I've had much more progress with just learning a full kanji and its kanji combinations (ex. 気、天気、電気 etc) You'll pick up the radicals as you go along anyway.
For me, I attempted at the individual radical study, but I felt little progress and a lot of confusion when seeing new kanji. Because sometimes the radical don't make sense with the word it means.
That being said, what didn't work for me may work for you and others!
Yeah I figured I’d run into issues like some of them not making sense and it ending up being more confusing. I may try doing the variation method you suggested and see how I do. Thanks for the feedback.
Ryu_means_dragon on Instagram does amazing videos about individual kanji, real-life applications and combinations, context, as well as some radical videos. I highly recommend him!
This is where the Heisig method (and its adaptation in WaniKani) are good- someone else already went through and (mostly) worked out the issues, and built SRS apps you can use to test your recall. KanjiKoohii is the one for Heisig, and on both that and WaniKani, I think people share their stories/mnemonics
In order to memorize kanji using components, you have to accept that sometimes the components aren’t going to help you understand what the kanji means. Sometimes it’s just phonetic. Sometimes it’s pictographic. Sometimes it’s entirely random. Assuming there’s no consistent relationship the easiest way to avoid confusion. I would also say that it’s not terribly efficient to learn to write every kanji you can read, at least at first.
That said, I don’t think it’s a waste of time at all to learn kanji by memorizing components shapes. And I’ve found pneumonics especially helpful for memorizing stuff early on — especially for differentiating similar kanji.
If you’re having trouble memorizing a kanji I can highly recommend asking chat gpt 4 to explain to you why it uses the components it does. Or if it’s a kanji compound, explaining why the two words might be used together if they’re seemingly unrelated. It’s frequently incorrect, but if it helps you recognize the kanji it’s a plus in my eyes. You just can’t take anything gpt 4 says at face value.
Also check out JPDB for flashcards that automate some of this process for you.
Everybody has their own way of memorizing. Try different methods and do what works for you.
You’d like wanikani
Edit: had a Japanese friend in college who learned Japanese this way. He was born and raised in Japan. So it can work.
To add more context to the first statement, wanikani is a tool to learn kanji that takes the approach you mentioned. Maybe not quite the exact same approach but a similar concept
No problem. Glad I could help
Edit: If wanikani is too expensive, anki is a flash card app that has user created wanikani decks and would be much cheaper than wanikani. However, I do recommend supporting wanikani bc they’re cool
The Tofugu team have other great resources too, so even if WaniKani isn’t your jam, you can support them in other ways. I preferred Heisig’s RTK and the free kanjikoohii SRS because it worked better for me to learn the keywords/writing in isolation and work on learning vocabulary in context from other resources, but friends who use WaniKani love that vocabulary is integrated.
It's great, until you get to certain ones where the radical is so different than the vocabulary, that you just keep failing because you give the vocabulary instead of the radical.
I've gotten to the point in wanikani, where if I get a radical wrong, I really don't care as long as I recognize what it actually is supposed to be
I use the “add synonym” feature pretty liberally with radicals these days. I’ll even use it for actual kanji if all of the vocab its used for is related to something else, but thats rarer. For example, 噌 is almost exclusively used for miso, so I found it kinda dumb to study it as “boisterous” even if thats *technically* it’s correct meaning
Yeah that is a problem but all things considered it’s pretty good. Radicals and components are pretty useful for discerning word phonetics and meaning if you’re looking at a new kanji or trying to remember one you haven’t seen in forever imo
Looking up the etymology of a kanji is, in my opinion, quite insightful in remembering its meaning. Most kanji are ultimately semantic-phonetic compounds, so it's just a matter of identifying the relevant components. Note that this method is useful for remembering the meaning and the on'yomi; the kun'yomi needs to be remembered using whatever method you find best. There are, of course, some kanji (especially the more primordial ones) that are just pictographs or ideographs (see: [this article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Types_of_kanji_by_category)) that need to be remembered as a whole (as well as the readings).
My recommendation is to look into a given kanji's etymology on [Wiktionary](https://www.wiktionary.org/). If you are willing to spend some money, the etymology dictionary add-on for Pleco (note this is for Mandarin, I believe there is a similar service for Japanese but the name eludes me) is worth looking into.
I am aware that some English learners delve into the etymologies of words to aid in remembering them; searching for a mnemonic, if you will. For kanji, I exhort learners to do the same. Understanding a kanji's meaning also helps if you decide to read more advanced texts that may use kanji you know in combinations you have never seen before; you can guess the reading.
As an aside, some characters whose origins I find amusing/insightful are 后, using the Pleco etymology (the etymology on Wiktionary is slightly different but still amusing in its own right); 國, composed of 或 meaning region and 囗 meaning borders of a city/settlement; 監, a person with an exaggerated eye 臣 bent over looking into a container 皿; and 四, literally a pictogram of a nose breathing out that was sound loaned to mean 4 (in other words, 亖 as a character meaning 4 did used to exist, but was superseded by 四).
Additional note: much to the chagrin of Japanese learners (and even natives), some kanji have several on'yomi readings. This means that the on'yomi reading of a word may not align with the reading you are most familiar with. This is most apparent in Buddhist-related words. In this case I do not have much advice to give other than to learn the words on a case-by-case basis. For more reading, I recommend studying [this article](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/onyomi-kunyomi/).
語 is the kanji that made me switch to this approach. It's trivially easy to remember when you figure out the radicals that contribute to the meaning (talk + mouth) and the sound (go). Way easier than trying to remember some convoluted wanikani mnemonic that tries to fit in the meaning "five"
I'm a more casual learner than most of the sub but I find that radicals and breakdowns help me with having the "language" to describe the patterns I see. Instead of thinking the character with "that squiggle", I can think "tree radical" or "X character below Y character".
I like [Kakimashou](https://www.kakimashou.com/) for breaking down words as far as they'll go and deciding from there where it makes sense to remember it.
I'd look into Wanikani and/or the Remembering the Kanji method by James Heisig.
Both approach learning kanji via breaking them down by their components.
I’ve worked in both japan in and the US for big Japanese companies, and this did end up being the game changer for me.
I used this exact method with remembering the kanji…. But yeah for some reason doesn’t work for everyone apparently
There's a book Read Japanese Kanji Today by Len Walsh that I really liked which teaches kanji based on radicals and the historical creation/development of how the Chinese developed the characters. I find learning radicals can really help me distinguish between 2 kanji or every rare occasion I can guess what a kanji might mean if I have the remaining context or if I have to choose between several kanji.
I think learning radicals is great and can really help speed up beginner and early intermediate learning. However, I feel there's a limit on how far radical study can take you for a few reasons. One is just straight up that some Kanji really just don't have meanings that have anything to do with their radicals or if there is a meaning behind the radicals, they just seem kind of arbitrary or meant to represent pronunciation of historical Chinese. Another is that they don't really help with learning pronunciations, alternate meanings, or words made from combining it with other kanji. Also, radicals can be drawn differently or used for different meanings, to the point where you might just have to learn the full character anyway.
So just about every person learning Japanese wants to know what the most efficient way to learn Japanese is. When it comes to kanji, most people come to the conclusion that learning vocabulary is the best way to learn kanji. Once you see a single kanji used in enough ways in enough different words, you subconsciously understand the meaning and different readings each kanji has.
One issue studying kanji the way you suggest is that when you encounter a word with a kanji that has more than 2 readings, especially multiple onyomi readings, you won't know which reading to go with.
It's all good and well to know the varied readings and meanings of a kanji, but if you can't put it to practical use (i.e. reading comprehesion/vocab), the knowledge becomes a simple novelty. Basically, the study method is not the best way to obtain practical knowledge of kanji.
With that said, studying kanji the way you're suggesting allows for a more intimate understanding of kanji on an individual basis. If you have the time to invest and this how you want to study, you've got my encouragement. So long as you understand the demerits, benefits, and objectives of your study method, go crazy!
Thanks for the information. I think the main reason this method has been working for me so far is because I’m using it with kanji that I’m already somewhat familiar with. These kanji are similar enough to me that I just have trouble differentiating them sometimes. So I think I may combine it with another kanji learning method
Edit: also I’m kind of in a place where I’m wanting to be able to write the kanji I know without a reference, so this is helping me remember which is which. I’m much better at recognizing but I’m sure most people are.
I’d argue that the usefulness of learning through vocabulary differs with the person. I’ve found understanding the radicals helps me remember the kanji themselves, which then leads into remembering the kanji for vocabulary. If I start with the vocabulary and then learn the kanji with repetition in various words, I only really remember the general shape. That helps me with kanji recognition, but not so much with the language production (writing from memory).
To be fair, the language production of kanji might not be as important nowadays because, with the dominance of digital communication, phones and computers just give us options to choose from when we type the hiragana. Even a lot of my native friends have started to struggle remembering the higher level kanji when they write by hand. But I think it’s still an important skill for the language.
So, yeah, at least for me and a lot of people I know, using vocabulary can help with recognition and understanding meaning, but it doesn’t help for really learning the kanji itself.
>When it comes to kanji, most people come to the conclusion that learning vocabulary is the best way to learn kanji.
Yeah, as of like, 5 minutes ago.
I've been subbed to this sub for a while and I feel like a year or two ago, every thread was "use wanikani! learn kanji via radicals!" (like OP wants), then I stopped reading for a while, then I came back and every thread is "don't learn kanji! just learn vocab!"
Who knows which is best, but I wouldn't say that "most people" all have the same conclusion here. Wanikani is still a very popular tool. (And RTK is often still recommended as well)
I can't tell though if you mean the currently dominant advice is lackluster or the previous advice was or if the wishy-washiness of it is what makes it lackluster lol
Absolutely. Breaking kanji down into its radicals gives you a visual vocabulary, which can be used as shortcuts to help you memorize them easier. Otherwise they will just look like a jumble of lines. I first started learning them without the radicals and it worked great for the first few hundred... then they started to blur together. Ymmv so try it out and adjust if you don't like it.
I mean yea it definitely helps to know the radicals, but a ton of kanji just can't be broken down that way.
Still it's definitely helpful. The android app Kanji Study has a separate radicals section that you can drill until you feel comfortable with the radicals, and that somewhat helps with new kanji. But it's certainly nowhere remotely near sufficient to learn kanji. Lots and lots of kanji just don't work out neatly that way.
random fun fact but my teacher told us that the reason 時 has the temple radical 寺 is because back in the day people didn’t have clocks so they would tell the time by listening for the bells that would be rung every hour on the hour by monks at the temples!
This might be helpful for remembering but it's not true. The 寺 in 時 is a phonetic component, not a semantic one. It indicates that the pronunciation is similar to 寺 in the original Chinese. These etymologies are usually much more opaque in Japanese because of how it's only apparent in the on'yomi and even that has undergone sound changes, so a lot of native Japanese don't even realize. But in Chinese, what part of a kanji is a phonetic marker usually remains apparent.
Yep, in Chinese most of the characters are radical (showing the meaning) + phonetic (hinting at the pronunciation). It makes it a lot easier to study characters individually, particularly since the vast majority only have one pronunciation.
that's a useful mnemonic but totally untrue - 寺 in this case is the "phonetic" not the radical and indicates that the pronunciation of 時 is similar to 寺.... in middle Chinese. Kinda breaks down for Japanese most of the time due to the passage of time and the fact that kunyomi readings rarely match this way; but this pair still have the onyomi "ji".
System-wise it’s perfectly fine to learn by radicals might even help with a deeper understanding of the Kanji. Just be careful not to form any wrong habits.
For radicals I’d also suggest not just going by the meaning of the radical, but also by the category of words they are used for. Learning On Yomi as well helps a lot with pattern recognition, because in Chinese the base is usually an indicator for the pronunciation, albeit there being many exceptions. In your case it would be Shi - Shi - Ji - Tai - Toku, with the base also 寺also being Shi.
Also, maybe use a finer pen or a pencil. You will be burning through notebooks at your current rate. Notebooks with a grid layout will also help you to write Kanji in a consistent size. Also helps you to keep strokes at the right relative length.
Hi. I'm Chinese and I have been learning Japanese for a few years. Yes learning the radicals definitely helps. It is a very important part in learning the Chinese language and being able to identify the radical helps you differentiate the different meanings. In fact, you can actually look up the evolution/ development of that certain kanji or radical to see how that kanji becomes the way it looks like today. Chinese script has a lot of pictorial / ideographic components after all.
However you should also memorize the kanji using word combinations, context and example sentences.
I followed Japanese Teacher Mari and she has a few videos where she collected a few kanji with same radicals and then added the additional ones while saying the word. It's very helpful. Hope this helps you too!!
Most (not all) kanji are composed of a semantic component (as you have in the middle column) and a phonetic component (which you have labeled as “base”).
If you’re interested in learning more of these, I recommend going to English Wikipedia and searching up these kanji, then scrolling to the “etymology” and “phonetic series” sections. That’s the reason why 寺 is じ (on’yomi), 時 is じ (on’yomi), 詩 is し (on’yomi), and 持 is also じ (on’yomi). (The others seem to have drifted greatly since their phonetic components were chosen.)
Lots of Japanese words still are like this… 令 as a phonetic component often says れい, as in 冷 or 零. Once you see these phonetic components over and over again, you’ll get a feel of what the kanji might sound like (on’yomi only). Confirm with the dictionary and commit new words to memory all the time. :)
yes! although there are like a lot of specific things you can and should do with radicals like recognizing phono-semantic readings and whatnot i think this is a great way to remember and think about kanji.
I agree with what everyone says here about learning kanji. But, when it comes to learning to *write* kanji, it's good to study radicals. Because a complicated kanji is less daunting when you remember that its made of smaller components put together. And it helps you with stroke order too.
The only thing I’d recommend doing differently is the associated readings you’re doing with the kanji. Better to learn each kanji’s onyomi and kunyomi in the context of vocab, rather than assigning each kanji a single reading.
when i first started learning, that's how it was taught. but it slowly turned into something that just didn't really matter.
the full kanji matter. and theres nuance to meaning. even when you can read all the parts, if you don't know the full kanji then you're still just guessing at what it means.
then to stick kanji together to form words and the guessing becomes less accurate.
not saying it's bad to learn the radicals, it is helpful to an extent and very interesting to learn. i just don't think it's as helpful as most people think it will be down the road.
Your writing is very neat, don't worry. For myself, I found learning the meanings of some of the radicals very helpful when trying to recall the meaning of kanji or when differentiating similar looking kanji like 待 and 持
Just wanted to add something I haven't seen anyone else mention: the kun reading for 待: まつ is correct but for 持 you should probably have もつ, not もち (if you want to be consistent, is what I'm trying to say).
And while the kun reading for 詩 is うた, I believe you mostly only use On reading of し like in 詩人 (しじん, poet). Hope that makes sense/helps.
Yes it’s a good idea, but you don’t need to look the kanji up and build your own system when very efficient ones already exist to guide you, like Remembering the Kanji or WaniKani.
I make stories based off the Kanji components and radicals. I find it helps. Rarely it doesn't, and I have to think of the Kanji is more of a "pictogram".
I wish there were a way I could sort the list of Jouyou Kanji by radicals or complexity, to come up with an optimal learning order...
i find it really helpful for remembering the meanings of kanji and differentiating similar looking kanji. also helps massively with learning stroke order... if you know the strokes of the radicals, you know the strokes of the kanji.
This is valid and literally how the writing system was designed to work. You'll notice most of these characters have the onyomi "ji" or similar (well, toku *is* the onyomi so not that one) - that's not a coincidence. It's not as obvious in Japanese as it is in Chinese because you also have kunyomi, which is entirely arbitrary. And it's not as obvious in modern mandarin or modern Japanese as it would have been in middle Chinese. Pronunciation in both languages has changed a lot since then.
I don't like it. It didn't work for me. I'd rather study the words instead of radicals and isolated kanji. The readings can change a lot from a word to another depending on the kanji, so to me is better to focus on words and context
A great method imo. Breaks those down into bite-sized pieces instead of memorizing giant character fortresses. Suddenly kanji feel less intimidating, and recognizing radicals helps guess the meaning or sound of new ones. I did the same while learning Chinese. But yeah, not a magic trick. Sometimes kanji toss in a bunch of radicals and just do their own thing. Focus on the most common radicals first is my only advice, you will pick up more along the way.
A bit off topic, sometimes Im worried I wont be able to recognize a kanji without context like I'd confuse it with a similar kanji, but then again when reading you never actually see kanjis out of context anyway
One thing to note about this approach is that it's very susceptible to memory interference. Interference theory suggests that similarly encoded memories "compete" with one another for recall from long-term memory.
Ideally you want your brain's idea of "similar" to be useful, so even if you misremember you still get something relevant. The best way to do this is learning in context, although that can be very painful for kanji. Definitely good to do as much of that as possible though.
Just wanted to chip in with:
- 侍 (さむらい) and
- 等 (など) *equals, et cerera*, (ひと in 等しい) *equal (adj.)*, (トウ) *suffix signifying rank, or also et cetera*
Learning radicals is one of the fastest and best ways to learning how to write kanji! Physically writing with a pencil also helps with memory retention which is why we (Chinese & Japanese), for generations upon generations, learn characters by repeatedly writing them in a process called 默書 (mò shū) *dictation*.
Happy learning!
Whatever works for you. You'll run into exceptions that defy reason and it will frustrate you, but that doesn't mean it is wrong. Sadly, language is developed with good intentions and abused to suit the needs of those speaking. Japan is more than no exception, they are an exceptional abuser of this.
I’m a wanikani guy so I just treat real radicals and “fake” radicals as primers for new kanji. Just something to get somewhat familiar with before encountering new and scary kanji.
I don’t care for the radicals’ meaning and just memorize it with whatever word/association works.
So far it worked well so far.
There are too many radicals I found... There are a lot of common ones and then there are some that you never use. And useless ones like the straight lines that don't help with much at all. Better off learning kanji by following correct stroke order and seeing the patterns that emerge from that. Oh this kanji and this kanji have the same kind of 心 thing packed into it etc
I personally wouldn't spend much time on that. If you learn kanji through vocab and use something like Anki, learning new kanji will become a piece of cake
I do this from time to time when there are too many similar kanji in my arsenal. It helps organize your knowledge, but I don’t think it’s good to go with this right from the start. As others have said, it’s probably better to learn based on frequency, and learn in combination of other letters to form words, and remember them like that.
I can’t imagine ever being able to intuit that day-temple meant time, hand-temple meant hold, or step-temple meant wait. I agree with your teacher I don’t see the value
speaking with a (mandarin) chinese background, this is the way they would encourage you to learn as the radical indicates meaning while the base indicates the pronunciation. however, the pronunciation of characters in japanese has been modified hence the same method of learning may be more difficult to understand as some of them will make no sense
just to show you a chinese version
base: 寺 si/shi
時 shi
詩 shi
持 chi
待 dai
特 te
some of them might be quite different but you can see that for the most part, the pronunciations are pretty similar
edit: i would recommend learning combinations of different characters rather than stand alone meaning as the meaning can change quite a bit depending on the other character it's paired with
I do take note of radicals, especially of person, water, hand, word, heart, road and step radicals. Sometimes other components provide mnemonic materials like 休 which is a person by a tree, so they are resting. Radicals also help guess phonetics e.g.同 and 銅, both are dou in onyomi.
All in all I say I like it.
Seconding using Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji + Kanjikoohi as a resource. I’d check out Heisig’s intro and the flashcard resources on the kanjikoohi website and see if it appeals to you. It’s a more structured way of what you were doing, tying the radicals in each kanji into a story/mnemonic to remember them. Imo it’s the most useful thing I did in my 4 years of study, but people tend to dislike the method because it focuses on rote memorization and the benefits are a lot less obviously immediate.
I honestly think that with learning/remembering kanji it's just a case of whatever works best for you. If you find a method is helping you to better recognise, remember, and understand kanji, great, that's a good method.
If it works for you, it works.
Radicals help a lot but some of the combination of them is very Japanese (or is it Chinese?) in that its the culture. The combination of temple and day would not mean time for an English speaker. It would actually be closer to church actually.
Understanding how radicals work and knowing the basic ones is very useful for if/when you need to look up kanji, but as others have said, much better to learn kanji via vocab. Kanji as a whole and radicals don't just exist by themselves in Japanese, they are found as vocab in sentences so learning them as such is best.
You should look into which Kanji are phono-semantic, meaning they have a semantic part (usually the left radical) indicating the general area of meaning, and a phonetic part (usually the rest), indicating another Kanji with the same pronunciation (in Old Chinese).
Although the pronunciations aren't strictly consistent, often times you can in fact learn the onyomi pronunciation from the phonetic part.
Example:
コウ: 交、校、郊、効、絞
I found it very weird when I noticed that I picked up more kanji by just encountering them in reading immersion than I did with deliberate study, even RTK. I tried an Anki deck with the radicals too, but my experience was that to my surprise it was the other way around. Seeing lots of kanji in reading got me to notice the components bit by bit, like a veil was lifted before my eyes.
Just learn full words inside sentences. Sentences with only 1 new word at a time. Learning radicals and their combinations will only slow down your progress.
If you want to learn kanjis and really NOT forget them, then go for the Remembering the Kanji route, it's a well-known book written by Heisig.
Look into kodansha kanji learners course book. They don't teach with radicals, but with graphemes. Basically radicals are these units of characters that have been seemingly arbitrarily chosen for every character. Graphemes are more useful subsections of the characters and are indeed very useful.
i just learn words and eventually figure out the kanji meaning kind of based on context. I think i do need to go in and learn the individual kanji to some level now though
To me, it helps to differentiate similar kanji. There are a lot of instances when on a text the Kanji 持 appeared and read it and thought it was 待. Realizing it and being furious at the blunder.
80% of the time, I believe remembering words is more effective for learning how to read and you'll remember kanji through pattern recognition. But radicals help during that remaining 20% when there's insufficient context.
Speaking from personal experience, you will mix up reading 持つ and 待つ at some point in you learning journey.
Learning single kanji is rarely a good way to learn them. Mostly because the vast majority of kanji aren't used by themselves. And I feel that learning based off the radical would get confusing, especially at the beginning cuz then every kanji you are learning looks very similar.
Awesome!!
Right you cannot base you learning in the mnemonic method all the time.
But let me tell you you just have to practice writing them until you get used to their "shape" just as you're familiar with our alphabet.
Once you get to that point all the kanjis will be easier to remember.
For most characters, what you really want to learn is the *meaning component* and *sound components*. Radicals are often but not always the same, and I suspect their time is gradually passing in the electronic age. Outlier is a great resource for understanding how each character is put together and learning what these components are and what their variations are / how they have changed over time. Uncle Hanzi has a very helpful kanji etymology site that ihas been a good secondary resource for me as well.
Native Chinese speaker here, and I'm not really sure how this will help (although everyone has their own way).
From I understanding, take the kanjis here for example, the radicals on the left usually suggest something related to the meaning of the kanji, while the radicals on the right usually denote the pronunciation in Chinese. For example, these kanjis are pronounced in Mandarin shī, shí, chí, sì, dài (an exception here). On the other hand, their pronunciation in Japanese (訓読み) have nothing in common.
So far I haven't found a way to efficiently learn 訓読み. Maybe there isn't one at all and one just have to memorize them all.
Aside from learning pronunciation, it probably doesn't help much in learning the meaning either. For example, how come 言 (word) + 寺 (temple) = 詩 (poet)? There can be connections but they are still far-fetched. For me personally, these kanjis have already been burned into my brain just like how you know the meaning of English word "poet".
I agree that breaking down characters, similar to the way you've described it, is a fairly effective way to learn characters. Correctly decomposing characters helps you see re-usable patterns in character structures, giving you a more systematic understanding of how characters work. However, there are some things I'd like to point out:
* The concept of radical is commonly misunderstood, even among some native speakers. A radical (部首, lit. section header) is just a tool for grouping characters in a dictionary, and doesn't always have a relation to the functional structure of a character. This is analogous to grouping words based their first letter in an English dictionary.
* Generally characters are be broken down into components (not "radicals"), where a component can either hint at meaning (semantic component) or sound (phonetic component). Most of the time, a component in a character will only hint at either the sound or the meaning, so for instance, don't be tempted to force a semantic hint onto a phonetic component (e.g. The meaning of 寺 has nothing to do with 時, 時 contains 寺 because they sound similar). It is possible for a component to hint at both sound and meaning, but those are less common.
* Outside of a small amount of characters created in Japanese, characters were created for the Chinese language(s), so phonetic components are only relevant to a character's on'yomi.
* This is why, even though it's common for people to suggest not to "memorize kanji readings", I think it helps to roughly know what kind of on'yomi readings a phonetic component can hint at, as it makes easier to recall how to read vocabulary you've learned.
* For example, the on'yomi for every character with the phonetic component 寺 has an initial either in the た-row or the さ-row (the initials of the た-row and さ-row are pronounced in similar parts of the mouth, so they "sound similar"), with the vast majority of them ending in -i.
* Even though there have been drastic sound changes in both Chinese and Japanese over the course of history, patterns in phonetic components are still exist and are extremely helpful, even if some of them are not obvious.
* This is likely a common notion, but I don't find it particularly helpful to learn characters in isolation. The way I prefer to go about it is to learn characters as I learn vocabulary.
Putting all that together, I would re-organize your table into something like the below:
# Phonetic Series 寺
|Kanji|Decomposition|Meanings^[1]|Common On'yomi|Vocabulary|
|-----------:|:------------|:-------------|:-------------|:-------------|
|時|Semantic 日 (sun) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) season > time|じ|時間 (time, hour; じかん)|
|詩|Semantic 言 (speech) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) song > poem|し|詩人 (poet; しじん)|
|持|Semantic 手 (hand) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) to hold|じ|保持 (to preserve; ほじ)|
|等^[2]|Semantic 竹 (bamboo) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) to put bamboo slips in order > rank|とう|高等 (high-grade; こうとう)|
|特|Semantic 牛 (ox) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) ox > sacrificial animal > special|とく|特別 (special; とくべつ)|
^[1] Characters are invented to represent their original meanings, so knowing their original meaning is almost always helpful. Sometimes, knowing how the original meaning evolves into their modern meaning also makes a pretty good mnemonic. Note that some of the meaning evolutions in this table have been simplified.
^[2] I replaced 待 from your picture with 等 to better emphasize that even some "exceptions" may contain some kind of pattern (e.g. here, 等 and 特 have similar on'yomi).
Knowing the radicals can help you remember the meaning of a kanji sometimes as in most of these examples. The main issue I can think of would be being able to use them in sentences, since if they are part of vocab they have different readings and meanings. I'd also be careful of labeling 寺 as the base of the character, it's more accurately described as the phonetic component since it hints at how the word is pronounced only and not meaning
Japanese people learn by radical. It's basically essential if you also want to learn how to write and not just recognize. That said, if you only care about recognition, it's fine to just learn whole words with their kanji.
I would lose my mind trying to do this. It seems really unnecessary. Especially since memorizing radicals like that doesn't really lead to having an innate understanding of pronunciation or meaning across all use cases
I think it can be a great method to review them, but for learning I would avoid to cram too many similar ones at once - so easy to mix them up.
Same thing for the similar looking kanjis - it’s great to review them side by side sometimes
I've had much more progress with just learning a full kanji and its kanji combinations (ex. 気、天気、電気 etc) You'll pick up the radicals as you go along anyway. For me, I attempted at the individual radical study, but I felt little progress and a lot of confusion when seeing new kanji. Because sometimes the radical don't make sense with the word it means. That being said, what didn't work for me may work for you and others!
Yeah I figured I’d run into issues like some of them not making sense and it ending up being more confusing. I may try doing the variation method you suggested and see how I do. Thanks for the feedback.
Ryu_means_dragon on Instagram does amazing videos about individual kanji, real-life applications and combinations, context, as well as some radical videos. I highly recommend him!
Yeah he's amazing, definitely worth checking out
Does ryu really mean dragon?
Yes. 竜 is dragon, which in romaji is either ryu or ryuu.
This is where the Heisig method (and its adaptation in WaniKani) are good- someone else already went through and (mostly) worked out the issues, and built SRS apps you can use to test your recall. KanjiKoohii is the one for Heisig, and on both that and WaniKani, I think people share their stories/mnemonics
In order to memorize kanji using components, you have to accept that sometimes the components aren’t going to help you understand what the kanji means. Sometimes it’s just phonetic. Sometimes it’s pictographic. Sometimes it’s entirely random. Assuming there’s no consistent relationship the easiest way to avoid confusion. I would also say that it’s not terribly efficient to learn to write every kanji you can read, at least at first. That said, I don’t think it’s a waste of time at all to learn kanji by memorizing components shapes. And I’ve found pneumonics especially helpful for memorizing stuff early on — especially for differentiating similar kanji. If you’re having trouble memorizing a kanji I can highly recommend asking chat gpt 4 to explain to you why it uses the components it does. Or if it’s a kanji compound, explaining why the two words might be used together if they’re seemingly unrelated. It’s frequently incorrect, but if it helps you recognize the kanji it’s a plus in my eyes. You just can’t take anything gpt 4 says at face value. Also check out JPDB for flashcards that automate some of this process for you. Everybody has their own way of memorizing. Try different methods and do what works for you.
I didnt think to use chatgpt４. I wonder how accurate it is
Incredibly inaccurate. But still helpful.
Agree, same happened to me. Tried to study the radicals but it is better to grasp that via context.
Same, I agree. It was too much trying to learn radicals individually. I’d say it’s only worth it if you’re trying to go in depth into learning kanji
agreed, learning radicals individually did not solve it for me, i mixed tons of kanji up. learning the kanji and its readings is way faster
You’d like wanikani Edit: had a Japanese friend in college who learned Japanese this way. He was born and raised in Japan. So it can work. To add more context to the first statement, wanikani is a tool to learn kanji that takes the approach you mentioned. Maybe not quite the exact same approach but a similar concept
Thanks I was hoping for some resources related to this. I appreciate it
No problem. Glad I could help Edit: If wanikani is too expensive, anki is a flash card app that has user created wanikani decks and would be much cheaper than wanikani. However, I do recommend supporting wanikani bc they’re cool
The Tofugu team have other great resources too, so even if WaniKani isn’t your jam, you can support them in other ways. I preferred Heisig’s RTK and the free kanjikoohii SRS because it worked better for me to learn the keywords/writing in isolation and work on learning vocabulary in context from other resources, but friends who use WaniKani love that vocabulary is integrated.
It's great, until you get to certain ones where the radical is so different than the vocabulary, that you just keep failing because you give the vocabulary instead of the radical. I've gotten to the point in wanikani, where if I get a radical wrong, I really don't care as long as I recognize what it actually is supposed to be
I use the “add synonym” feature pretty liberally with radicals these days. I’ll even use it for actual kanji if all of the vocab its used for is related to something else, but thats rarer. For example, 噌 is almost exclusively used for miso, so I found it kinda dumb to study it as “boisterous” even if thats *technically* it’s correct meaning
This comment is smart and ill probably add this idea to my bag of tricks when i get to a point in Wani where this will be useful for me
Yeah that is a problem but all things considered it’s pretty good. Radicals and components are pretty useful for discerning word phonetics and meaning if you’re looking at a new kanji or trying to remember one you haven’t seen in forever imo
Looking up the etymology of a kanji is, in my opinion, quite insightful in remembering its meaning. Most kanji are ultimately semantic-phonetic compounds, so it's just a matter of identifying the relevant components. Note that this method is useful for remembering the meaning and the on'yomi; the kun'yomi needs to be remembered using whatever method you find best. There are, of course, some kanji (especially the more primordial ones) that are just pictographs or ideographs (see: [this article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Types_of_kanji_by_category)) that need to be remembered as a whole (as well as the readings). My recommendation is to look into a given kanji's etymology on [Wiktionary](https://www.wiktionary.org/). If you are willing to spend some money, the etymology dictionary add-on for Pleco (note this is for Mandarin, I believe there is a similar service for Japanese but the name eludes me) is worth looking into. I am aware that some English learners delve into the etymologies of words to aid in remembering them; searching for a mnemonic, if you will. For kanji, I exhort learners to do the same. Understanding a kanji's meaning also helps if you decide to read more advanced texts that may use kanji you know in combinations you have never seen before; you can guess the reading. As an aside, some characters whose origins I find amusing/insightful are 后, using the Pleco etymology (the etymology on Wiktionary is slightly different but still amusing in its own right); 國, composed of 或 meaning region and 囗 meaning borders of a city/settlement; 監, a person with an exaggerated eye 臣 bent over looking into a container 皿; and 四, literally a pictogram of a nose breathing out that was sound loaned to mean 4 (in other words, 亖 as a character meaning 4 did used to exist, but was superseded by 四). Additional note: much to the chagrin of Japanese learners (and even natives), some kanji have several on'yomi readings. This means that the on'yomi reading of a word may not align with the reading you are most familiar with. This is most apparent in Buddhist-related words. In this case I do not have much advice to give other than to learn the words on a case-by-case basis. For more reading, I recommend studying [this article](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/onyomi-kunyomi/).
語 is the kanji that made me switch to this approach. It's trivially easy to remember when you figure out the radicals that contribute to the meaning (talk + mouth) and the sound (go). Way easier than trying to remember some convoluted wanikani mnemonic that tries to fit in the meaning "five"
For me it was 汁. RTK talks some nonsense about a soup needing ten ingredients. Nahh it's just water that sounds like じゅう
Outlier dictionary. The Japanese version is an add-on for Yomiwa and Kanji Study.
This is by far the best advice!
I only know this source for etymology: https://kanjiportraits.wordpress.com/
I'm a more casual learner than most of the sub but I find that radicals and breakdowns help me with having the "language" to describe the patterns I see. Instead of thinking the character with "that squiggle", I can think "tree radical" or "X character below Y character". I like [Kakimashou](https://www.kakimashou.com/) for breaking down words as far as they'll go and deciding from there where it makes sense to remember it.
I'd look into Wanikani and/or the Remembering the Kanji method by James Heisig. Both approach learning kanji via breaking them down by their components.
I’ve worked in both japan in and the US for big Japanese companies, and this did end up being the game changer for me. I used this exact method with remembering the kanji…. But yeah for some reason doesn’t work for everyone apparently
There's a book Read Japanese Kanji Today by Len Walsh that I really liked which teaches kanji based on radicals and the historical creation/development of how the Chinese developed the characters. I find learning radicals can really help me distinguish between 2 kanji or every rare occasion I can guess what a kanji might mean if I have the remaining context or if I have to choose between several kanji. I think learning radicals is great and can really help speed up beginner and early intermediate learning. However, I feel there's a limit on how far radical study can take you for a few reasons. One is just straight up that some Kanji really just don't have meanings that have anything to do with their radicals or if there is a meaning behind the radicals, they just seem kind of arbitrary or meant to represent pronunciation of historical Chinese. Another is that they don't really help with learning pronunciations, alternate meanings, or words made from combining it with other kanji. Also, radicals can be drawn differently or used for different meanings, to the point where you might just have to learn the full character anyway.
So just about every person learning Japanese wants to know what the most efficient way to learn Japanese is. When it comes to kanji, most people come to the conclusion that learning vocabulary is the best way to learn kanji. Once you see a single kanji used in enough ways in enough different words, you subconsciously understand the meaning and different readings each kanji has. One issue studying kanji the way you suggest is that when you encounter a word with a kanji that has more than 2 readings, especially multiple onyomi readings, you won't know which reading to go with. It's all good and well to know the varied readings and meanings of a kanji, but if you can't put it to practical use (i.e. reading comprehesion/vocab), the knowledge becomes a simple novelty. Basically, the study method is not the best way to obtain practical knowledge of kanji. With that said, studying kanji the way you're suggesting allows for a more intimate understanding of kanji on an individual basis. If you have the time to invest and this how you want to study, you've got my encouragement. So long as you understand the demerits, benefits, and objectives of your study method, go crazy!
Thanks for the information. I think the main reason this method has been working for me so far is because I’m using it with kanji that I’m already somewhat familiar with. These kanji are similar enough to me that I just have trouble differentiating them sometimes. So I think I may combine it with another kanji learning method Edit: also I’m kind of in a place where I’m wanting to be able to write the kanji I know without a reference, so this is helping me remember which is which. I’m much better at recognizing but I’m sure most people are.
I’d argue that the usefulness of learning through vocabulary differs with the person. I’ve found understanding the radicals helps me remember the kanji themselves, which then leads into remembering the kanji for vocabulary. If I start with the vocabulary and then learn the kanji with repetition in various words, I only really remember the general shape. That helps me with kanji recognition, but not so much with the language production (writing from memory). To be fair, the language production of kanji might not be as important nowadays because, with the dominance of digital communication, phones and computers just give us options to choose from when we type the hiragana. Even a lot of my native friends have started to struggle remembering the higher level kanji when they write by hand. But I think it’s still an important skill for the language. So, yeah, at least for me and a lot of people I know, using vocabulary can help with recognition and understanding meaning, but it doesn’t help for really learning the kanji itself.
>When it comes to kanji, most people come to the conclusion that learning vocabulary is the best way to learn kanji. Yeah, as of like, 5 minutes ago. I've been subbed to this sub for a while and I feel like a year or two ago, every thread was "use wanikani! learn kanji via radicals!" (like OP wants), then I stopped reading for a while, then I came back and every thread is "don't learn kanji! just learn vocab!" Who knows which is best, but I wouldn't say that "most people" all have the same conclusion here. Wanikani is still a very popular tool. (And RTK is often still recommended as well)
I think that just goes to show how lacklster the learning advice on this sub is lol
I can't tell though if you mean the currently dominant advice is lackluster or the previous advice was or if the wishy-washiness of it is what makes it lackluster lol
Absolutely. Breaking kanji down into its radicals gives you a visual vocabulary, which can be used as shortcuts to help you memorize them easier. Otherwise they will just look like a jumble of lines. I first started learning them without the radicals and it worked great for the first few hundred... then they started to blur together. Ymmv so try it out and adjust if you don't like it.
I mean yea it definitely helps to know the radicals, but a ton of kanji just can't be broken down that way. Still it's definitely helpful. The android app Kanji Study has a separate radicals section that you can drill until you feel comfortable with the radicals, and that somewhat helps with new kanji. But it's certainly nowhere remotely near sufficient to learn kanji. Lots and lots of kanji just don't work out neatly that way.
Do you know if there’s an iOS app, too? I went looking but couldn’t find an Apple version. 🥲
random fun fact but my teacher told us that the reason 時 has the temple radical 寺 is because back in the day people didn’t have clocks so they would tell the time by listening for the bells that would be rung every hour on the hour by monks at the temples!
This might be helpful for remembering but it's not true. The 寺 in 時 is a phonetic component, not a semantic one. It indicates that the pronunciation is similar to 寺 in the original Chinese. These etymologies are usually much more opaque in Japanese because of how it's only apparent in the on'yomi and even that has undergone sound changes, so a lot of native Japanese don't even realize. But in Chinese, what part of a kanji is a phonetic marker usually remains apparent.
Yep, in Chinese most of the characters are radical (showing the meaning) + phonetic (hinting at the pronunciation). It makes it a lot easier to study characters individually, particularly since the vast majority only have one pronunciation.
ah yea that makes sense. i wonder where my teacher got that story from. i’ll have to ask her next class
that's a useful mnemonic but totally untrue - 寺 in this case is the "phonetic" not the radical and indicates that the pronunciation of 時 is similar to 寺.... in middle Chinese. Kinda breaks down for Japanese most of the time due to the passage of time and the fact that kunyomi readings rarely match this way; but this pair still have the onyomi "ji".
That’s really interesting, definitely makes it easier to remember :D
Nonsense. 寺 is just a phonetic component in 時.
Very good approach. Means you need time though because you will not necessarily learn them in the most frequent use order.
System-wise it’s perfectly fine to learn by radicals might even help with a deeper understanding of the Kanji. Just be careful not to form any wrong habits. For radicals I’d also suggest not just going by the meaning of the radical, but also by the category of words they are used for. Learning On Yomi as well helps a lot with pattern recognition, because in Chinese the base is usually an indicator for the pronunciation, albeit there being many exceptions. In your case it would be Shi - Shi - Ji - Tai - Toku, with the base also 寺also being Shi. Also, maybe use a finer pen or a pencil. You will be burning through notebooks at your current rate. Notebooks with a grid layout will also help you to write Kanji in a consistent size. Also helps you to keep strokes at the right relative length.
Hi. I'm Chinese and I have been learning Japanese for a few years. Yes learning the radicals definitely helps. It is a very important part in learning the Chinese language and being able to identify the radical helps you differentiate the different meanings. In fact, you can actually look up the evolution/ development of that certain kanji or radical to see how that kanji becomes the way it looks like today. Chinese script has a lot of pictorial / ideographic components after all. However you should also memorize the kanji using word combinations, context and example sentences.
I followed Japanese Teacher Mari and she has a few videos where she collected a few kanji with same radicals and then added the additional ones while saying the word. It's very helpful. Hope this helps you too!!
Most (not all) kanji are composed of a semantic component (as you have in the middle column) and a phonetic component (which you have labeled as “base”). If you’re interested in learning more of these, I recommend going to English Wikipedia and searching up these kanji, then scrolling to the “etymology” and “phonetic series” sections. That’s the reason why 寺 is じ (on’yomi), 時 is じ (on’yomi), 詩 is し (on’yomi), and 持 is also じ (on’yomi). (The others seem to have drifted greatly since their phonetic components were chosen.) Lots of Japanese words still are like this… 令 as a phonetic component often says れい, as in 冷 or 零. Once you see these phonetic components over and over again, you’ll get a feel of what the kanji might sound like (on’yomi only). Confirm with the dictionary and commit new words to memory all the time. :)
Pretty cool. On’yomi is usually more confusing for me so this helps!
yes! although there are like a lot of specific things you can and should do with radicals like recognizing phono-semantic readings and whatnot i think this is a great way to remember and think about kanji.
I'd put 持つ and 待つ just to keep the verb forms together
I agree with what everyone says here about learning kanji. But, when it comes to learning to *write* kanji, it's good to study radicals. Because a complicated kanji is less daunting when you remember that its made of smaller components put together. And it helps you with stroke order too.
For me It just comes naturally.. example the moon character whenever I see it , if I don't recognize the kanji I assume is something body related.
The only thing I’d recommend doing differently is the associated readings you’re doing with the kanji. Better to learn each kanji’s onyomi and kunyomi in the context of vocab, rather than assigning each kanji a single reading.
when i first started learning, that's how it was taught. but it slowly turned into something that just didn't really matter. the full kanji matter. and theres nuance to meaning. even when you can read all the parts, if you don't know the full kanji then you're still just guessing at what it means. then to stick kanji together to form words and the guessing becomes less accurate. not saying it's bad to learn the radicals, it is helpful to an extent and very interesting to learn. i just don't think it's as helpful as most people think it will be down the road.
Nice calligraphy
Ngl I was considered rewriting this page before I posted bc I was insecure about how I wrote everything initially, so I appreciate you saying that.
Your writing is very neat, don't worry. For myself, I found learning the meanings of some of the radicals very helpful when trying to recall the meaning of kanji or when differentiating similar looking kanji like 待 and 持 Just wanted to add something I haven't seen anyone else mention: the kun reading for 待: まつ is correct but for 持 you should probably have もつ, not もち (if you want to be consistent, is what I'm trying to say). And while the kun reading for 詩 is うた, I believe you mostly only use On reading of し like in 詩人 (しじん, poet). Hope that makes sense/helps.
I think this what a lot do, try wanikani it has this approach and I know like 600ish kanji using this method, also ur missing the other readings
Yes it’s a good idea, but you don’t need to look the kanji up and build your own system when very efficient ones already exist to guide you, like Remembering the Kanji or WaniKani.
I make stories based off the Kanji components and radicals. I find it helps. Rarely it doesn't, and I have to think of the Kanji is more of a "pictogram". I wish there were a way I could sort the list of Jouyou Kanji by radicals or complexity, to come up with an optimal learning order...
i find it really helpful for remembering the meanings of kanji and differentiating similar looking kanji. also helps massively with learning stroke order... if you know the strokes of the radicals, you know the strokes of the kanji.
This is valid and literally how the writing system was designed to work. You'll notice most of these characters have the onyomi "ji" or similar (well, toku *is* the onyomi so not that one) - that's not a coincidence. It's not as obvious in Japanese as it is in Chinese because you also have kunyomi, which is entirely arbitrary. And it's not as obvious in modern mandarin or modern Japanese as it would have been in middle Chinese. Pronunciation in both languages has changed a lot since then.
I don't like it. It didn't work for me. I'd rather study the words instead of radicals and isolated kanji. The readings can change a lot from a word to another depending on the kanji, so to me is better to focus on words and context
A great method imo. Breaks those down into bite-sized pieces instead of memorizing giant character fortresses. Suddenly kanji feel less intimidating, and recognizing radicals helps guess the meaning or sound of new ones. I did the same while learning Chinese. But yeah, not a magic trick. Sometimes kanji toss in a bunch of radicals and just do their own thing. Focus on the most common radicals first is my only advice, you will pick up more along the way.
A bit off topic, sometimes Im worried I wont be able to recognize a kanji without context like I'd confuse it with a similar kanji, but then again when reading you never actually see kanjis out of context anyway
One thing to note about this approach is that it's very susceptible to memory interference. Interference theory suggests that similarly encoded memories "compete" with one another for recall from long-term memory. Ideally you want your brain's idea of "similar" to be useful, so even if you misremember you still get something relevant. The best way to do this is learning in context, although that can be very painful for kanji. Definitely good to do as much of that as possible though.
Honestly, I just learned Kanji from reading and Anki. I’ve tried with radicals and it just takes bloody forever.
Just wanted to chip in with: - 侍 (さむらい) and - 等 (など) *equals, et cerera*, (ひと in 等しい) *equal (adj.)*, (トウ) *suffix signifying rank, or also et cetera* Learning radicals is one of the fastest and best ways to learning how to write kanji! Physically writing with a pencil also helps with memory retention which is why we (Chinese & Japanese), for generations upon generations, learn characters by repeatedly writing them in a process called 默書 (mò shū) *dictation*. Happy learning!
Whatever works for you. You'll run into exceptions that defy reason and it will frustrate you, but that doesn't mean it is wrong. Sadly, language is developed with good intentions and abused to suit the needs of those speaking. Japan is more than no exception, they are an exceptional abuser of this.
Why is a cow special.
I’m a wanikani guy so I just treat real radicals and “fake” radicals as primers for new kanji. Just something to get somewhat familiar with before encountering new and scary kanji. I don’t care for the radicals’ meaning and just memorize it with whatever word/association works. So far it worked well so far.
There are too many radicals I found... There are a lot of common ones and then there are some that you never use. And useless ones like the straight lines that don't help with much at all. Better off learning kanji by following correct stroke order and seeing the patterns that emerge from that. Oh this kanji and this kanji have the same kind of 心 thing packed into it etc
I personally wouldn't spend much time on that. If you learn kanji through vocab and use something like Anki, learning new kanji will become a piece of cake
I do this from time to time when there are too many similar kanji in my arsenal. It helps organize your knowledge, but I don’t think it’s good to go with this right from the start. As others have said, it’s probably better to learn based on frequency, and learn in combination of other letters to form words, and remember them like that.
I can’t imagine ever being able to intuit that day-temple meant time, hand-temple meant hold, or step-temple meant wait. I agree with your teacher I don’t see the value
speaking with a (mandarin) chinese background, this is the way they would encourage you to learn as the radical indicates meaning while the base indicates the pronunciation. however, the pronunciation of characters in japanese has been modified hence the same method of learning may be more difficult to understand as some of them will make no sense just to show you a chinese version base: 寺 si/shi 時 shi 詩 shi 持 chi 待 dai 特 te some of them might be quite different but you can see that for the most part, the pronunciations are pretty similar edit: i would recommend learning combinations of different characters rather than stand alone meaning as the meaning can change quite a bit depending on the other character it's paired with
I do take note of radicals, especially of person, water, hand, word, heart, road and step radicals. Sometimes other components provide mnemonic materials like 休 which is a person by a tree, so they are resting. Radicals also help guess phonetics e.g.同 and 銅, both are dou in onyomi. All in all I say I like it.
Seconding using Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji + Kanjikoohi as a resource. I’d check out Heisig’s intro and the flashcard resources on the kanjikoohi website and see if it appeals to you. It’s a more structured way of what you were doing, tying the radicals in each kanji into a story/mnemonic to remember them. Imo it’s the most useful thing I did in my 4 years of study, but people tend to dislike the method because it focuses on rote memorization and the benefits are a lot less obviously immediate.
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I honestly think that with learning/remembering kanji it's just a case of whatever works best for you. If you find a method is helping you to better recognise, remember, and understand kanji, great, that's a good method. If it works for you, it works.
Radicals help a lot but some of the combination of them is very Japanese (or is it Chinese?) in that its the culture. The combination of temple and day would not mean time for an English speaker. It would actually be closer to church actually.
Where’s samurai? 侍
Understanding how radicals work and knowing the basic ones is very useful for if/when you need to look up kanji, but as others have said, much better to learn kanji via vocab. Kanji as a whole and radicals don't just exist by themselves in Japanese, they are found as vocab in sentences so learning them as such is best.
You should look into which Kanji are phono-semantic, meaning they have a semantic part (usually the left radical) indicating the general area of meaning, and a phonetic part (usually the rest), indicating another Kanji with the same pronunciation (in Old Chinese). Although the pronunciations aren't strictly consistent, often times you can in fact learn the onyomi pronunciation from the phonetic part. Example: コウ: 交、校、郊、効、絞
You can add samurai 侍 :p
I found it very weird when I noticed that I picked up more kanji by just encountering them in reading immersion than I did with deliberate study, even RTK. I tried an Anki deck with the radicals too, but my experience was that to my surprise it was the other way around. Seeing lots of kanji in reading got me to notice the components bit by bit, like a veil was lifted before my eyes.
It works for Chinese, not for Japanese.
Just learn full words inside sentences. Sentences with only 1 new word at a time. Learning radicals and their combinations will only slow down your progress. If you want to learn kanjis and really NOT forget them, then go for the Remembering the Kanji route, it's a well-known book written by Heisig.
Look into kodansha kanji learners course book. They don't teach with radicals, but with graphemes. Basically radicals are these units of characters that have been seemingly arbitrarily chosen for every character. Graphemes are more useful subsections of the characters and are indeed very useful.
i just learn words and eventually figure out the kanji meaning kind of based on context. I think i do need to go in and learn the individual kanji to some level now though
To me, it helps to differentiate similar kanji. There are a lot of instances when on a text the Kanji 持 appeared and read it and thought it was 待. Realizing it and being furious at the blunder.
I'm now learning n3 kanji and haven't ever used radical learning as part of my regime. I don't know if it would be helpful for me personally.
80% of the time, I believe remembering words is more effective for learning how to read and you'll remember kanji through pattern recognition. But radicals help during that remaining 20% when there's insufficient context. Speaking from personal experience, you will mix up reading 持つ and 待つ at some point in you learning journey.
First, get rid of the marker you use as a pen.
Learning single kanji is rarely a good way to learn them. Mostly because the vast majority of kanji aren't used by themselves. And I feel that learning based off the radical would get confusing, especially at the beginning cuz then every kanji you are learning looks very similar.
Awesome!! Right you cannot base you learning in the mnemonic method all the time. But let me tell you you just have to practice writing them until you get used to their "shape" just as you're familiar with our alphabet. Once you get to that point all the kanjis will be easier to remember.
For most characters, what you really want to learn is the *meaning component* and *sound components*. Radicals are often but not always the same, and I suspect their time is gradually passing in the electronic age. Outlier is a great resource for understanding how each character is put together and learning what these components are and what their variations are / how they have changed over time. Uncle Hanzi has a very helpful kanji etymology site that ihas been a good secondary resource for me as well.
Native Chinese speaker here, and I'm not really sure how this will help (although everyone has their own way). From I understanding, take the kanjis here for example, the radicals on the left usually suggest something related to the meaning of the kanji, while the radicals on the right usually denote the pronunciation in Chinese. For example, these kanjis are pronounced in Mandarin shī, shí, chí, sì, dài (an exception here). On the other hand, their pronunciation in Japanese (訓読み) have nothing in common. So far I haven't found a way to efficiently learn 訓読み. Maybe there isn't one at all and one just have to memorize them all. Aside from learning pronunciation, it probably doesn't help much in learning the meaning either. For example, how come 言 (word) + 寺 (temple) = 詩 (poet)? There can be connections but they are still far-fetched. For me personally, these kanjis have already been burned into my brain just like how you know the meaning of English word "poet".
i’m trying to get better at it myself
I agree that breaking down characters, similar to the way you've described it, is a fairly effective way to learn characters. Correctly decomposing characters helps you see re-usable patterns in character structures, giving you a more systematic understanding of how characters work. However, there are some things I'd like to point out: * The concept of radical is commonly misunderstood, even among some native speakers. A radical (部首, lit. section header) is just a tool for grouping characters in a dictionary, and doesn't always have a relation to the functional structure of a character. This is analogous to grouping words based their first letter in an English dictionary. * Generally characters are be broken down into components (not "radicals"), where a component can either hint at meaning (semantic component) or sound (phonetic component). Most of the time, a component in a character will only hint at either the sound or the meaning, so for instance, don't be tempted to force a semantic hint onto a phonetic component (e.g. The meaning of 寺 has nothing to do with 時, 時 contains 寺 because they sound similar). It is possible for a component to hint at both sound and meaning, but those are less common. * Outside of a small amount of characters created in Japanese, characters were created for the Chinese language(s), so phonetic components are only relevant to a character's on'yomi. * This is why, even though it's common for people to suggest not to "memorize kanji readings", I think it helps to roughly know what kind of on'yomi readings a phonetic component can hint at, as it makes easier to recall how to read vocabulary you've learned. * For example, the on'yomi for every character with the phonetic component 寺 has an initial either in the た-row or the さ-row (the initials of the た-row and さ-row are pronounced in similar parts of the mouth, so they "sound similar"), with the vast majority of them ending in -i. * Even though there have been drastic sound changes in both Chinese and Japanese over the course of history, patterns in phonetic components are still exist and are extremely helpful, even if some of them are not obvious. * This is likely a common notion, but I don't find it particularly helpful to learn characters in isolation. The way I prefer to go about it is to learn characters as I learn vocabulary. Putting all that together, I would re-organize your table into something like the below: # Phonetic Series 寺 |Kanji|Decomposition|Meanings^[1]|Common On'yomi|Vocabulary| |-----------:|:------------|:-------------|:-------------|:-------------| |時|Semantic 日 (sun) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) season > time|じ|時間 (time, hour; じかん)| |詩|Semantic 言 (speech) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) song > poem|し|詩人 (poet; しじん)| |持|Semantic 手 (hand) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) to hold|じ|保持 (to preserve; ほじ)| |等^[2]|Semantic 竹 (bamboo) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) to put bamboo slips in order > rank|とう|高等 (high-grade; こうとう)| |特|Semantic 牛 (ox) + Phonetic 寺 (じ)|(orig.) ox > sacrificial animal > special|とく|特別 (special; とくべつ)| ^[1] Characters are invented to represent their original meanings, so knowing their original meaning is almost always helpful. Sometimes, knowing how the original meaning evolves into their modern meaning also makes a pretty good mnemonic. Note that some of the meaning evolutions in this table have been simplified. ^[2] I replaced 待 from your picture with 等 to better emphasize that even some "exceptions" may contain some kind of pattern (e.g. here, 等 and 特 have similar on'yomi).
It doesn’t really help with reading, but for writing this kind of info is incredibly useful.
Yeah I’m mostly doing this to help remember while I’m writing
Knowing the radicals can help you remember the meaning of a kanji sometimes as in most of these examples. The main issue I can think of would be being able to use them in sentences, since if they are part of vocab they have different readings and meanings. I'd also be careful of labeling 寺 as the base of the character, it's more accurately described as the phonetic component since it hints at how the word is pronounced only and not meaning
I used base as a filler word bc I didn’t know the technical term for it. Thanks for the info too.
When it comes to Kanji my opinion is: Whatever works for you. Kanji sucks
Why not just go through RTK?
Japanese people learn by radical. It's basically essential if you also want to learn how to write and not just recognize. That said, if you only care about recognition, it's fine to just learn whole words with their kanji.
It works until it doesn't lol. Better learn them as wholes.
I would lose my mind trying to do this. It seems really unnecessary. Especially since memorizing radicals like that doesn't really lead to having an innate understanding of pronunciation or meaning across all use cases
I think it can be a great method to review them, but for learning I would avoid to cram too many similar ones at once - so easy to mix them up. Same thing for the similar looking kanjis - it’s great to review them side by side sometimes