Also, for anyone that isn’t aware, if you’re a TextFugu member you can use the code on the TextFugu dashboard to get a discount on a yearly WaniKani membership. The real price of WaniKani  for non TextFugu members is meant to be $100 a year, at the moment it’s $80. Using the code reduces the cost to $50 which is half of what a real membership will eventually cost for a non TextFugu member.

I finished Textfugu a few months ago and can tell you it is like swimming in the kiddie pool. It will get you just far enough to jump in the deep water, but you definitely can’t swim.  However, the course teaches you how to teach yourself. By realising it is going to take a couple of years to be good at Japanese if you study everyday, then you will get the full benefit of Textfugu. Looking back, the time I spent on the Kanji section was a waste of time. I needed to learn to write them in order to read them. They are just far too complicated and similar looking to learn by reading only. My advice would be to bang through the lessons as fast as you can. Then learn kanji full time with grammar on the side.

I’m nearly done with Textfugu, but I have to admit the thing that slows me down the most is the kanji. It’s not that I have a hard time with it, but it just eats up the most time.

I found writing kanji was very helpful in that it gave me a sense of stroke order which made looking up unknown kanji, and words, a lot easier. It did help with recall a little, but probably not enough to justify the time by itself. I think it’s important to spend some time learning to write the most common kanji, as soon as you start kanji, but other than that I would wait till you are closer to advanced before trying to learn to write more kanji. Understanding stroke order, and being able to guess it, is an invaluable tool. Knowing how to read kanji is a must, even early on, so in that sense I can’t imagine how it’s a waste of time, unless you’re not learning it effectively.

That’s my two cents based on my experiences at least.

I agree with both of you. As Ben said, it depends on the person. We all learn in our own way. Now that I have learned to write about 700 kanji I find I can learn vocab and reading much quicker. That was really my biggest complaint. The time it takes to learn 2000+ kanji the Textfugu way isn’t efficient enough for my taste. I like to do things quickly then focus on improvement.

Hi hey, it isn’t really a system per se but I use a lot of apps for iPhone/iPad. First I skim through a chapter of Heisig’s RTK book. Then I use the RTK app to confirm the stroke order. Then I goto the kanjikoohi website to get the stories or make my own for each kanji. Any strange words I look up using imiwa or other apps. Then I start Anki and review, review, review by actually writing each kanji until I get them right every time. I also in my spare time use other apps, especially Kanjibox. Sometimes I copy sentences that use the kanji I know. This improves my hiragana and katakana writing too. I try to read and reread a chapter of Tae Kim’s grammar guide or Textfugu too. I am very focused now on getting through the kanji. It is definitely time consuming and I often want to quit. However, I spend a lot of time in Japan and feel very stupid not being fluent. So I need to hurry up and learn Japanese. Without kanji I can not self learn the language. Thats why I am focussing on kanji already.

@mtb812 – That’s a good reason to learn kanji. I have to admit my understanding level continues to rise the more kanji I learn. That’s why I think it’s important to learn reading it sooner rather than later. I’ve heard some say it’s more important to learn the words with the kanji first, and the kanji will just naturally follow. That makes sense, but I suspect that’s just another valid style for different learner types. I’m not certain which is best for me. It’s a shame someone doesn’t have a test to tell you which style will likely work better for you. ;)

@Carlos – Good question on the stroke order. I found, before I learned stroke order, that it would take me wayyyyyy too long to look a kanji up using radicals or any other method. However, Windows has something called IME Pad that lets you draw a kanji, and it’ll guess at the one you want. I believe most, if not all, electronic dictionaries have the same thing. My Android phone has an app called Kanji Recognizer which is an incredible tool for practicing, learning, and looking up kanji by stroke order. Any one of these tools is an incredible time saver. However, their accuracy on guessing the kanji you want goes down dramatically if you don’t do the stroke order correctly. IME Pad is the most forgiving, by far, that I’ve seen, but that’s partly because it’ll display a lot more guesses at once. You might ask why there aren’t kanji OCR apps, and the answer is that there are. However, they all seem to be terrible. I’ve yet to see one that even comes close to guessing very simple kanji. With so many messy things about the real world, lighting, fonts, angle of the shot, kanji OCR has a long long ways to go. Also, it would only be an option for a device with a decent camera. Plus, from a learning point of view spending 30 seconds to look up a kanji helps build a memory. Writing the stroke order in the process helps build a memory. Taking a photo, and looking at an answer really doesn’t. It’s kind of like Rikaichan. It’s a great tool, but most things I look up using it never stick in my memory, so I try to keep that to a minimum.

Hi Astralfox, there definitely are many cases. Just look at right 右 and left 左. Also, heart 心 and certain 必.

@mtb Wow so there are. I wonder why I didn’t notice ‘right’ and ‘left’, still got them correct somehow ?_? Thank the all powerful unconcious once again I guess. The second example should be easy to remember because they cross over, so it can be taken as a seperate ‘thing’.

Keep it up Hana, Hannah? Just wondering.