“Take a deep breath and tell yourself you’re reading this cute romantic manga for educational purposes, not because you don’t have any romance in real life” 😂😂 I love it

reading manga is helping me so much to read kanji even though it's so hard at the beggining. I remember it's takes me like 20 minutes just to finish 1 chapter when i start reading... but when i "read more" it's become easier and faster too ^^

I actually learn Kanji by integrating writing in my routine. It is indeed an overkill, but I genuinely enjoy doing writing practices, and it helps me remember Kanjis faster and distinguish Kanjis with similar radicals.

Another advantage of reading is that you already have the Kanji and words sorted by relevance. It might bother you, that you already forgot the word 3 pages ago, but when it doesnt appear in the next 80 pages, it cannot be that important. And when it does, you have another free repitition, just like flash cards.

Yuta is right, there's no need to focus that much on writing Kanji. I'm majoring in Japanese for 6 semesters (about 4 years) now and early on the tutors put so much emphasis on writing every textbook Kanji at a perfect angle even tho some of my Japanese classmates can't write or remember the strokes at all. It is only necessary if you're into calligraphy or poetry.

One resource that helps me with kanji, personally, is “The World of Kanji” by Alex Adler. It actually goes into detail of the origins of kanji, which I think could be helpful for those trying to come up with mnemonic devices and better visualize how a pictograph came to be a kanji. For example, 母 relates to “mother” when you realize that the kanji represents a pair of breasts for feeding a child. Or 行 relating to the verb “go” when it represents a four-way crossroad. Whenever I see these two kanji, I now know how to connect them to their meaning because of the context of how the kanji itself was created and changed over time. Try using this book in combination with your other methods to see if it can help!

Frankly it’s quite simple: The best way to learn how to read is to read. The best way to learn how to write is to write. And the best way to learn how to speak is to speak.

1:05 Detective Conan was the first manga I read in Japanese when I was more or less on the required level to understand it. I agree, it helped me immensely in learning kanji.

8:35 Actually, by spending time on making flashcards yourself, you are focusing and repeatedly checking the word, which can be very beneficial. Sometimes, by the time you have finished with the flashcard you have already spend enough time focusing on it, to memorize it properly.

Yes thank you. After years of being led down the garden path by so much bad advice this is literally it. It feels bad at first but just pick a manga you love and take it one speech bubble at a time. It has helped me to an insane degree. No more coming up with lengthy mnemonics for every aspect of a Kanji and trying to revise it with flashcards. Just read. If you don't remember it, look it up. Trust that it's being reinforced. Keep reading. And gradually it improves. And it's actually enjoyable!

i believe writing is important when you're still learning basics. Such as (He did x, y, z, because A-san told him W) When you can easily understand the structure, then reading becomes efficient. You just learn new words and different sentences for situations and you can actually start guessing meanings from the kanji. Also I really can't remember anything unless I make notes. I often find myself remembering things from just the memory of writing it. Everyone's different, but writing is important at the start for many. Oh also I remember the stroke order, but usually write in the wrong order, because it's faster.

As someone who still struggles with learning Japanese years after I started, I'd like to thank you so much for this video!! It's so helpful! One of my biggest struggles is learning/remembering kanji. Years ago, I took some Japanese lessons where I live and the method they used to teach kanji was the traditional one (writing the kanji lots of times and trying to remember the readings and order of strokes without much context before somehow trying to apply all that to actual sentences). Needless to say I can hardly remember some of the kanjis from those lessons despite the hundreds of times I did those exercises of writing the same kanji over and over again. However, I did notice it's easier for me to remember kanjis through reading manga, texts, stories, etc, but I never thought this would be an actual valid or correct method to learn since I wasn't learning the meaning of the kanji itself, or it's different readings, or the stroke order, and always thought it was "incomplete" or something, so I'm really happy to know that's not the case!

I've found that reading manga helps a lot with reading for me. For one, it's not just a wall of text but accompanied by visual elements that help with figuring out things like setting, situation, feeling and so on. It's also more fun and engaging, which makes me more likely to actually continue! I've also benefitted a lot from reading my manga aloud and getting an extra "boost" so to say in my learning by having the audio as well. A minor thing that gives a lot!

I typically enjoy reading but also writing down the books/articles I read. I take in the vocabulary I don't know and learn from that reading. It's so important to be able to do both in my opinion and it works best for me :)

One thing about learning Japanese that I really enjoy is the existence of radical. It’s so cool to learn new kanji and they make total sense right away because of the radicals it is made of.

When learning Mandarin back in primary school, we would have a text in a textbook full of short story style paragraphs, and at the end of each, we have questions about the text, and notes on the characters with multiple readings, we call these 多音多义字, how we would learn is this small table of such characters, and example words of each reading. And we would look up the dictionary for the meaning, write it down, and create sentences with them as an exercise. I found that even if the sentence creation is only done once or twice, the memory gets ingrained very quickly because of the method of using the dictionary. Of course this is in the course of many years if you read through many characters and will end up with a comprehension thats sufficient for most of your daily use. I am only a year into Japanese studies as a whole, but find the method above I utilised as a child very useful in learning Japanese kanji, and as such now am able to read through multiple kanji in song lyrics without needing the furigana. Of course the list is incomplete, but as Yuta said, its not a race :). Enjoy your education journey! It lasts a lifetime:)

I love wanikani for the many reasons you listed. I use it on my work PC and never close it so I will always remember to look at it in my free time and pauses during work. I'm slowly learning kanji just with wanikani and trying to read visual novels (and VN-like games), specially those that are fully voiced. I feel so good when I recognize new kanji when doing this!

My experience with learning japanese is the following: I do 1h-2.5h of anki flashcards every day. That includes kanji and vocabulary with 2k6k deck. Then I watch about 1h of media in japanese and read doujinshi for 30 minutes. Rinse and repeat. I passed N3 after 10 months after starting this and am aiming for N1 by the end of this year. I will also start reading NHK easy articles every day. I did this during secondary school so I believe anyone can do this if they make it a habit.

love the way you just went right to it, amazing, we need more people like you.

I really liked your message at the end about not worrying where others are at in their journey with learning. Great video Yuta!

凄い助かりました、ゆたさん！いつも有り難いです。MattvsJapan made a video about writing out kanji and he is known among his Japanese friends for his amazing kanji knowledge. And he even admitted that it wasn't really worth learning to write them out, it's more of a party trick (that took sooo many hours to do) than an actual useful skill. As long as you know basic stroke order, even if you were living in Japan and had to fill out forms you can always look up the kanji for reference when filling it out. Unless you need to be able to handwrite kanji, There's very little reason to spend the time to learn to write them all out. 皆さん、お互いに頑張りましょう！

everyone learns stuff differently for me writing stuff down actually helps me way more

As an advance learner I have to say this is one of the best videos on learning kanji out there! I would also add on that watching things with Japanese subtitles is such a great way to learn. You practice listening and reading at the same time and you get to learn how the words are properly pronounced.

I opened this video ready to close it after the 10 first seconds. But you immediately started without any boring waste-of-time-introduction! Thanks man!

This reminds me of the time i was deep into learning kanji! So basically, I started getting interested in it because of Kuroko no Basket's character names. I went from learning the meaning of each kanji in their names, to learning the stroke orders, to learning the radicals, then the readings. Next thing I knew is that i saved several page links of kanji tables. But what made me retain it in my head and still do up to this day is when i create an original character, either for a fanfic or an original story (both of which i never wrote), and then think of i good name for the character. I would go on and research words, research names, research readings, combine syllables and stuff. It was very effective for me. I had an entire list of character names based off the numbers 1-10, and a bunch of other names saved in many different document files in my pc or phone. I literally bought a kanji dictionary just for this.

This guide not only helps on learning kanji, I also do this when I study hiragana and katakana. The more I notice a character when reading, the more I remember it.

You're actually so funny lol I'm loving your videos! There are lots of people good at teaching japanese here on youtube but I'm drawn to your channel not only bc you're more clear, but also 'cause of your personality! You're great!

I always feel so motivated to study after watching your videos!! ありがとうゆた先生🙌🙌🙌

いい動画を作ってくれてありがとうゆた先生! Could you also do a video on tips for getting better at speaking? Im pretty confident in my listening and reading but when Im talking in Japanese I can only form short replies. I've been practicing a lot lately and feel myself getting better but I was hoping you'd have some good tips on speeding things up.

0:26 *NEED SAUCE!!!!*

Absolutely perfect video. I love the way he explains everything compared to some of the other videos I’ve seen. Especially when he says don’t listen to the “Flexors”. There’s too much pressure when you’re of Japanese descent, to automatically know how to read all kanji. Saw the videos you’re like WTF are they talking about! But he keeps the explanations practical.

I just want to thank you for all of your amazing videos! Without them I don't think I wouldn't have the patience or encouragement to continue. Even though I'm not good at japanese yet, I do learn a lot from your videos that help me a lot! So I thank you for making these great lessons for japanese learners like us! 😁

What I like to do is I read lyrics to a Japanese song while I listen. It helps with retention, pronunciation, and also with pronouncing the kanji

Yuta to the rescue on how I'm learning wrong, again lol. Thanks for the content! Your premium course has been great. I recommend it for everyone learning Japanese.

I love how seamless your segway into advertising your business always is

This video is so informative and made me feel better with my progress thanks for bossting my morale in learning language.

Thank you for your video. I'm currently learning kanji, and I agree with almost everything you've said. I would like to make an argument for writing kanji in the beginning though. For me, and as you've alluded to it's different for everyone, writing has helped me to clarify some of the similar looking kanji (similar looking to me and perhaps Western eyes in general, perhaps not). Also, in my job as an English teacher, being able to clarify the difference between, "He/She is _____" related to occupation, and "He/She is _____" related to personality... it's a lot easier to write '職' next to the former, with my limited Japanese/limited ability to explain. I think writing helps me with recognition, because I can see the pieces/radicals more easily, but it took about two months to reach that point for me. I probably won't go back to that notebook, but I can duplicate the train schedule from memory... writing kanji, and then trying to pull it from memory and rewrite it the next day from memory helps me remember some of the basic shapes and the differences between them. For example, 夫 and 末 (not the best example, but off the top of my head... maybe 井and 丼). I think it's good to start writing kanji when learning, but maybe just not spend a ton of time focusing on it. For me, it also helps make what initially looked like more complicated kanji less complicated. For me, it has been helpful. Maybe it's as simple as having to look more carefully in order to get the parts right. Maybe it's something about muscle memory causing connections, and some complicated neuro-kinetic-optical phenomena I don't understand. Anyway, I wouldn't 'write' it off completely.

“Why do you need to learn kanji because you want to read Japanese right?”….took me a few seconds as a Chinese person to process this 😂

Yuta, you explain things very well and I enjoy your presentations. Keep up the good work :)

spreadsheets are a game changer. Thanks so much for the tips!!

This is a really helpful video. I'm learning something new today. 1. Stroke order 2. Reading is definitely more effective than practice writing it until we learn each kanji. I never review the flashcards either. I will just read and look up if a kanji doesn't furigana.

0:06 官能小説から引用すなw

Useful insights in the psychology of learning. Thanks Yuta!

Only thing that's missing from this video is list of manga for starters, but still very helpful ^^

It took me a while to read Japanese in Pokemon Shield and news articles. I read almost as fast as my English now just through practice. The same happened through my speaking. I started watching lots of KZfaq and live action shows with Japanese. Now whenever I speak to my conversation partner, she says I'm starting to sound way more natural. There's no trick. It's just exposure.

Yuta, I often see Japanese people using a book that is a bit large, and then written the words. May I know what kind of book it is?

Great tips! Love the new hairstyle!

🙏🏻 thanks for being such a helpful source for training nihongo! Hopefully soon enough I'll be good to go live in Nihon!

Manga was so crucial in learning Kanji, it helps train the eye to look for the context, which inadvertently helps in learning conversation. Also, it's been scientifically proven that Kanji Flexing is a cry for help, and just not a good look. Friends don't let other friends Kanji Flex💪

The weird thing is, I always found kanji incredibly tedious and unintuitive (and they are), but everytime I read Korean, which has probably the most intuitive and easy writing system ever, I'm starting to miss kanji because when I see 수, like in 수요일 (wednesday), it _could_ mean water, but I have to guess from context, unlike in Japanese where the 水 in 水曜日 is non-ambivalent.

to every piece of advice you gave i just said, “yes! yes! yes!”. i was especially happy to see the short “rolling” lists you recommend at 8:20 because that’s exactly how i’ve always taught myself languages and i’ve never seen the method talked about elsewhere. but i disagree when you tell us not to write. it’s true that with intuitive “phonewriting” handwriting is becoming rare (and many japanese will tell you that if they can still recognize all the kanji they need they can handwrite fewer and fewer off the top of their head) but i’ve always sensed that there’s a mystical connection between hand and brain that helps you the same way speaking out loud does. when i’m trying to remember a kanji. miming writing it out really wakes my memory. handwriting kanji is also... soothing? satisfying? whichever, it’s a way to keep learning fun, which is the biggest key to not giving up. it may not be the best “return on investment” but you also stress learning in your own way at your own rate and i’ve always been convinced slow learning is best. after all, a native speaker doesn’t learn their language in 6 months or even 6 years, even after 60 they’re still progressing! 少しずつね。

Love your way of helping learners! Thank you! Your methods have scientific grounds and you're very encouraging and with a sense of humour! I learned beautiful ❤🇯🇵Japanese language at uni, then I had to move to another country, so that ended my studies. Now I really want to come back to learning as I've already forgotten so much:(

Skipping writing and just reading is a sure way to start forgetting kanji and eventually mixing kanji with similar kanji, even Japanese are not immune to this, but it affects them to lesser extent because they've actually studied these characters hard as kids and written them thousands of times during their lifetimes. I can speak to this from my own experience, having studied all the jouyou kanji and some extra. When I was still studying kanji I was able to write any kanji I knew and if I glanced at a kanji I recognized, I was able to replicate it. I read and type Japanese daily, but not having to had to handwrite kanji for years I sometimes struggle to reproduce a kanji and even mix similar kanjis, especially if they're not frequently encountered in writing. Learning the parts (radicals and others) and writing them down each time and each time you combine them to new characters is essential for getting the feel for how the kanji are built. It also acts as a tool for focus, as visual and tactile engagement helps engage the pathways necessary for neuroplasticity, that is necessary for learning. About the radicals: not all recognizable repeating patterns in kanji qualify as radicals so radicals are a less useful definition for a learner, it's only useful for old fashioned dictionaries really. Looking up Heisig's Remembering the Kanji is probably still your best bet for learning kanji efficiently as an adult.

Regarding the "Skip writing" part, there's a book by James W. Heisig called "Remembering the Kanji". It can teach you to write kanji by hand (as well as remembering the basic idea of what a particular kanji is about) VERY fast. At the moment I'm learning 20 new kanji a day, and they actually stay in memory (not without the help of anki ofc, book elaborates on how to use it). 20 new kanji takes about 1.5 h a day (that includes revising old ones through anki as well as putting new ones there) I'm at 220 kanji, so I can't say much about the impact, but I do it because a) it's hella interesting, and I'm starting to see the meaning in a lot of previously unintelligible glyphs b) I hope it will make learning vocab tenfold easier, since I will be able to base my associations on kanji meanings. P.S. the book doesn't teach you anything about the pronunciations and I thinks it's great, because as you said in the next sections, it's better to learn words in this context OH yes, and it's basically a mnemonics book P.P.S. oh, I guess I'm one of these 'flexing people', well so be it xd

Thanks for this beautiful video.

Reading really helps. I took Japanese classes where we just wrote Kanji, but then I went to Japan and took the train in Tokyo and then it suddenly all made sense to me. By reading the names of the stations in both Kanji and Hiragana remembered more Kanji's than if I would continue to write and write and write...

I play Genshin Impact with both the texts and voices in Japanese. I'm highly MOTIVATED

When I began learning japanese, I immediately started using kanji in all my writings. My friend called me stupid, cause why use kanji on a beginner level, when you can use kana until the time comes to learn kanji. But now I'm preparing for JLPT N4, and I already know some common kanji and words that include their readings. So the idea of being closer to actual japanese writing from the very beginning showed itself great in long-term

Thanks Yuta! Great video

Thank you! Very honest and direct!

i happen to be one of the few "foreigners" who managed to pass the 1st level of the "KANJI KENTEI" test, and here's a hard truth: to learn something you HAVE to learn it: there are no miracles, and at the end of the day you have to invest time and effort into memorization of each kanji's readings, its correct stroke order, and then all the numerous compound words where that particular kanji is used: all the relevant info can be found on internet - one only has to commit themselves (if they are inclined to do so)

Damn i was searching how to learn Kanji a few hours ago

Thank you Yuta san for making this great video! You've made me want to get back into learning Japanese again. I fell into all the traps that you mentioned in this video and gave up trying to learn because those methods had very limited return on my investment of time. I'll go borrow a manga with furigane from the Japanese library in my city and try your tips! Thanks again for the great content! :D

Thanks Yuta. This was a big help.

The first 30 seconds of video and you can see how cultured he is

Most people moving on to kanji will have just "learned" hiragana and katakana. Frankly, I do suggest just going down the radical list with as much effort as you put into your hiragana. According to wikipedia, which has a list, 51 of them are used in 75% of the everyday kanji. Just pretend this is the third set of "kana" you have to learn.

Your sharing is amazing. Thank you so much. It's really helpful.

thank you for putting the most important info in the beginning. thats great advice and i would have missed it if there was a lengthy intro or something

I've been learning Japanese on and off for about 12 years now and I always feel like I've made like no progress but then I'll look back at notes from like 2 years ago and I'm like... wow I _have_ actually progressed. Of those 12 only about the last 3 or 4 were spent trying to learn more kanji. I used to have this notepad document when I was a kid of Japanese translations from romaji to English; recently I upgraded to a word document that is 70% Japanese characters because it focuses on kanji and spelling moreso than translations. I also recently took a sort of Japanese placement test and I actually scored better on the kanji section than the vocabulary section so now I'm like... I should be focusing on learning more vocabulary xD I feel like I'm the only person that has learned this language completely out of order: I first learned grammar and sentence structure, then kana, then verbs, then kanji, then vocabulary

Hehehe... I've been procrastinating learning kanji for...yearssss. Hiragana and katakana 👍 good enough but, I can only recognise family kanji characters and that...will change! Fighting 😤😆

Thank you for make these video I have been trying to learn kanji for a while

Honestly, i find that making notes making me remember things better. Just making noted, not necessarily reviewing them.

I know it’s controversial but I can highly recommend the Remembering the Kanji books by Heisig (RTK) I only did the first part of the series and skipped the second one with the readings and it helped me IMMENSELY with remembering vocabulary and it often helps me guessing the rough meaning of an unknown word with Kanji which ties in perfectly with Yutas first tip of reading. It does take a lot of time to work through the first book and get to a point where you actually remember most Kanji but if you can stick with it the reward is insane. Many people don’t like the method, it’s kind of hotly debated on the internet but I can honestly say to just give it a try. If it doesn’t work for you just stop

I use flashcards. It works for me :#

Great advice - especially about ignoring the social media flexing! :)

this is very helpful to me as I am currently learning japanese. making videos and audio books also help me memorize.

This came at the perfect time. I've been trying to use the Olly Richards method of learning Japanese by reading, though I've been taking a break and am now trying to get back into it (I even started playing Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney in Japanese as a start). I wonder, though. A major motivation of mine is to write stories (like, full novels) in Japanese. Any advice on that?

As someone who spent thousands of hours making a learn to read website, only to realize that all I really needed to do was have my daughter read to me - I can attest to everything Yuta is saying.... It was almost like a parody, every single thing he said not to do, I did, right down to ignoring stroke order which caught my off guard

Great advice! 👍

I'm actually working as a manga translator Japanese→Spanish and I took the time to make my own list of every new word/phrase/refrain/slang/onomatopoeia I found that I didn't know when translating. It has helped me a lot to learn new things and now it's pages and pages long lol

"Tell yourself you are reading this cute romantic manga for educational purposes and not because you have no romance in real life.'' Why do you have to hurt me like this Yuta?

I learned every single kanji in 10 minutes, git gud nubs

Thank you very much, you motivated me again!

very helpful, needed this.

I'm a non-Japanese Japanese teacher studying learning methods and kanji didactics and I agree and humbly disagree with a number of things in this video. Disagreements: *radicals* are not the building blocks of kanji as mentioned in various antiquated textbooks. "Radicals" are just a very old index system for dictionaries. Kanjis DO have components and there is compelling evidence that learning them along with the kanji is very helpful. => its better to learn meaning, form phonetic components, as described in the "Kanji Outlier Dictionary" , the "Etymological Dictionary of Han Chinese Characters" or “The World of Kanji”. Research shows that people who can recognize components are better at learning kanji. *writing* can be very helpful for SOME people. So if you are a person who always needs to write things down to remember them, then practicing writing is helpful for you. Various apps and even a bit of calligraphy can also be helpful if you enjoy it. => practice writing if it's useful for you, but don't spend too much time. *learning words instead of individual kanji* learning words in context of the kanji is absolutely helpful, in fact for some people it might even be the best method to learn words first and kanji later. This is how Japanese learn... but then they already know a lot of keywords before they learn how to write them in kanji, and they are surrounded by Japanese kanji all day. Still, it takes them 18 years to master all standard kanji... Westerns don't have that type of time or environment ^^ => learning keywords is key to learning kanji, but becoming aware of ONE or TWO common kanji readings for those key words is very helpful. Researchers have found that people who can associate a SOUND with a kanji are better at remembering them long term. => learning individualkanji meanings in the context of words and sentences helps at the intermediate and advanced level especially. Agreements: Context and reading usually helps! That is backed up by research, and it's been my experience as well. If you are lucky enough to go to Japan, one way to casually practice is to read street signs and ads. *if you've learned individual kanji it will be easier to remember new words and recognize known words in new contexts* Mnemonics and visual stories as in the WaniKani system or Heisig can be helpful, especially when combined with semantic and phonetic components as mentioned above. Some people need more "logical" structure, while others need more visuals and mnemonics - some combination of the two is probably best. Totally agree with SRS flashcards. I'd just add that Anki cards are more helpful for slowly learning individual kanji and that sentences with clozed deletion input are quite helpful. Something not mentioned: the order and structure of a kanji course is important! For more on that subject there is a PhD thesis by Dr. Simon Paxton entitled, "Tackling the Kanji Hurdle", which is fairly convincing. Basically: while the perfect kanji learning method is the method that works for you, structurally an optimal kanji course doesn't exist. Optimally you'd learn frequent words first or together with specific kanji, but kanji would be logically ordered in terms of frequent meaning and sound components. For instance, learning that the three dots on the right of 液、湿、汁 is the component for "water" and means "water" or "liquid" already helps a lot. At the same time, learning that the kanji 青 is pronounced せい (sei) helps you to learn all of these: 清, 靖, 精, 晴, 請, 情, 鯖, 静 because they are pronounced the same way. Of course in Japanese Kanji can have many readings, but in this way you can hit many birds with one stone. The best book in terms of structure and kanji order I know of is "The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course" by Dr. Andrew Conning of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. If you are looking to learn kanji systematically the best bet would be to do Genki 1 or Marugoto Rikai A1 first, then go through KKLC and learn kanji for words you've learned. Ignore the provided vocabulary at first. Brush through Outlier Kanji Dictionary and/or Etymological Dictionary of Han Chinese Characters to get a feeling for the structure. If you still need a mnemonic because the structure is confusing refer to KKLC, WaniKani or Heisig for mnemonics -. At least make an Anki card or modify an existing one with the Kanji on the front and one or two readings and vocabulary on the back. Then read a lot or watch short videos with Japanese subtitles. With all of this the most important thing to remember is not go get bogged down by a specific kanji or word. In a journey of 3000 kanji it's okay to ignore or brush by some steps, since you can always come back later or maybe even learn it by association. And have fun ^^ !

Thank you very much for your sharing. Very useful!

This is solid advice for self teaching people. I am seriously learning Japanese for 1-2 years and this approach is basically how i do it. The only exception is i don’t read as much as i should. I mainly use anki to brute force kanji/vocabulary. But i managed to learn around 600-700 kanji so far according to the app. This lets me understand some basic phrases and signs. I hope i can get into reading more so i learn faster in the future.

Great advice Yuta.

it was so nice and helpful, thank you!!❤️‍🩹🐾

I love slowly adding kanji into my writing over time! I started replacing 私、for わたし for example and it’s working so well. I’m using genki so a lot of the stuff is repeated and that’s the stuff I like to kanji”ify”

Thank you very much for your precious advices !

thanks for the tips!

Not everyone can skip writing. I have to write new words and kanji. No matter how many times I come across many words or kanji, if I don't take the time to write it until I know it, I'll never learn it. Besides I have friends who still like to write postcards.

I like the sentences approach! Should implement that in my learning process...

ありがとう！This is very helpful :) I used to use Anki, but even if I was motivated to do it every day, after a few weeks, the kanjis were just additioning and it would take me 2 hours every day to finish reviewing the kanjis I had to review and I just gave up because I didn’t have time. I will try your new technique !

Currently reading サクラの降る町. I scan it, extract the characters with OCR and then I can easily check the words I don't know with Rikaikun. It was tough in the beginning but it gets much easier very fast. (Also knowing that sometimes a radical represents the reading of the kanji makes thing much easier.)

I wish I could've had this video when I started taking the plunge into learning kanji. I wasted so much time thinking I needed to learn each kanji on it's own, and ended up learning the 400 most common kanji before giving up learning Japanese for a while. Having come back from that now, I found that learning the kanji in the context of each new word I learn is so much better. I'm still not very far in my Japanese learning adventure, but so far I can agree with every point in this video. And again, I wish I could have had it back then and not wasted as much time. XD

Great video! thank you

I love learning to read and write kanji regardless of how much time it takes, it makes me genuinely happy for some reason. It's probably the small moments of achievement I feel every time I manage to read and understand an entire Japanese sentence or gradually see my technique in brush strokes improve that make the characters look so beautiful. I really agree with the people who say Kanji is the ultimate form of art.

Wow I've been trying different methods and trying to see what works for me, and I've settled on doing almost exactly what you suggested. When learning a new word I focus on it for a while, write it down in notepad as well as the reading, meaning, sentence for context, then do something else for a few minutes. After a few minutes I've probably forgotten it so I go back an "re-learn" it and do it again. Then repeat that until I feel like I feel good about remembering it. And then review over the next few days. I felt just using Anki by itself was a little too quick for me, it would tell me that I was "done for the day" but I hadn't really committed it to my memory yet. (there might be a setting in there that I can tweak) I still love using Anki but I find also writing it down and doing it manually as well has really helped me with committing new things to memory. Really, the best advice I could give is don't just blindly follow a guide, try to really pay attention to how you feel when learning. Pay attention to what you feel works and doesn't work, and make adjustments. No two people are the same, it's up to you to learn how to learn, the best way for yourself!