puns in English either.

As Katie Harris from Joy of Languages puts it:

“Tolerate ambiguity. When you’re listening in a foreign language, you’re going to spend a lot of time not getting stuff – that’s normal. If you have a tendency to get frustrated when you don’t understand things, you’re going to make life unnecessarily difficult for yourself. Accept ambiguity as a natural part of language learning and you’ll be able to remain calm and keep moving forward.”

(from Improve Your Listening in a Foreign Language - The Ultimate Guide)

Katie’s talking about listening, but I think we could confidently swap out “reading”  here and the idea definitely still applies. Not understanding everything you read and see is totally normal. 

…and if you get really stuck, there’s always the walkthrough.

There’s another word I learned:  

攻略　こうりゃく　walkthrough

I really might watch TV every day in September, though. Who says challenges have to be challenging…?

(Top image source: Nintendo)