In my evening class we learn the basics on Nihongo, and of course we started with
Hiragana and
Katakana pretty soon. These are the 2 sets of 48 characters that can be regarded as a Japanese alphabet. You just need to memorise them, and use them very frequently. I’ll come back to this later on.
The bigger challenge are the
Kanji 「漢字 - かんじ 」. They are the Chinese characters that are used in Japanese, and the goal is to know 2000 of them. This is a job that can be spread over several years. You start slowly, and gradually increase the number.
As I also focused on using Anki for memorizing (more on that later), I systematically included the kanji for every word from the beginning. I never studied those kanji, but by seeing them frequently together with the explanation, they were slowly inserted into my memory and after I while I could recognize them and know their meaning. This was a big help afterwards, when we needed to memorise them in class.
During the first year, we also learned 14 of the most simple kanji. Basically all the digits (1 to 10, 100, 1000, 10.000) and a few extra.
During the second year, we learned one kanji per week. So by the end of the year, we knew about 48 more. I guess by the end of the third year, we’ll be at 150.
The stroke order, how to draw the kanji in the correct way, is very important and you should use the correct way from the beginning.
In order to practice 「練習 - れんしゅう」, I created worksheets with a Kanji-stroke font.
For new kanji, I start with the big-size version, and smaller size when I get more confident.
- first year (
Big and
Small),
- second year (
Big and
Small),
- third year (
Big and
Small)
and an additional set (
Small) with kanji that I want to learn next.
(As I will regularly check and update these sheets, please don’t send them around but refer to this page for the latest version.)
If you want to create your own, you can get the font
here. Just download, drop in the Windows Fonts directory, and select it in the software.
