Studying Kanji is a Waste of Time

stop studying kanji

Kanji Grid Addon

Kanji Game (漢字でGO)

Kaname Naito's Kanji Video
Pro Kanji Reader Plays 漢字でGO

Outline
0:00 Why People are Scared of Kanji
2:07 Learn Kanji Through Vocabulary
5:22 Learning Words
7:09 About Kanji Readings
8:48 Learning Kanji Through Words Results
9:29 Kanji Game
10:27 Conclusion

[トレントン]

Hey guys, I've been reading through the comments and just wanted to clarify some points that I might not have conveyed well enough in the video.

Maybe I came across as a little bit antagonistic (which wasn't my intention), so I just wanted to make clear that I'm not trying to attack anyone's methods or tell you that a certain method can't work. Different people have preferred methods, and that's okay.

A sentiment that a lot of people have is that trying to distinguish kanji as a beginner is difficult and that kanji study helps with that. I understand the value of this, and although I don't personally think it's necessary, I would bring this up as an option if I were to remake this video. I see so many people struggling to learn Japanese who spend way too much time overthinking it, and I think kanji study holds much of the blame for that. My goal with this video was to tell people that studying kanji isn't as important as many people think it is, and that if your goal is to become able to read written Japanese, you don't need to go out of your way to study it.

I think a lot of people are mistaking my statements about not studying kanji readings to mean that I don't think you should pay attention to them at all (which definitely could have been articulated better, so apologies), but that wasn't what I was trying to say at all. My point is that you learn kanji readings through learning words and allowing yourself to draw connections and use pattern recognition to learn kanji readings, not that you should completely disregard them.

It's okay if you don't agree with my advice, and I appreciate that most of the people offering differing opinions or criticism are doing so respectfully :)

[JS-jbyu]

I geniuenly believe that it is a lot easier to say for someone who "already made the mistake of learning kanji" than for someone who never studied a single one. Learning them idividually helps you remember them easier when you see them in vocab. You don't need to remember every single reading for each kanji, but at least look at them and get their basic meaning. It helps to distinguish between them.

[saincxm]

i think you will single handedly motivate me to start learning again

[airex]

Damn learning Japanese is fun when there’s not hundreds of YouTubers in your ear telling you not to do it

[jinjurbreadman]

Next video:
Studying Japanese is a Waste of Time

[kineticmeow]

This is WHY I love WaniKani as you learn the kanji and learn vocabulary words that go along with that kanji. The mnemonics and coming across them while reading native material really helps them stick.

[darmandez]

"Whatever kid, have fun spelling Black Sabbath"

[MelissaJetzt]

Yeah I found a Tofugu article the other week about the readings and they suggested learning one reading then moving on and learn new ones as you learn new words. Changed my life, honestly. I was just drowning. Now I feel like I have a chance!

[arcticafox]

Level 54 WaniKani fan here. I still recommend WaniKani! It actually does exactly what you recommend. Even though it’s advertised as teaching you Kanji, it actually teaches vocabulary words and introduces the kanji that are used in the vocab. It does not teach every reading at first (usually just he on-yomi) but gradually introduces them through vocabulary cards. You could come across every word in WaniKani through immersion, of course, but I’d argue it’s a fast track to learn so many words and be able to jump into reading much faster.

[infinitekaister]

Studying individual kanji does has its place in Japanese learning. Too often, some readers will never learn the nuances of kanji and when they decide to just learn the vocabulary in which the kanji is introduced, they don't really develop a "solid understanding" of what the kanji actually looks like. Thus, many words/kanji become very ambiguous and easily mixed up, because they have no understanding of the core kanji meaning, radicals, or how it is written. While with anything, it can simply be brute-forced fixed with years and thousands of hours of reading but there is a good balance between both that I would agree with. That's not even including research that shows that writing out things is generally more beneficially for memory-retention purposes.

[lemmyboy]

For me personally learning kanji helped a lot. I dont mean perfectly learning every meaning and every pronounciation but to learn the most common pronounciation and the most common meaning.
1. It helped me understand vocab way faster.
2. It helped me to understand unknown words, because either i know the pronounciation or when reading could make sense of it via the kanjis solo meaning.

But im also not a good language learner English took me eternity because my brain does not like not understanding.
So i think what is the key for all his videos is that you are the immersion type learner. You can stick your head to stuff you dont understand or cant make sense from, without instandly putting it in the background.

If you are like me and your head literally does not care and puts it in background immediatly. Be ok with it taking longer then for those guys, we need to brute force this.

[emrd]

at the start I hated kanji but when you start actually learning japanese I beg you will fall in love with it and you'll rather see a sentence having kanji because it makes japanese a lot easier to read and recognize instead trying to comprehend 400 hiragana and katakana characters without space

[Mobik_]

I learned all 常用漢字, with their correct stroke orders and amount of strokes. I do it daily, 30 to 1 hour every single day for the past 588 days... I LOVE IT! I love knowing how to write them, I love the details of each Kanji, etc

[rovingmauler]

I have been studying kanji pretty extensively in the last month and it’s helped a ton. The problem with all the videos that say do this or don’t do that is that they prey on people struggling at a certain point in their learning. In reality, anything you study that helps you improve is good. It might not be the most optimal path but as long as you can see improvement and are enjoying learning, your journey is on a good path. I would say, if you are finding that you are studying kanji to the point of it making you not want to learn Japanese, then switch to something else. If you are having fun learning the readings of all the kanji, keep going.

[angietrif]

Wanikani is my best friend lol. It just makes it fun and also is way quicker than whatever I was doing earlier trying to write the Kanji love ur vids!

[Valimar]

The concept of just learning the kanji through vocab is funny to me because you can just do both and do the best of both worlds. You dont need to learn kanji until the day you die, but even knowing the abstract meaning of the radicals and jyouyou kanji will help you understand the vast majority of compound kanji words and phrases before you even know how to say them.

I frequently read books and games that have 6-8 kanji in a single chain to represent an abstract concept thats not going to be in a dictionary or google because its meant for native speakers who can read. I dont need to look up each kanji individually and piece them together because i know the meanings and with their basic readings i could look up something i dont remember in seconds instead of OCR or stroke based methods.

This also accelerates immersion based approaches because im understanding the sentences well and reading even if i dont know the specific vocab terms but rather the abstract meanings.

Of course, everyones goal is different and not everyone will benefit from being a few thousand kanji deep in the KanKen lists. But you could at least spend like 10 minutes a day doing an anki deck for kanji that will improve every aspect of reading japanese without necessarily costing anything.

I also recommend just using a common frequency list instead of RTK or WaniKani. You can also kanji mine afterwards to pick up common kanji in whatever genre you like.

[hijeffhere]

Crazy how:

1. To learn kanji, you must learn it from vocabulary

2. To understand vocabulary, learn it from context

3. To acquire grammar, you must immerse in the language

Overall, to learn something in a language, you must look at a bigger picture. And it all comes back to immersion.

[zombiedemon]

I'm learning to read hiragana by learning to write hiragana.

The more I write a hiragana letter, the better and easier i remember it and recognize it.

[lamMeTV]

Knowing how kanji break down helps me a lot in distinguishing them. But then again RTK was also just a lot of fun so I dont regret spending a second with it. Also dont worry I dont blindely follow what a random teacher says

[OldManDoom]

I actually enjoy studying kanji. The crazy thing is that studying kanji has helped me with the language more than any listening exercise I have ever done