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How I’m learning those scary Japanese kanji

If you’re famil­iar with Japan­ese, let’s cut to the chase.

Aside from my full-time job and writ­ing fic­tion, I ded­i­cate my spare time to the ful­fill­ing, enrich­ing, but painful art of learn­ing new lan­guages, among those, Japanese.

One thing that drove me to learn Japan­ese, aside from grow­ing up with a heavy dose of ani­me, is how dif­fer­ent and inter­est­ing it is. From how the gram­mar works, to how each char­ac­ter is an elab­o­rate piece of art, to how it dif­fers from neigh­bor lan­guages like Chinese—everything about it results entranc­ing to me. 

How­ev­er, while the lan­guage is beau­ti­ful, it comes with a steep learn­ing curve cour­tesy of no oth­er than the dread­ed kan­ji characters. 

漢字 → kan · ji

You’ve prob­a­bly heard about them, and every­thing you’ve heard is right.

Japan­ese uses three char­ac­ter sys­tems: hira­gana, katakana, and kan­ji. Hira­gana and katakana work sim­i­lar­ly to Romance lan­guages (like my moth­er tongue, Span­ish) except that char­ac­ters rep­re­sent syllables. 

To illus­trate hira­gana, let me resource to a clas­sic quote:

o
ma
e
wa
mo
u
shi
n
de
i
ru

Ahem, now let me flex my meme skills:

Katakana is anoth­er syl­labary, except they’re used for loan words (for­eign words adopt­ed by the lan­guage over the years). You can eas­i­ly tell them apart since they look much more sym­met­ri­cal and less styl­ized than hiragana.

Then we have kan­ji.

Kan­ji char­ac­ters are logograms that express mean­ing and are derived from Chi­nese char­ac­ters, ade­quate­ly called “hanzi” or Han char­ac­ters. One aspect that makes them tough to learn and write is how they’re made from a heck-ton of strokes. To make things worse, there are like three thou­sand of them.

But god­damn do they look cool.

Me learn­ing kanji.

At first, I tried just mem­o­riz­ing them all and be done with it. 

I failed miserably. 

My engi­neer side always tried con­vinc­ing me that like every oth­er writ­ing sys­tem, these kan­ji char­ac­ters had to fol­low some sort of log­ic. There had to be an eas­i­er way to learn them, I shout­ed, grab­bing my screen by the sides and shak­ing it in desperation.

Then I found out about Kan­shu­do.

Since then, it’s been my sal­va­tion and I final­ly feel like I might be able to some­day be pro­fi­cient at writ­ing Japanese.

Kan­shu­do is a method that asso­ciates a catchy and easy to remem­ber phrase (or mnemon­ic) to each kan­ji character. 

Take this one for example:

That one means luck or car­ry (read un, and yeah, a kan­ji can mean two entire­ly dif­fer­ent things depend­ing on the con­text.) My first thought was “all that to say ‘luck’? And how will I ever learn to draw that?” And here’s the thing: kan­ji are often com­posed of oth­er kan­ji. While some of them have a mean­ing on their own, oth­ers are com­po­nents that are meant to be used along with oth­er kanji. 

The phrase asso­ci­at­ed with the kan­ji above is: 

“When the army moves, it car­ries its luck.

Wait, that’s a bit ran­dom, isn’t it? What does the rest of the phrase have to do with anything?

Trust me, what comes next was a true eye-open­er for me.

Turns out some of the most com­plex kan­ji are com­posed of sim­pler ones. In the case of luck, the core kan­ji is:

It means car and is read kuru­ma. That sure­ly is a lot eas­i­er to remem­ber than the first one, isn’t it? It kin­da sounds like “car,” after all.

Mov­ing on, the next bit is:

That one means cov­ered. Come on! It looks like a lit­tle roof. In this case, this does­n’t have a read­ing because is not meant to be used on its own. 

Okay, let’s put those two togeth­er, and we get:

That’s army and is read gun (very appro­pri­ate). Since this one is a com­posed kan­ji, we have a phrase to remem­ber it: 

“A cov­ered (冖) car (車) is used by the army (軍).”

Do you see what’s going on here? The phrase is built in a way that it not only con­tains the kan­ji it rep­re­sents but also all of its sub-kanji!

Let’s keep going! The last bit is:

That’s a com­po­nent indi­cat­ing move­ment. We add that to army and we get luck:

Now our orig­i­nal phrase (with its kan­ji) makes a whole lot­ta more sense.

“When the army (軍) moves (⻌), it car­ries its luck (運).”

Instead of mem­o­riz­ing one sin­gle kan­ji, I learned five of them on a sin­gle sweep. That’s the mag­ic of the Kan­shu­do method. It’s so easy it’s ridicu­lous. I still had to prac­tice a lot to get the strokes right, but recit­ing the phrase as I went not only made me remem­ber the strokes, but also their order. One does not sim­ply draw kan­ji strokes in any order. You start by draw­ing army (cov­er + car) and then move.

Let make absolute­ly clear here that Kan­shu­do has­n’t paid me a pen­ny to write this post, but it has been a game-chang­er for me and, if you’re also strug­gling with kan­ji, maybe it might do the same for you. 

Go give em’ a try—it’s free!

I ❤️ you, Kan­shu­do. Keep being awesome.

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