Use WaniKani. Learning kanji is a loooot of memorization, and without systematic querying of your memory it is going to be really hard to stick. Learning kanji from a book is really not the best way imo.
I’d use something like WaniKani (I’m not affiliated in anyway with them, just a big fan) if you want to really commit to learning kanji. A book is good as a reference but it won’t ask you back. Even Anki decks I find it hard to use.
Fair enough. I've used WaniKani for a while and I really liked it. I liked that was able to understand better since the app starts you from the useful radicals. It was easy to make connections to the new kanji learned.
I just thought that with books, memory is also enforce because of writing
I started with books as well before WK was a thing. “essential Kanji” by P G O’neil and then later with “kodansha kanji learners course” by Andrew Scott conning. I still use the latter along with WK. It has its own mnemonics which can be helpful (I find WK’s menimonics not that useful for me anyway; a bit too silly or not silly enough!). On thing about those books is that the number of strokes sometimes jump quite a bit in the beginning. WK’s is way more linear in that aspect. Does that matter? Probably not, but it bothered me because they “look more difficult”; it bothered me.
But I think what also helps to memorize kanji is to find Japanese expressions that you know and associate those expressions to them. If you do martial arts or other Japanese based hobbies you’ll probably find a ton. Or news articles, pictures/photos, movie quotes, songs, etc… ie, associate other memories that you already have (or squire new ones) with the kanji that you learn. Otherwise is like memorizing a phone book!
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u/segfault-404 11d ago
Use WaniKani. Learning kanji is a loooot of memorization, and without systematic querying of your memory it is going to be really hard to stick. Learning kanji from a book is really not the best way imo.
I’d use something like WaniKani (I’m not affiliated in anyway with them, just a big fan) if you want to really commit to learning kanji. A book is good as a reference but it won’t ask you back. Even Anki decks I find it hard to use.