How to remember kanji
Kanji are built from parts, read differently in different words, and easiest to learn inside vocabulary. How to make them stick.
There are about two thousand kanji in everyday Japanese, and most have more than one reading. That’s a lot, and learners tackle it in two main ways: some learn every kanji’s meaning first, others only learn kanji as part of words. Both work, and the same memory techniques help with either.
Kanji are built from parts
Most kanji are made of smaller parts that turn up again and again, often called radicals. Learn the common parts and a new kanji becomes a combination of things you know.
- 休 (rest) is a person 亻 next to a tree 木.
- 明 (bright) is the sun 日 and the moon 月 together.
- 森 (forest) is three trees 木.
Many kanji also have a part that hints at the reading. 晴 (sei, clear weather) and 清 (sei, pure) share 青 (sei, blue), and the sound comes with it.
Learn kanji inside words
A kanji’s reading depends on the word it’s in. 生 is sei in 先生 (sensei, teacher), but nama in 生 (nama, raw) and u in 生まれる (umareru, to be born). Learning kanji inside real words gives you the right reading every time, and the most common words give you the most common kanji first.
Many learners also study kanji meanings on their own first, using stories built from the parts. It’s a good way to tell similar kanji apart, and it pays off fastest when you meet each kanji in words soon after.
Make each one memorable
A story from the parts
Turn a kanji’s parts into a small scene with its meaning: for 明 (bright), picture the sun and the moon crashing into each other in a flash so bright you have to squint. Make the things interact. Images where things interact are remembered better than images of the same things side by side (Wollen et al., 1972).
A hook for the word’s sound
For a whole word, a phrase that sounds like it gives you a way back to the reading. 猫 (neko, cat) sounds like “neck-o”: picture a cat draped round your neck like a scarf. That’s the keyword method (Atkinson & Raugh, 1975); more in memory hooks.
Make it yours
Set the scene somewhere you know, with you in it. Things that relate to you are among the easiest things to recall (Symons & Johnson, 1997).
Read before you write
Decide whether you want to write kanji by hand or mainly read them. Most everyday writing is typed, and the computer picks the kanji for you, so many learners focus on reading first and write the ones they care about.
Keep them with spaced reviews
Kanji fade fast without reviews. With spaced repetition, you’re tested on each one just before you’d forget it, at gaps that grow from days to months (Cepeda et al., 2006). When a card comes up, try to read the kanji before looking at any furigana. See furigana.
How Flashfriend does it
Flashfriend teaches kanji through words, most useful first. Each word card shows the kanji with furigana over them, and you can set furigana to show only on the answer once you know the readings. For each word you pick a place for its kana row and a scene from a phrase that sounds like it, and Flashfriend paints the picture. Every word has audio, and once you know enough words, sentences with one new word and grammar one pattern at a time follow, so the kanji you learn turn up in real Japanese.
Flashfriend teaches you to read, hear and use Japanese. It doesn’t teach handwriting, so if you want to write kanji by hand, add a stroke-order app. Read more about Flashfriend for Japanese, or how to remember Japanese vocabulary.
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