

I feel speaking is the most nerve-wracking thing to do (multiply this by 20 if you are an introvert or self-conscious!) What I have observed with my friends who are learning Japanese -myself included - is that they get in their heads about making mistakes. Like every aspect of a language, Japanese conversation needs to be actively practiced to achieve fluency. Inadvertently, speaking is pushed to the side. Then they come to a point where they have to use the language and they find themselves completely lost or overthinking trying to find the right word instead of the good enough word. When you’re ready to learn more, head on over to the next page.When people learn languages, they tend to put themselves in a hole of learning grammar, rewriting sentences, and conjugating verbs. It’s all about the method, not the memorization. Instead of spending 6-7 years learning the “suggested” 2000ish kanji, you’ll spend less than a year and spend a lot less time with each kanji. TextFugu will be teaching you kanji in order of simple → complex (the kanji itself, not the meaning), where each kanji builds on the last in a way that makes learning a new kanji very easy. Takeaway Just because Japanese school children all learn kanji one way, it doesn’t mean it’s right for you (someone who’s not a Japanese school kid). Now, that’s not the only thing we’ll be doing to make kanji a lot more pleasant, continue reading to learn what else you’ll be doing in order to become a kanji learning master. So, that right there is the problem, and that’s also one of the reasons why TextFugu does kanji so differently. Instead, the complexity of the kanji itself should be what you base your order of learning on. You understand concepts and words that little kids don’t, so meaning of the kanji shouldn’t be taken into account when deciding order. That means the meaning of the kanji isn’t the problem. If you’re learning Japanese as a second language, you probably have a pretty good handle on English (or some other language) already. The point is… most people have you learn kanji in a way that would teach you the bottom set of kanji before the top set of kanji, and to me that’s just ridiculous. Now, don’t worry if you can’t read any of these, that’s not the point. You would learn these kanji approximately four years before you learned the first set of “advanced” kanji I wrote above. Notice how much more complicated they look? 曜 線 鳴 算ĭespite how many strokes they contain, and despite how difficult it would be for a beginner like you to have to learn something like this, these kanji are considered to be pretty beginner (in regular circles, at least). Now, take a look at this next set of kanji. The reason is because the meanings of these kanji are more difficult. Despite this, these kanji are considered “advanced,” so Japanese school kids would learn these much, much later. None of them have more than three strokes to them. This concept is probably easiest to get across visually. This means that with Japanese school children, the most important thing that they take into account is the complexity of the meaning of the kanji, and not so much the kanji itself. One meaning is just more complicated than the other meaning, even though the word “chug” has fewer letters in it. You probably knew the word “to drink” before you knew the word “to chug” (that is, unless you grew up in a frat house). This actually makes sense (for them, not you), because they’re little kids and they need to learn vocabulary words (and they can’t do that if the meaning is too difficult). When it comes to Japanese school children, though, they have to learn kanji by learning the kanji with the simplest meanings first. When learning kanji, you need these two parts whether you’re a Japanese school kid or a 75 year old gorilla trainer. Since every kanji looks a little bit different, each kanji can have its own meaning associated with it.

The second part of this equation is the meaning of each kanji. Each kanji is basically its own picture/image/logograph. There are two main parts to learning kanji. If you take the time to look at it more closely, though, you’ll see that it doesn’t make any sense at all. At first glance, this seems like the most common sense thing to do. Learning Kanji The Way Japanese Kids Learn Kanji (Is A Terrible Idea) “If at first you do succeed, try something harder.” – Ann LandersĪlmost every teacher, student, textbook, and resource has you learn kanji the same way as Japanese school children.
