掲示板 Forums - Just looking at the kanji characters makes me feel scared and afraid😭

Just looking at the kanji characters makes me really afraid that I won't be able to learn it.

That's a common fear to have. Hearing you have to learn 2000 of anything is enough to make a person scream. But by reading you'll come to know the common ones and get familiar with the system. Study a bit every day, and it'll add up.

My personal tip? Radicals are your friends. When you break a more complicated kanji down radical by radical, you'll find there's an order to them that really isn't all that scary!

Though kanji does look tough at first with mnemonics, which is seeing the kanji as a picture, you'll learn it in no time. For example 木 means tree/ wood and the kanji looks like a tree which is a way to remember kanji.

For anyone learning Kanji.

can you tell me about his experience and how difficult it is.

For anyone learning Kanji.

can you tell me about his experience and how difficult it is.

Kanji is by far the hardest part of Japanese. In my opinion it's the only thing that makes it a "difficult" language to learn. Thankfully learning how to write kanji by hand is entirely optional, so at least there's that.

Edit: unless you're aiming for certain jobs in Japan or simply find it fun/helpful. I don't want to make it sound like it's completely worthless or anything.

I used to have the same fear but I have come to love studying kanji and deciphering the meaning behind them. It gets a lot less scary when you take it one step at a time and slowly work your way up from super simple Kanji to more complicated ones.

Other users have already made some great suggestions, such as breaking the kanji up into components, which I believe is a very effective way to memorize them. I personally can't memorize a specific Kanji without a mnemonic, so I try to come up with a small story for each of them, there are lots of fun mnemonics you can read here on renshuu too. What I usually do is study the smaller components first, which make up more complex Kanji like building blocks.

Kanji can also add clarity to words which sounds phonetically similar, so in a way, while they might seem scary, they're very useful in that regard.

Just break it down into sections and it’ll be easier

Kanji... (Is easy for me cuz I learn Mandarin too

)Well you don't really need to remember all of them,plus some don't even have any meaning or stuff and is just there cuz yes

,but for now you can just learn the n5 kanji with stories to remember them. I learned stories from @TokiniAndy 's YouTube where you first learn how to write the kanji,then learn the readings in a different series.And plus it's aimed at "n6"(renshuu made n6)-n5

btw tip learn their readings with their vocab cuz if you know the kanji but don't know which reading your gonna read 小学生 as "chimanai"

cuz the have different readings(also just focus on n5 kanji don't worry on n4-n1 kanji yet plus ik your still learning the alphabets so just focus on that first

For anyone learning Kanji.

can you tell me about his experience and how difficult it is.

For me, kanji seems harder to learn than it really is. It's almost as easy as learning words without kanji, and I can learn a couple of them in a day. If you read in Japanese (which you ideally should do to learn better) or just use the language often it's actually really easy to remember them since you're getting reminded often. If you really find it hard or want to make it easier you can skip learning all the onyomi/kunyomi readings and stroke order, and just learn them through words rather than as kanji on their own if that makes sense. (So, instead of "this kanji looks like this, and these are all its definitions, and these are all its onyomi/kunyomi readings.." just "today I'll learn this word, which has this kanji in it.") That's what I do, and even though you could consider it cutting corners compared to what some others do, there aren't really bad consequences to it so it won't hinder your learning. It's also easier to do because a lot of kanji are just 2 other kanji merged. Like, 好 (suki) is just 女 (onna) and 子 (ko), so if I need to remind myself how to write Suki I just remind myself its Onna Ko. Sometimes a kanji is easy to forget when I've just learned it or I don't use it much, but when I learn it most of the time I remember it as well as letters from my native language so for the most part there's no worry for me about forgetting a kanji, and if there is I can always revise it. Anyway, I hope this helps!