I think the first thing every beginner needs to do is CHANGE their mindset towards kanji. There seems to be a general fear or ugh feeling of starting out and not knowing everything. Well guess what, until you are N1 you probably won’t know all the common kanji and even then you might still not be able to read everything.
I heard Japanese school kids learn kanji for like 10 years in elementary and middle school. So no there’s no use getting overly frustrated when you’ve only just begun.
I read somewhere that if you think of kanji as characters with slightly more lines or strokes than hiragana, it will be less intimidating. And I think that’s true to some extent…
The nice thing is there are several tips to learning kanji:
*Kanji are made up of single radicals
Radicals are a set number of stroke lines. You can Google what the radicals look like. Multiple radicals make up a character.
*simple kanji make up the basis or radicals for a lot of the bigger kanji
For ex:
木 (き/ki): tree
森 (もり/ki): forest
The kanji is basically shrunk down and paired with other radicals you might have seen before.
*You can guess the meaning of a lot of kanji without being able to read or pronounce it (and it actually makes sense when written out)
For ex:
今 (いま/ima): now
日 (にち/nichi or ひ/hi): day
今日 (きょう/kyou): today
And anything with 日 at the end is talking about a type of day:
月曜日 (げつようび): Monday
誕生日 (たんじょうび): birthday
Ex 2:
電 (でん/den): electric
車 (くるま/ kuruma): car
電車 (でんしゃ/densha): train
*Stroke order can be made simpler by using the Jisho App
This app shows you in real time how to write the stokes correctly vs on paper where they show you the strokes with tiny numbers beside them. The general rule is left to right and up to down. The last stroke should always be the one closing the box or space (日) or the one closest to the bottom (建).
Now Where to Begin
*In the Genki book (at the back), they have charts that list out the kanji for each chapter. You can start there.
Or you can use a kanji-specific workbook like Kanji Look and Learn (𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘐’𝘷𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘐’𝘷𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵.
(Someone asked me if it’s better to learn kanji by JLPT or grade level and honestly that’s up to you. I think if you go by JLPT level, you’ll have a better sense of your level though vs grade level to be honest. And I think most Japanese learners go by JLPT level in the higher levels. )
*Don’t try to learn more than 5 per day when starting out
It will take a bit of time for you to get used to writing kanji, so don’t try to overdo it and stress yourself out.
*Learn stroke order now and it will become more like muscle memory later on
It’s not super important in the big picture, but if you want your characters to look right, you should learn strike order.
*You can try using kanji sites like WaniKani to learn to recognize and read kanji
Final Thoughts
You SHOULD learn to write at least the N5 level kanji and have that memorized because that is the basis for all bigger kanji.
However, after that is up to you. In my opinion, you actually don’t need to know how to write kanji at the higher level unless you are taking a class because everything is usually typed out on the computer or phone. Writing it out can help you memorize faster though.
Let me know your thoughts.
framed in beige 