Remembering the Kanji

In this post I will explain how I learned kanji with Hesig's Remembering the Kanji and Anki. Since immersion focusses on acquiring your target language through reading and listening, it is necessary to master the writing system first and foremost in order to look up words . What this essentially means for Japanese is that the first few months are spent on learning only kanji.

 

The Hesig Method

The amount of information one has to memorize with regard to a single kanji is quite overwhelming. A character's readings, meanings and stroke order are usually taught together. This makes the process of learning kanji very tedious. James Hesig, in his book, Remembering the Kanji (RTK), came up with a system which associates each kanji with an English Keyword, which eliminates the necessity to memorize a large amount of information from the outset. The general idea is that the keyword serves as a kind of 'bridge' between the kanji and its readings/meanings. The kanji are ordered in increasing order of complexity, rather than frequency of use. 

Another important aspect of RTK is mnemonic stories, which contain the keywords of the components that make up a kanji. So an example mnemonic story for Apricot (杏) would be, 'From the tree(木) straight into the mouth(口) is the best way to eat an Apricot .' 

After having memorized the keywords, you can look up kanji with the help of websites like rtk-search. This allows you to learn the readings/meanings of kanji in context. 

For example, let's say, you come across the word 暖炉(だんろ) for the first time and you know the first kanji is 暖かい, but don't know how the kanji 炉 is read. You can use its keyword, 'hearth,' to look it up . After this, the word, 暖炉 can be searched in a dictionary like Jisho.

I used this method to learn to recognize about 2000 Kanji in four months.

SRS and Anki

SRS stands for spaced repetition system, which involves recalling a piece of information at increasing intervals of time. Anki is a software implementation of this concept. It allows you to create or import pre-made decks of flash cards which can be systematically learned and reviewed. Anki automatically adjusts the intervals on a per card basis, based on the user's performance. There are many RTK decks created by the community. This is the one that I have been using since I started immersion.  This is what the front of a card in that deck looks like:

The goal here is to guess the keyword of the kanji shown and click on the show answer button, which will display the back of the card.

 

This is the back of the card. The word below the kanji is the keyword that you are supposed to recall. The text highlighted in yellow are the mnemonic stories for this kanji. The card is considered a ‘Pass’ if you were able to recall the keyword correctly. 

Anki also has a number of addons which make creating flashcards for learning Japanese very easy. I will detail my Anki setup in the future.

Conclusion

Well that covers pretty much everything I do to learn Kanji. In the next post, I’ll go over how I learn grammar and vocabulary through sentence mining.