How to learn kanji

Kanji is where most people who quit Japanese quit. Not because the characters are hard — a child learns them — but because adults are handed the wrong job: memorise two thousand pictures, each with several pronunciations, in an order chosen by a frequency table. Done that way it is a wall. Done the way it is actually learned in Japan — a few at a time, in groups that mean something, written by hand, met again in words and then in sentences — it is a long road with a visible end. This is the road, and every sheet it needs is on this site.

What a kanji is, and is not

A kanji is not a word. It is a unit of meaning that shows up inside words, often with a different sound each time: 学 is gaku in 学校 (school) and mana- in 学ぶ (to learn). You do not "know" 学 when you can draw it; you know it when you can read those two words and a few more without thinking. So the target is never "learn 2,000 kanji". It is "read the words the kanji are in", and the kanji is the handle you pick the words up by.

This is why the question "how many readings should I memorise?" has an unhelpful honest answer: none, in isolation. Learn the character's core meaning and one or two words, and let the readings attach themselves to words, which is how they exist. A reading learned as a list item (ガク・まなぶ) is a reading you will forget by Friday; a reading learned as 学校 is one you will keep.

Sets, not lists

Frequency lists are the natural way to order kanji for a computer and the worst way to order them for a person. The twenty most common kanji include 日, 一, 国, 人, 年, 大, 十, 二, 本, 中 — nothing that hangs together, nothing you could use to say a single thing. Learned that way, each character stands alone in memory, with nothing to hold onto.

Learn them in sets that belong together instead. Numbers one to ten on one sheet. The days of the week. Telling the time. Up, down, left, right, inside, outside. Each set is a small system: once you have 一 to 十 you can read every price, date and page number in the country, and the characters support each other because you meet them together. That is how the 80 N5 kanji are arranged here — thirteen sets — and every level after them the same way: N4 in 18 sets, N3 in 34.

Write them by hand, in order

There is a fashionable view that handwriting is obsolete and recognition is all you need. For reading speed, recognition is indeed most of it. But the fastest route to recognition is still the hand: a character you have written ten times in the right stroke order is a character you can tell from its neighbours (未/末, 待/持, 千/干) at a glance, because you know how it is built. People who learn kanji by looking at them learn to recognise them in one font, in one size, in the words they saw them in. People who write them recognise them anywhere.

Stroke order is not pedantry either. It is what makes a kanji legible when written fast, it is what lets you count strokes to look up a character, and it is what makes 田 and 曲 and 由 come out as different shapes instead of the same scribble. There are eight rules that cover nearly everything; learn them in the first week and you never need to learn a stroke order again. Every kanji sheet on this site prints the order beside the character.

The three passes

For each set, three passes on three different days. Trace and copy: the sheet shows the character with its stroke order, its meaning, its readings and two words; you trace it once and copy it four times, saying a word as you write. Recall: a few sets later, a review sheet asks for the character from its meaning, and the meaning from the character, with the answers on page 2 — the pass most self-studiers skip and the one that turns "I've seen that" into "I know that". Meet it in words: the vocabulary sets and reading passages at the same level use exactly the kanji you have, so the third pass is not a drill at all, just reading.

The pace that works is a set a day, five days a week, and a review when the ladder puts one there. That is about 25 minutes a day and it is not negotiable downwards: kanji learned in a two-hour Sunday session are gone by Wednesday. It is negotiable upwards, but not much — two sets a day is the ceiling before the sets stop settling.

The schedule, level by level

The whole run is about two years at a set a day, which is the same figure Japanese children take from the first grade of primary school to the end of the sixth for roughly the same characters — and they have the language around them all day. Two years is not slow. Anyone selling you faster is selling recognition of the shape, not the ability to read.

Radicals, mnemonics, and when to use them

Most kanji are built from parts, and many of the parts recur: 言 (speech) appears in 話, 語, 読, 記; 水 becomes 氵 in 海, 池, 泳. Noticing this is worth a lot, and it happens on its own if you write the characters — after 話 and 語 you will see 言 in 読 without being told. What is not worth much, for most people, is a system that invents a story for every character before you have met it. Stories are scaffolding; they help you hold a character for a week and then get in the way, because you cannot read at speed through a story. Use a mnemonic when a character will not stick after three passes, and drop it the moment it has.

The mistakes that make people quit

• Learning kanji before kana are automatic. Furigana, dictionaries, readings — everything about kanji is delivered in hiragana. If you still sound out hiragana, kanji study is twice as slow. Finish Level A and B first, properly.
• Collecting readings. Five readings per kanji, memorised as a list, is 10,000 facts by N1. Two words per kanji is 4,000 words, which you wanted anyway.
• Never writing. See above. Twenty minutes a day with a pencil beats an hour of flashcards.
• Never being tested. Studying is pleasant and recall is uncomfortable, so people do the first and skip the second. The review units on this site are numbered like every other unit for exactly this reason: skipping one shows.
• Going too fast at the start. N5's 80 kanji feel easy, so people do them in a week and arrive at N4 with sand foundations. The first 80 are the ones every later character is built from; give them the month.
• Stopping when it gets boring. Around N3, kanji study becomes a long, flat road with no landmarks. That is what the sets are for — government and politics is a milestone in a way that "kanji 201–210" never is — and what the reading passages are for. If you are bored, you are not reading enough; go read something at your level and the kanji will show you why you learned them.

Where to start

If you can read both kana: numbers one to ten, today, one sheet. Then the ladder from C2. If you cannot, a week of hiragana first — it is the best kanji investment you will ever make.

Kanji data on this site is drawn from KanjiVG and KANJIDIC (CC BY-SA); the sets, sheets and this guide are ours, under the same licence. Print it, copy it, hand it to a class.