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!

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.

Welcome to Buddhism, by the way.

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.

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.

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

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.