Justin wrote:

Welcome, Bahanur!

Wow, double major – good job! Guess you already know a thing or two about studying then, eh? :)

My kanji study (although it may not be the best method, I’ll admit) involves a book called Remembering the Kanji (by James W Heisig, RTK for short), a preposterous number of pens, a notebook, graph paper, and Anki. I do have to ask before I continue, how far are you into the Textfugu course? Koichi does a pretty solid job explaining how to study. I have twisted and modified things to make my studying more effective for me, and I’m sure you’ll wind up doing the same.

Of course, as I’m sure literally every learning resource will tell you, go ahead and learn AT LEAST hiragana (but ideally hiragana and katakana) first because, if nothing else, it gets you in the right mindset for learning a new writing system. It will also just be better for your learning in pretty well every other way imaginable. So yeah, those two first. Or, as I said, at least hiragana first. You will find katakana shapes in kanji though, so to me it seems right to learn those first.

So, what I do is I aim to learn 20/day, but honestly I tend to mess up and right now my average in only about 10. I tried 50 once, and that was a horrendous error and I can not advise against that more emphatically. Seriously what a soul-crushing day that turned out to be. Anyways, I have a book in which I write kanji mnemonics (little ‘stories’ to remember the elements in each kanji) along with the meaning or ‘keyword’ as Heisig calls it. After 20 of those, I do my best to write the kanji out 3 or 4 times without looking in RTK. If I have to look it isn’t the end of the world. But being able to read the mnemonic and then write the kanji is far more effective, at least for me. After I’ve done that, I write it on a sort of “master list” that has corresponding numbers for fast lookup. Then I jam over to Anki, run through that with my review and my 20 new cards, write everything out at least 3 times, and then winge about how my hand hurts. That last step is critical.

This, however, is just how I do it. There are many, many different ways to study, and none of them are wrong as long as it works for you. Just keep trying things until you come up with a method that works.

I’m fairly sure other people will have other suggestions. People with slightly more um… street cred? than I.

Thank you so much Justin! A very useful answer! I really envy you because you seem to know what you are doing :) I also sent a message to Koichi and received this;

Well, kanji is the thing people usually have trouble with. It also is the thing that slows most people down, yet they don’t want to do kanji even when this happens. So if there’s anything to focus on, I’d say kanji / vocabulary. That will get you the farthest ahead, and make things like grammar much easier (because you will be able to focus on learning the grammar instead of looking up words/kanji every other minute).

Good luck and study hard, but don’t get burned out! :)
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