Home Forums Tips, Hacks, & Ideas For Learning Japanese Help with learning Kanji Readings?

This topic contains 1 reply, has 2 voices, and was last updated by  thisiskyle 8 years, 11 months ago.

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  • #47870

    マーク
    Member

    So I’ve been starting to learn Kanji for a little while now. I’m currently at the 2-3 stroke Kanji, and remembering the meanings really go well, but the readings won’t go as fast… My question is, how can I study/learn the readings better/faster ? For some reason remembering the meaning of a Kanji is so easy up until this point, but the readings I forget immensly quickly. Is there any trick or tip on how not to forget them so fast? Is it normal that the readings are harder? Will they get into my mind easier with time, or is it a concern that I can’t really learn them very well right now?

    If I do know the reading, it’s often the on’yomi one I remember, and sadly the kun-reading is used more often, making it more difficult to start using them.

    猫は可愛いです!
    #47872

    thisiskyle
    Member

    The trick to learning the readings is to not bother learning the readings.
    Each kanji has too many readings and each reading has too many kanji. You’ll never remember them by trying to learn them in isolation.

    Learn vocab, you’ll pick up the readings along the way. You can find vocab that only uses kanji you’ve already studied using this tool. http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=11496

    The program takes a list of kanji and skims through a dictionary to generate a list of words that use only the kanji in the list. The output includes the words, their readings, their definitions, and a frequency value that tells you approximately how common the word is.

    I ran a list of all one, two, and three stroke kanji through it, opened the output in Excel (you could use Google Sheets just as easily if you don’t have MS Office), sorted it by frequency and deleted everything over 25000 (fairly uncommon words), and wound up with a list of 105 words.

    You could do this every few kanji you learn. You’ll amass a list of vocabulary pretty quick. You could filter at a lower value than 25,000 if you find your getting too many words that you don’t feel like you actually need.

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