The Fastest Way to Learn the Kanji

Kanji! Its endless curves, the way they combine to make words, make meaning of concepts in forms I’d not thought before, the way writing can be a visual art, the incredible depth and history. I hate them. They are like the most beautiful, fascinating, insufferable lover. Kanji is the third of the three pillars of the Japanese writing system (the other two being hiragana and katakana). The characters are actually Chinese characters that the Japanese began to adopt well over 1,000 years ago.

The unique thing about Kanji is that the characters have meaning, as opposed to how hiragana and katakana are simply used to represent sounds. The other unique thing about them is that there are thousands of them! The sheer number of Kanji that must be learned in order to obtain Japanese fluency (JLPT N1) is just ridiculous. Overwhelming. 2,000 plus!

How can we ever hope to do it? How can we, in a year, master something that Japanese people themselves are expected to learn only by the end of high school?

The 97-Day Kanji Challenge

Studying Kanji is tricky business. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the best way to study the kanji fast. And, truth be told, there are a lot of good ways to study the kanji. But most of them can be pretty overwhelming, so it’s easy to lose motivation and go in search of the mythical “easy, fast way to learn the kanji.”
I won’t mince words: Learning the kanji is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not only that, but it took me longer than 97 days to learn them. It took me a lot longer, because I kept trying different study methods, never thinking that I was on the right track to learning all of the kanji.

How NOT to Learn the Kanji

1. Stroke by Stroke
a. This is how a lot of Japanese classes will encourage you to learn the kanji. That’s because they teach kanji in the same way that Japanese children learn them—stroke by stroke, over the course of 10+ years. There’s another word for this method: masochism. Seriously, this is torture. I’m not saying it’s impossible to learn this way. I’m just saying that it’s going to take a really long time if you choose this method to master Kanji.

2. Learning Each Kanji as a Whole
a. Kanji are made up of parts… and those parts have meaning. So you should learn the parts first, then the kanji as a whole.

3. Using Only 1 Kanji Study Tool
a. A lot of people will write books and blog posts and just about anything you can think of in which they tell you about “the best, fastest, most awesome way to learn the kanji”…which, as coincidence would have it, is their way. Not only that, but they want money for it, too. No! There are a ton of useful kanji study tools and methods out there. But the only way to learn kanji fast and effectively is to combine the best ones. And that’s what this 97-Day Kanji Challenge Post is all about: an amalgamation of the best tools available for learning kanji.

How You SHOULD Learn the Kanji

The fastest way to learn the kanji is to use a combination of the best kanji study tools out there. Not only that, but you also need to be sure to use them in a very particular manner.

Why these three tools? Well…

1. Anki Flashcards will keep us from forgetting what we learn.
2. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji will help us break our kanji into parts so we can learn them via stories and mnemonics. (If you don’t know about the Heisig method, you can read about it on Wikipedia.)
3. Reviewing the Kanji will save us from having to write our own, time-consuming, ineffective kanji stories and mnemonics.

Used together, these three tools can speed up your kanji acquisition exponentially. When used together the right way, they leave you with the fastest way to learn the kanji. If the instructions in this guide are followed precisely, you will learn all of the 2,000+ joyo kanji in 97 days.

Even the Best Way Will Not Be Easy

I could go on for pages and pages about why I chose the following method of study as opposed to one of the plethora of other options. The bottom line, though, is that I think this is the fastest way possible to learn and retain the meaning of each of the 2,136 Joyo Kanji. However! It will be a nightmare getting through this 97-Day Challenge, and I’m really sorry to tell you that. But if you’re serious about learning Japanese, then it’s the most valuable 97 days that you will ever spend studying. If you know the meaning of the kanji—even if you don’t know their readings or example vocab to go with them—every part of your Japanese studies will get easier, and you will learn faster. Concepts make more sense. Vocab makes more sense. So why not just get them out of the way? You can do it. I know you can.