April 28, 2024
"Learning kanji is the worst"
"You have to learn over 2000 of them?! Nooo wayy"
Well well well. Learning kanji is my favorite part of learning Japanese. I know it can seem intimidating - after all, we are talking about more than 2000 characters! Of course, learning random pictures without any plan would be pretty hard. However, with a right system, it is not only manageable, but also... fun!
Each Kanji tells a story
Unlike vocabulary or grammar, it takes a bit of a storytelling to remember a kanji - and that's what makes it both easy and fun to learn. It feels more like a creative writing prompt rather than learning a language (something I personally struggle with).
There is a certain structure to kanji. Let's start with the singular "building blocks"! For example:
亻 is a person. I call him Mr. T, since he looks like a letter T. He's a tall, slender salaryman in a suit, constantly working overtime, constantly tired...
木 is a tree. You can imagine a tree by just looking at it.
Having those two "building blocks" (called primitives), we can build a larger kanji:
休 means rest. What can Mr. T doing under a tree? Of course, he's trying to get some rest after a long day at work. I picture Mr. T sitting by a tree, leaning back, dozing off with a briefcase in one hand and can of beer in the other one.
Getting freaky
Of course, it does get more crazy with time! To avoid being overwhelmed by the number of elements in the kanji, some of them that are often seen together are combined to create larger primitives. So, instead of building complex kanji with many singular "blocks", one can use fewer but bigger components to do so. For example:
宀 means house. Imagine roof and the chimney!
二 means two. Well, that was easy.
儿 means human legs.
元 combines "two" and "humans legs" and means "beginning". At the beginning, there were two pair of human legs - Adam and Eve.
Now, there is 完, meaning perfect. To build this kanji, instead of using three primitives (house, two and legs), we can use just two - house and beginning. The house was in a perfect condition at the beginning of the party. Now look at it!
The same "beginning" will be used in a few other kanji, like "toy" or "stubborn". Because primitives appear in multiple kanji, by learning new kanji you automatically strengthen your memory of the previously learned primitives. The more you learn, the easier it gets!
To end this post, take a look at some of my favorite kanji and their stories:
掛 means "hang" and consists of 3 primitives - "finger", "ivy" and "magic wand". A wizard enters the room and looks around. "Here!," he suddenly points a finger at the wall. It's completely obscured by a poison ivy. He pulls out his wand and quickly gets rid of the intrusive plant. Ivy disappears and he sees the key he was looking for, hanging on the wall.
選 means "elect" and consists of 3 primitives - two "snakes", "together" and "road". It's this time of a year - you can see it on a streets. Poster of a snake here, poster of another snake there. The only time they appear together like that is just before elections - otherwise, they are unable to cooperate.
殺 means "kill" and consists of 3 primitives - "sheaf", "tree" and "missile". Look, there's something yellow on top of a tree. Is that... a sheaf? *suddenly the missile hits the sheaf, striking perfectly thanks to its yellow color* It has to be some kind of a military training - if it was a person, it would kill them!
While writing this post, I noticed that kanji are rarely composed from more than 3 primitives. So the difficulty in remembering kanji can be mostly affected by the complexity and rarity of the primitives used, and not the number of primitives themselves.
Isn't that fun?
For me it definitely is. And that's pretty much it! Building stories with smaller blocks. There are no rules and no "wrong" stories - in fact, the more quirky and vivid a story is, the better chance it will be recalled and remembered easily, so if you think about something gross or inappropriate... use it. It's just for your learning purpose only, and weird things are just way more memorable! When I sometimes catch myself not being able to remember certain kanji, the only thing I have to do is to come up with a wilder story.
Even if you don't want to learn Japanese, if you like storytelling or memory exercises, learning kanji sounds like an interesting challenge to take. And if you want to start learning Japanese, I hope I've shown you that there's no need to be afraid of kanji.
DISCLAIMER: Radicals are officially defined components of kanji that can be used to categorize and organize characters, for example in a dictionary. Primitives are arbitrary parts of kanji that don't have any official names, but can be used by learners to make remembering kanji easier. Since all radicals are primitives as well, for the sake of this post, I choose to call them all "primitives". Don't worry about the names - it's all simply about kanji "building blocks".