New vocab collections perfect for kanji learning (2024)

FAQs

Does learning kanji help with vocabulary? ›

As I believe I've demonstrated in the sections above, there are many words you can only learn by knowing the kanji they're written with. There are kanji which have atomic meaning but do not exist as standalone words. Studying vocabulary and kanji are both important.

Mnemonics: Create Stories to Remember Kanji

You can do it by creating stories about the shape of the kanji by dissecting the Kanji into smaller individual shapes.

To become fluent in kanji, you'll need to learn around 2,000 basic Japanese kanjis used in media and everyday Japanese life. Don't panic; once you have the first 400-500 symbols down, the rest tend to follow smoothly. You really only need around 1,200 to read a newspaper or go to work.

To be considered fluent in Japanese, you need to learn somewhere from 1500 to 2500 kanji characters (it depends on who you ask). Learning so many kanji can be terrifying. This is why it's better to focus on learning a few kanji each day instead of worrying over the big picture.

You should study Kanji progressively. If you don't know much Japanese, learning Kanji will not benefit you as much as it will once you have built up more vocabulary and grammar.

About 3000-5000 words will give you 'basic fluency'. At this level you will be able to find a way to say anything you want to, but it probably won't be the way a native speaker would say it.

Keep in mind that the more advanced you get, the more complicated and less common the kanji will be, making learning even more difficult. So it's safe to say that it's manageable to learn around 5-10 kanji characters per day.

For those targeting the JLPT N5, the first level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, you'll need to familiarize yourself with around 100 common JLPT N5 kanji. With an hour of study each day, it's realistic to cover this range in about 20 to 30 days.

Kanji creates natural breaks in a sentence that make it easier for the reader to separate nouns and verbs. A hiragana-only sentence would be difficult to parse (i.e. to resolve into its component parts and describe their syntactic roles), similar to a sentence written in English without any spaces between words.

Most learners of Japanese should focus on about 1000 kanji (roughly kyouiku kanji). This is easily learnable in a year for most people, and that amount will get them over 90% of text coverage that general learners will be reading. Pretty much no learner should have an initial goal of learning 3000 kanji.

What percent of written Japanese is kanji? ›

The Duolingo Japanese course has undergone significant expansion since its inception. As of 2021, it consists of approximately 3200 words, 1350 kanji, 731 lessons, and 131 skills.

Kanji is symbolic, or logographic. It is the most common means of written communication in the Japanese language, with more than 50,000 different symbols by some estimates. However, most Japanese can get by using about 2,000 different kanji in everyday communication.

Learning Kanji can literally help you improve your memory. Think of it as a workout for your mind. As you progress within your learning, you'll improve your brain functionality and find yourself able to concentrate better.

Kanji helps with distinguishing words. Also with a meaning directly attached to each kanji, you make out the sense of the word much faster than by reading hiragana that only convey the sound.

In the modern world you will rarely need to write kanji or know the stroke order unless you are taking a Japanese test. Objectively reading and knowing words that contain the kanji is far more important.

Kanji often represent a whole word, so a text in Japanese (or Chinese or any other comparable language) should be much more "compact" than a text written in a western language.