Japan Study Abroad Podcast

JLPT Study Regimen, Step 1 - Remembering the Kanji

Welcome to this new series of articles documenting my study regimen for tackling the JLPT 2-kyuu this fall. This series is by no means all you need to do to pass the test, and everyone’s learning styles are different. However, what might work for me might also work for you. In each article of this series I will document one of the things I do everyday in order to bring myself closer to passing the test.

Remembering the Kanji

A few weeks ago on the podcast I mentioned a little book called Remembering the Kanji by one James W. Heisig. I am indeed using it to increase my core kanji competency. For those of you planning on following in my footsteps after this article, it is important to note that this book will not actually teach you any Japanese. In fact, even if you finish the book, the likelihood that you will be able to read Japanese without further training is fairly slim. By fairly slim, I mean worse than the lottery.

This, however, does not mean that the book is useless. Remembering the Kanji is a fairly intuitive and remarkable way to learn to recognize the general meaning of kanji characters and how to write them properly. The strength of the book is the order in which the kanji are presented. Since kanji are composed of smaller pictographs called radicals, the book maintains a sort of radical toolbox. Lesson by lesson new radicals are introduced, and in those lessons it shows all of the kanji you can make with those new radicals along with their meaning.

Untangling the Kanji

Through this method you can build a very good understanding of what individual pieces of kanji mean, and also what they mean when put together. Learning this way does a good job of untangling the mess of strokes that most western students see when first learning kanji. Even after the first few hundred kanji learned, common themes begin to emerge. When seeing a new kanji, a student of RtK might be able to get a general sense of the meaning or be able to write it down accurately enough to look it up later.

This is an extraordinarily powerful ability to have, and it arises because this method creates wisdom of kanji rather than discrete knowledge of kanji. Interestingly, the wisdom that RtK creates is similar to the wisdom that Chinese or Korean learners have about kanji. They have no idea what a kanji sounds like or specifically means to the Japanese, but they know what it means to them. They also know that their meaning isn’t usually far off, and because of this they tend to do better when learning Japanese. For learners not using the RtK method, the wisdom and familiarity that Chinese or Korean students exhibit must be created through an extremely high number of rote repetitions.

Explaining the Kanji

That rote method of understanding kanji, that the Japanese love so much, is what this book succeeds in avoiding. Instead of writing the kanji over and over again, the learner is charged to come up with a story that contains all the elements of a kanji so that each kanji has a unique and memorable story.

The idea is that you’re constructing a path in your mind from the English keyword to the written kanji using your imagination as the glue. Over time what you’re left with is a well-worn path between the kanji and their meaning. You will most certainly end up forgetting whatever silly story you came up with to remember the kanji in the first place, but that’s okay. It served its purpose.

Reviewing the Kanji

As far as the nuts and bolts, here is how I use this book. First, I follow the instructions laid out in Heisig’s introduction. I do not do marathon review sessions. I only review RtK flashcards once per day, and I practice only from English keyword to kanji. Remembering how to write a kanji is far more difficult than remembering the meaning, and once you can write a kanji from memory it becomes fairly trivial to be able to recognize. It’s not automatic, but it works quite well.

I also use a very special website called Reviewing the Kanji. It’s kind of a flashcard site with a bunch of features that are optimized specifically for this learning method. The website keeps track of how far along I am in the book, and employs a Leitner card box system to determine which kanji to test on which day.

I test new kanji once on the day that I learn them. If I pass them on that day then they will show up for review again in another 3 days. Pass again, and the kanji doesn’t show up for another 7 days. Once more, and it won’t show up again for another 2 weeks. This progresses to the point where you might only see some of the more familiar kanji once every 8 months. However, if you fail a kanji it goes straight back to the beginning and enters the system again once you’ve re-studied it. Through this method, the kanji knowledge gets put into long-term memory.

Progressing through the Kanji

Because the strength of this system is in the lack of repetition, almost any student of Japanese should be able to fit this into their schedule. Even though I find myself having a lot of time to study, I generally only spend 30-45 minutes per day on RtK. I start my day by reviewing on Reviewing the Kanji; generally 30-50 cards. From there, if there are very few failed cards, I will spend time introducing 20-30 new kanji. If there are a significant number of failed cards, I will spend the rest of my RtK time that day on reintroducing myself to them so that they can be added back into the system. I’m averaging about 75 new kanji per week by working this way, and that puts me on track for taking JLPT 2-kyuu in the fall.

Currently I have 475 kanji in the system, I have finished 18 lessons out of 56 total, there are 66 cards in my failed pile, and there are 122 in long-term rotation.

Links of Interest:

• Remembering the Kanji Sample PDF
• Remembering the Kanji on Amazon
• Reviewing the Kanji
• Further technical explanation of Leitner cardfile systems