Why Study Kanji?

If you’re studying Japanese, at some point you will be encouraged to start learning kanji 漢字(かんじ). There are thousands of kanji that are used in common written Japanese, so if you want to engage with written Japanese you will have no choice but to encounter them.

But why do you need to take time to study kanji individually? And what does studying kanji even mean?

The truth is that you could technically get by without studying kanji directly if you were hell bent on doing so. If you really wanted to pick up these characters on their own, you could start your foray into native Japanese content by reading native materials aimed at the middle school level. In that category of material, you will find that kanji are often accompanied by furigana 振り仮名(ふりがな), which allow you to understand how to pronounce words composed of kanji. Sure, you might be cabined off from engaging with certain materials while you are learning the kanji from immersion with middle school content. But honestly, most great manga is often aimed at middle schoolers and contains furigana, so you can engage with a lot of great content without knowing the kanji. And by reading manga, you could slowly pick up the individual kanji from context and repetition.

Easy right? Unfortunately, no.

While in theory you don’t need to know kanji to start reading native Japanese content, without knowing the kanji, your ability to engage with written Japanese will be tremendously more difficult. That’s because if you are trying to learn a new word, you will often be trying to learn which kanji go with that word, as well as identify unfamiliar individual kanji at the same time. That’s a ton of mental effort just to engage with the language because you were too stubborn to learn kanji by themselves. And this painful slog will last for a long time, until you have learned to recognize over a couple thousand of these kanji.

Practically, this means that the mental strain of trying to read Japanese without knowing the kanji means that you won’t be able to read the language with efficiency, which in turn will destroy your ability to enjoy the content you are reading. The irony is that while learning the kanji can look like an unnecessary time suck, it actually will speed along your progress in the language. After all, what’s the benefit of starting to read native Japanese content sooner if you are looking up every word and character to get through a sentence?

In fact, if you want to learn Japanese as quickly as possible, you’ll need to get on with your kanji study. That’s because written Japanese is the fastest medium for learning the language. And there is no engaging with written Japanese—at speed or duration—without first studying kanji.

So what does kanji study even mean? “Studying” kanji can mean a lot of different things. For instance, kanji study could mean learning how to write each kanji out with the proper stroke order. Kanji study could also entail the learning of the differen sounds—the kunyomi 訓読み(くんよみ) and the onyomi 音読み(おんよみ)—that are associated with each kanji. But fundamentally, all kanji study must include learning the meanings associated with the Chinese characters themselves. For example, by studying kanji you will learn that the kanji “水” means “water.”

While all kanji study is intended to help you identify or recognize distinct kanji, learning the meaning of individual kanji is the key value. That’s because by knowing the meanings associated with individual kanji you can actually accelerate your learning of Japanese. And it’s the reason why I emphasize learning the meanings of the kanji above all else when studying kanji.

When you know the meaning associated with a particular kanji you will gain two distinct advantages. The first is obtaining a memory aid that reduces the amount of time it takes to learn a new word. If you are learning a new word that is made of multiple kanji, you can often use the characters as a memory aid for picking up the word itself. For instance, if you know that “曜” means “day of the week,” then “水曜(すいよう),” which means “Wednesday” is made of of two characters you know. That allows you to come up with a memory aid like “water day of the week” or “水曜” means Wednesday, because “water” and “Wednesday” both begin with “w.”

This memory aid feature of kanji study is GOLD, because you need all the help you can get to remember words. After all, this isn’t Spanish where you get the benefit of a shared linguistic root. So in a very real sense, learning the meaning of kanji becomes your new associative database for picking up Japanese words more readily.

The other big benefit is that it’s not uncommon to guess the meaning of a word based on its kanji alone, even if it’s the first time you encounter the word. If the memory aid is GOLD, guessing a word from kanji and context is PLATINUM. For instance, if you know the kanji “海” means “sea,” then you might guess on your first go that 海水(かいすい) means “seawater.” This is great news, because if you can figure out what a word means without looking it up, then you avoid the painful and time-consuming step of having to search in a dictionary to look up the word so you can figure out what is going on.

If you are still struggling to grasp the benefits of what kanji study can do to accelerate your study of Japanese, imagine how much faster you could have learned English if you already knew the common Latin and Greek derivatives used in English. For example, you would know that “aqua” means “water.” So when you encounter the words “aquarium,” “aquatic,” “aquifer,” and “aqueduct,” you would immediately know that each has something to do with water. In this way, knowing the meaning of the Latin derivative breaks down the difficulty of learning entire families of new words and accelerates your acquisition of vocabulary.

Unlike English, where learning the Greek and Latin derivatives are merely useful options, Japanese essentially makes learning their equivalent mandatory. If you look at kanji study from this angle, it should be clear that studying kanji is more than just a painful time suck. Because if you take the time to learn the kanji, you can cut your time for learning Japanese down significantly. And that means studying kanji is the shortest path to fluency.

Sure, this fastest path will require you to learn just over 2000 kanji to really accelerate your study of Japanese. But if you use flashcards correctly, you can learn all the kanji you will need in just a handful of months. And that’s a small pain to shoulder for shortening years off of your language study.