How to learn kanji without the grind

There are 2,136 jōyō kanji, the official list for general use last revised in 2010, and Japanese children learn 1,026 of them in primary school. That number scares many learners into months of kanji study before reading anything. It helps to know how kanji are put together, because they're far less arbitrary than they look.

• Most kanji are built from parts. A few hundred components (often called radicals) recur across thousands of characters. Once 亻 means “person” to you, 休, 体, 住 and 使 stop being random squiggles.
• Most kanji hint at their sound. The largest group are phono-semantic compounds: one part suggests the meaning, another the on'yomi. 青 (sei) appears in 清, 晴, 精 and 請, all read sei. The hint isn't reliable, but it's right often enough to help.
• Words, not characters, carry meaning. 大家 is “big” plus “house” but means landlord (in the ōya reading). Kanji hint; the word decides.

Most kanji have two kinds of reading, because Japanese borrowed characters from Chinese and kept both the borrowed pronunciation and its own native word:

• On'yomi come from Chinese pronunciations and appear mostly in compounds of two or more kanji: 先生 (sensei), 学生 (gakusei).
• Kun'yomi are native Japanese words attached to the character, often with hiragana endings called okurigana: 生きる (ikiru), 見る (miru), 赤い (akai).
• Rule of thumb: kanji followed by hiragana usually takes the kun'yomi; kanji stuck together usually take on'yomi. There are plenty of exceptions: 日曜日 is nichi-yō-bi, with 日 read two ways in one word, and 今日 (kyō, today) ignores its characters' usual readings altogether.

That's why memorising a kanji's list of readings on its own is close to useless: 生 has a dozen, and knowing them doesn't tell you which one a word uses. Learn readings through words. Kaishi teaches 先生 and 生きる as words, and the readings come with them.

Learners argue endlessly about this, and people have succeeded with every approach. A Year to Learn Japanese (opens in a new tab) sorts them into three routes, which is a useful way to choose:

The immersion guides (TheMoeWay, VN Club, Donkuri) all lean towards the first route, with the second for people who find kanji blurring together. Tofugu, which makes WaniKani, recommends the third. If you're unsure, start with the first and add RRTK450 if you notice you can't tell 待 from 持 after a few weeks.

A full novel uses fewer different kanji than the jōyō list, and a handful of them do most of the work. By Jiten.moe's counts, the Japanese Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone uses 1,596 different kanji, Norwegian Wood 1,767, and all of Yotsuba&! 1,204. Most of those appear only a few times. That's why reading with a dictionary works: the common kanji become familiar through repetition, and the rare ones get looked up when they matter.

Kanji also get easier the more you know. After the first few hundred, new ones are mostly familiar parts in new arrangements, and you start guessing readings from their phonetic parts. Japanese front-loads the effort: it's hard at the start and steadily easier after.

Reading needs recognition; writing needs recall, which is much harder. Most Japanese adults type far more than they write, and even native speakers forget how to write characters they read every day. So for most learners, handwriting can wait.

• If you want to write, learn the basics of stroke order first (top to bottom, left to right, horizontal before vertical); it makes characters easier to write and to recognise.
• Once you can already read a lot, TheMoeWay and Donkuri both recommend the Kanken deck for learning to write, built around Japan's kanji proficiency test.
• For practice and feedback, the weekly Tegaki Tuesday handwriting challenge is a friendly community habit.

The speaking and writing chapter covers writing sentences, which is a different skill from writing characters.