Why Memorizing Kanji Doesn’t Always Work

Kanji characters are an essential part of Japanese language. You have to know them well, and a lot of them, to achieve a state of literacy in Japanese, and they provide a window into Japanese and Asian culture in general. People who start out learning Japanese language tend to follow a typical approach:

  1. Study basic commonly-used kanji using flashcards
  2. Learn how to write them, and what words they appear in.
  3. Move onto harder kanji and repeat steps 1 and 2.

I’ve done this plenty myself.

But then, after my recent visit to Kamakura, I had an embarrassing experience that taught me the limits of this approach.

I was having dinner with wife and daughter, and I decided to order a tendon (short for “tempura donburi”) from the menu. I saw the kanji 海老 and for some reason I read them as “kai” and “ro”, because these are commonly used readings for these two kanji. So I proudly ordered a “kairo tendon” and then realized the waitress was giving me a funny look. My wife jumped in and said “ebi” (shrimp), and I realized that I had misread the word. I knew from countless eating experiences that “ebi” was shrimp, but when I saw these two kanji, somehow I completely misread them because I studied them in isolation. 海老 is read as “ebi” (shrimp), not “kairo”.

For the kanji 海, it is very often read as “kai” and 老 as “ro”, so from the standpoint of flashcards and other home-study methods, I was correct. But they can also be read as “e” and “bi”, which are less common readings, but are correct here. For a word like 海 which has 10 different ways to read it, it’s hard to remember them all, and especially on the fly like that, so my mind must have picked the most frequently seen.

But the process of memorizing kanji in isolation is a very limited approach. Often times in Japan, you’ll also see place-names or people’s names that also use obscure readings of a kanji that aren’t common. If you tried the approach above, you’re likely to misread things too. At best, all that spent effort will make you really good at flashcards, but still no good at Japanese language.

Now, this is not to say you shouldn’t study kanji at all, but instead, you need to start from the other direction: learn useful, everyday words first, get enough exposure and build mental associations as time goes on. I like to call this the “convergence method“. The experience above reminds me that I should listen to my own advice from time to time.

Also, to be fair, if you do spend the time to learn the first 100-300 kanji first (White Rabbit’s kanji flashcards are great), this is certainly not time wasted. These kanji are so fundamental, you’ll see them used in both basic words, and difficult ones. The problem I’ve seen is that after a couple hundred kanji, there’s just too many kanji, and they get hard to differentiate. You should learn kanji just long enough to get on your feet and start reading. Otherwise, you’ll forget them anyway as soon as you stop studying them. Try it, and you’ll see exactly what I mean by this. :-/

Or do them in parallel: memorize basic kanji, but also develop elementary reading skills too. They can reinforce one another.

In the long-run, instead of spending countless hours memorizing kanji, build up your basic vocabulary first, and if you do this long enough, you’ll start seeing the same kanji recycled over and over. As you see how a kanji gets used in real life, you can then go back and study it in depth for tests, linguistic studies and so on. The kanji is already familiar to you, but now you can use those shiny new flashcards to learn about it more in depth. This requires that you practice reading in Japanese too, which is a valuable and practical skill you should cultivate anyway.

If you learn nothing from post, for heaven’s sake, please remember that 海老 is “ebi”, not “kairo”! :p


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8 Comments on “Why Memorizing Kanji Doesn’t Always Work”

  1. Philippe says:

    Hello Doug,
    As you are learning Japanese for JLPT Level 2, perhaps you will be interested in the Manual exposed on this site : http://tobira.9640.jp/xoops/
    (please click on the left picture to look at contents)
    This book is accompanied by lots of online free materials.
    Each chapter deals with a cultural topic.

    The book can be found easily (I’ve bought it at Parco).

    If you have a look at it, tell me what you think of it.

    Greetings from cold Paris.
    Philippe.

  2. JonJ says:

    Right — in other words, the approach to learning Japanese should be like the way one learns any language: learn vocabulary (i.e., plain old words), preferably the vocabulary you primarily use (active and passive), and in the process you will of course learn how to read and write the words, unless you want to remain illiterate (which is a state many gaijin, even those living in Japan, used to be content to remain in because they thought the writing system was impossible to learn).

    Oddly enough, many students of Japanese get so obsessed with learning kanji that that becomes almost their primary task.

  3. Doug 陀愚 says:

    Hi JonJ,

    I coulnd’t agree more. The more I study Japanese, the less I can understand people’s fixation on kanji! Even the JLPT puts it as the least important section, because it only comprises such a small component of the language.

    Indeed, as you point out, Japanese really isn’t as hard as they say; I think the typical approach to study is all wrong, and I didn’t even realize thus until my wife gave some helpful advice from her experiences learning English. :)

  4. Doug 陀愚 says:

    Bienvenue, Phillipe! Always glad to meet another person, especially from Asia, EU and so on. :)

    I took a look at the Tobira site you suggested, and I am reading through it tonight. Are you new to Japanese studies, or do you have some past experience? It sounds like you are pretty experienced. If so, definitely get some real Japanese manga (in Japanese), and some online TV shows and just keep watching/reading. I bought lots of textbooks, but I don’t use them much anymore, because I can enjoy the real thing now (not perfectly). It took about a year, but the effort was worth it.

    Stay warm and thanks for the great suggestions. :)

  5. Philippe says:

    Hello Doug,
    Thanks for your answer.
    I have learned Japanese three years at university more than ten years ago, but I have forgotten much of it from that time.
    However, I am new to Buddhism… and a devotee of Kannonsama.

  6. Doug 陀愚 says:

    Your Japanese is still probably a lot better than mine. I do a lot of self-study, but haven’t lived in Japan, nor do I have much formal training. :-p

    Welcome to Buddhism, by the way. :)

  7. Kaz says:

    This article does not make a point that is entirely valid. It encourages us to practice reading and build vocabulary. However, reading Japanese is a painfully slow decrypting experience if you haven’t memorized enough kanji. (Of course, those of us memorizing kanji are doing that with the goal of improving reading, by means of which we get a grip on a wider vocabulary).

    Sure, there are compounds with special readings, and thus we can’t read everything using memorized kanji readings. You just have to know that 美味しい is oishii, for instance. However, that does not amount to discouragement against memorizing the kanji.

    If you don’t memorize the kanji, you will have to do a painful kanji lookup to read anything, such as a newspaper article. If you know the kanji which make up a compound, you can guess at the possible readings, and look it up quickly in a phonetic dictionary based on romaji or kana.

    To handle the exceptional cases, it helps if you have a grip on the rule-conforming regularities first. Use your memory and take advantage of regularities as much as possible to save time.

    Even educated Japanese people sometimes don’t know how to read some kanji or kanji compound, especially names! (Yet they have spent years in school memorizing kanji). So there is no need to feel discouraged.

    You can never be perfectly literate in Japanese; it is logically impossible. That’s because 1) there is sometimes more than one way to write something, such as a name. If someone is called Tomoko, you don’t know which kanji to use to write that without asking and 2) you don’t always have the context or knowledge to know how to read something, such as a place name. You have to ask the locals about a name on a sign, etc.

  8. Doug 陀愚 says:

    Hi Kaz and welcome to the JLR!

    However, reading Japanese is a painfully slow decrypting experience if you haven’t memorized enough kanji….If you don’t memorize the kanji, you will have to do a painful kanji lookup to read anything, such as a newspaper article.

    That is exactly what people should be doing in my opinion. :) I did the “kanji memorization” track for years and got surprisingly little traction, until I started taking words I encountered first and sort of “reverse-engineered” them, and when seeing other words with related kanji, it got easier to draw associations and guess correctly more often than not. Also in my limited experience, going from compound word -> components (i.e. individual kanji) is a lot easier than component -> compound word. With a compound word, you have something you concretely know, whereas with a given kanji, you only know one piece and still may not know the word.

    Suffice to say, it’s more work upfront, but if you do it enough times, you don’t have to consciously think about that word, or even related words because you’ve see it all before.

    To be fair, if you’re starting completely from scratch, you probably should memorize the first 100-300 kanji or so because they’re so commonly used, but as soon as you stop memorizing, you’ll rapidly forget what you learned, so the burden is still on reading practice as soon as you can get on your feet.

    Even educated Japanese people sometimes don’t know how to read some kanji or kanji compound, especially names!

    Quite so, but they usually know how to read “ebi”. ;)

    P.S. Updated the blog post to clarify a few points mentioned here in the reply. Good feedback, thanks!


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