Kanji can be pretty crazy. I’ve tried a few different methods, the most effective being using a flash card program on your PC (such as Anki) - the English pops up and I write down the kanji on a notepad and check to see if I got it right. Real life flash cards are a bit more time consuming, and just writing them out doesn’t really do it for me. No matter how hard I memorise a kanji though, I can’t never practise it again. Like you say, you have to keep going back over them again and again, unfortunately.

I’ve found that if you can somehow think of kanji as interesting and enjoyable that seems to help, and the more you go on the more your brain learns how to memorise and remember them better.

@ Joe, I will be googling that software called Anki, sounds like just the thing I need

@ Mike, thanks for the mention and I will be taking up your offer to chat over messenger!

I’ve tried a lot of different things (books, computer apps, flashcards, etc), but the one thing that does work is writing it. If you are serious about learning the kanji, I strongly recommend picking up a Nintendo DS Lite (any region) and the “game” Kageyama Method Dennou Hanpuku Tadashii Kanji Kaki to Rikun (http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-cl-49-jp-70-1v6o.html). The Nintendo DS Lite is not region locked, so any (US, Japanese, Europe, etc) will play Japanese games fine and the game is simple enough to follow for just practicing the grades 1 - 6 kanji. The best part is it gives you feedback on how well you are writing the kanji (beyond just the correct stroke order), so you can truly learn how to write them correctly. The other games reinforce the kanji, but if your vocabulary is limited then that part may be more frustrating than anything, but I’d recommend the game regardless. The are also several other DS Lite games worth picking up if you are serious - my recommended ones are Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten (an excellent Wordtank-like dictionary) and Ukkari o Nakusou! Bunshou Yomi Training. Definitely worth the investment, best “study tool” I have ever gotten for Japanese - and playing regular Japanese games as a break is pretty cool, too. There’s tons of story-based games for when you start advancing later on to reinforce your reading and the text is typically very clear and easy to read (not like the old Gameboys). Just work at them a little every day and you’ll make progress - I’ve been studying on my own for about 7 years now and that’s all it takes. Good luck! ^_^

I haven’t used any of my kanji in years, but I just did lots and lots of repetition when I was learning. And I was always careful to check back with my diagrams to make sure I was doing the correct stroke orders. Somehow, that helped me keep the characters straight in my mind. It made it easier for me to recognize the components and remember what each one meant. Once I got good at it, it was really fun being able to write with kanji. Best wishes!

Hello.
I agree with you. I wrote Kanji a lot of times to learn when I was a child. I used 漢字ドリル. I thought it was pretty boring then but it was nice to learn actually. I know some people might say it’s meaningless and just a waste of time. Grouping with Hen/Tsukuri/etc would be helpful.

When learning the Kanji do you need to learn all the different readings for each one, and the translations. I bought a set of Kanji flashcards from whiterabbitpress, which are great although I`m not sure which parts to learn!

I stumbled across your blog while I was searching for some kanji-related DS software, and I thought I’d add my two cents on kanji–

I had a lot of trouble with kanji until I decided to try Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji.” At first I was *very* skeptical about his approach. It just seemed gimmicky. But I downloaded the 125-page chunk of the book he makes availble online. I tried it, and it actually helped me remember a lot of kanji a lot better than I had before. (And believe me, I’ve tried just about everything.) I had a big “Aha!” moment, and stuck with it. I burned through volume 1 in about 2 months.

It’s rather simple in its approach. You break up the learning of kanji into tasks.

Task one is to learn how to write each kanji and attach English keywords to them. (A keyword is sort of a very rough meaning for just the character.) It helps if you pretend that English uses kanji, and you’re just learning the “English Kanji.” It just so happens that English Kanji and Japanese Kanji are written exactly the same way. They just vary a little in their meanings and vary totally in pronunciation. That doesn’t sound lilke much, but actually it’s pretty important in the long-term. It gives you memory hooks and placeholders to hang the on/kun-yomi on later. Over time you won’t need the English keywords anymore– they fade away.

You remember the keywords by creating strong visuals and whacked-out stories. The stronger the visual, the better. So for example: The kanji with the keyword Possess is composed of the primitives “By one’s side” and “Flesh” (or “Moon”). So: To keep from being Possessed by evil sprits, you carry some rotten flesh by your side, because the smell keeps them away.

Not very appetizing, but it does stick in your mind.

Task two is learning on-yomi, which you can do any which way you please. Vol. 2 of RTK has its own way of looking at on-yomi. It works for some, but not all. Other people do things like kanjichains and memory palaces, and all sorts of other things. It doesn’t really matter how you do it, just that you break the tasks up. I haven’t had much of a chance to use vol. 2, but it does go into great detail for on-yomi.

Task three, the hardest, is kun-yomi. There isn’t really a good system of learning kun-yomi– that I’ve found, anyway. Just collect them like Pokemon and use a good SRS like Anki to drill the heck out of them. Volume 3 contains more kanji with keywords and on/kun readings.

I highly recommend http://kanji.koohii.com if you do decide to try RTK. It’s a very well-made site that helps you drill the 2042 kanji in volume 1, all the way to kanji 3007 in vol. 3. There are also forums there you can interact with to see what things people are doing that may/may not work for you.

RTK is not a perfect system. For some reason, volume 1 has 2042 kanji, and volume 3 has the rest of them, leading you to 3007 total. Also, there are some characters from vol. 3 which, if you learned earlier, would make about 40-50 kanji in vol.1 a lot easier to remember. Someone on the reviewing the kanji forums made a list of them.

Heisig picks some odd keywords for some kanji, but be careful if you decide to substitute. And I highly recommend *not* using the canned stories in the book as a crutch. It’s a whole lot better long-term to start creating your own stories to remember kanji as soon as possible.

Also, you should read all of his text *before* you start the book. He puts text in odd places, when he really should have just explained everything up front. Just skim through the book, and you’ll see what I mean. If you get stuck for a story, try the kanji.koohii.com site. There’s a huge database of stories there.

Theoretically, you can do the whole thing without the book (if you’re clever), but I do NOT recommend it. The book has a ton of useful info you won’t find otherwise. Just the stroke order alone is handy.

Heisig’s approach doesn’t suit everyone, and it can cause some confusion if you’re taking Japanese classes in school. (Although someone at the University of Alaska-Anchorage is teaching a class just on RTK as a sort of pre-Japanese class. Heisig himself doesn’t recommend it for classroom use, but it’s an interesting experiment.)

It takes a lot of time, but it lends itself very well to either powering through it in 6-8 weeks, or taking a year to get through it, depending on how much time you have. If you don’t have trouble with Kanji, then great. But if you do, you might want to check it out.