UPSC Forum

How to Study Kanji

To get through the tests all we have to do is get the kanji, vocab and grammar structures into our heads. The question is, what’s the best way to go about it?

Any suggestions out there for other ways to increase learning efficiency?

I have a horrible memory, so the best way for me to learn is repetition. I had a few books on JLPT vocabulary and kanji that I read again and again until everything was familiar. It’s really boring sometimes but it works for me. Also, anytime I run across an unfamiliar word that I think is really important or useful, I write it down on the dry erase board in my kitchen so that I have to look at it for a few days. By the time I erase it, it’s set in my memory.

The character is from China. Most kanji have more than one pronounciation or reading (in some cases a lot more). Some of these, the “Onyomi”, are from the original Chinese, while others are the readings from a Japanese word.

“kunyomi” is the term for readings originating in old Japanese, and “onyomi” are readings that originated in China.

As a _very_ general rule, Chinese-derived words are written as combinations of more than one kanji, and are more “adult”, male, abstract and formal - just like more recent imported French words are more abstract and formal in English than the older Germanic import (or the really old Norse) - while Japanese-derived words are normally written with just one kanji and hiragana, and are seen as more concrete, informal and more female. There’s a lot of exceptions to this, of course.

While there are no real “rules” regarding kunyomi, there are two things that could help you memorize onyomi:

1) When the reading of the kanji in China changed over time, they changed often the same way for words with similar sound, so you often have two or three similar readings following some pattern,

e.g.
MOKU - BOKU
SEI - SHOU
SEKI - SHAKU
TAI - DAI

2) Often you have one part of the kanji indicating the sound. E.g. you see a temple (JI) in the kanji for time or even hemorrhoid (ouch!), you can be quite sure the reading is JI. Or look at middle (CHUU) and insect, which has also a “middle” part. That system is not perfect (because it was invented for the original Chinese pronunciation), but better than nothing

So to recap, I am under the impression that KUNyomi readings have a much wider range of meaning while the ONyomi words have a richer meaning that means something more specific When we’re studying for our exams, it’s easy to forget that there’s a whole lot more to kanji than remembering the meanings and readings.

“Kanjiclinic” is an occasional column on some aspect of kanji, and always entertaining. The author is fairly sporadic, but if readership picks up perhaps she can be persuaded to write a little more often

Here’s the link - the latest column is linked on the upper right:

http://kanjiclinic.com/

By the way, you may find that writing the kanji and learning the proper stroke order actually helps the learning — not just remembering of ones you’ve already learned, but the ease with which you can learn new ones. Just something to think about (I’m only studying for level 3 myself, so I’m just guessing, although I know the writing/meaning of about 800 kanji and the on/kun yomi of about 400)

Level 4

103 Kanji, 727 words and 21 greeting expressions