Kanji without the wall

2,136. That’s the number people throw at you, the kanji you supposedly need before you can read anything. It scares a lot of people off Japanese, and I get it. My friend SevenStop, who later got a near-perfect score on the N1, said his first thought when he started was “I’m not even going to learn kanji, that seems hard.” But you don’t learn them the way that number makes it sound. You learn words, and the kanji tag along.

Learn them in context

The classic approach is grinding kanji one at a time, in isolation: the meaning, every on’yomi and kun’yomi, the radicals. It falls apart the second you meet real words. Tap through these:

Learn those as words and each one comes with its own reading, its own meaning and a sentence you remember it from. You never stop to pick a reading. You just know 銀行 is ぎんこう because you’ve seen it a hundred times. And kanji have nuance, same as words, so knowing what two kanji mean on their own doesn’t always tell you what they mean together. I’d rather spend those hours reading real Japanese than memorizing facts in a vacuum.

Your starter deck already does a lot of this, and every word you mine adds more. After a while you start noticing the same parts over and over: 氵 (water) in 海, 泳 and 洗, or 青 sounding like せい in 晴, 清 and 精. DASmallWorlds calls the point where this snowballs a critical mass, where you start guessing the reading and meaning of new words from kanji you already know.

What about RTK?

Full transparency: I did Remembering the Kanji myself, pretty late. I could follow most easy anime, but my reading was so bad. Look-alike kanji kept tripping me up, because to me each one was just a lump of lines. So I made a physical box of flashcards and did 20 kanji a day. Write them on cards. Review the paper two days later. Into Anki five days after that. It took about six months, and watching that box fill up was weirdly motivating.

But what made them stick was running into the same kanji that same day, in a visual novel or a chat with a friend. Later I suspended most of those RTK cards and only turned one back on when I met that kanji in the wild. Would I start with RTK if I were beginning today? Probably not. Learning words in context gets you the same “oh, that’s 氵 plus 羊” feeling, and you spend the time reading real Japanese instead. If seeing kanji as parts would help you, or kanji is just your hobby, it’s a fine tool. RRTK, the recognition-only version where you look at a kanji and go “yep, that means stop,” is a lighter way to do it. SevenStop says you acquire kanji by seeing them in lots of different words, and that it’s not a race. I’m with him.

The genuinely hard parts

I won’t pretend it’s all easy. If you asked me the hardest part of Japanese, I’d cheat and say two things: kanji and pitch accent. What still gets me is words that sound the same, like 後悔 (こうかい, regret) and 公開 (こうかい, publishing something, like a video). “I regret publishing that video” is a thought I’ve had more than once. Only the kanji and the pitch tell them apart. Then there are the weird readings. 行う. 行方. Or お開き, which uses the kanji for “open” to mean the end of a wedding or a banquet. What the heck? That’s just exposure, though. See them enough and they stop being weird.

If kanji turns into a hobby for you (it happens), I built a Kanji trainer and a 難読 board of hard-to-read kanji on this site. Writing them by hand is optional (chapter 3). Reading and writing are separate skills, and you can read thousands and write fifty, like me. Next time you review a card, take two extra seconds and look at the parts of the kanji. That’s all it takes to start.