Learning the Jouyou Kanji

I love learning languages and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Japanese. I didn't start out being good at learning languages. In fact I was pretty terrible. I'm not a polyglot or anything, but you tend to hear that same sentiment from most people online that have learned a second langage later in life. For instance, I took four years of Spanish in high-school but could still barely order a taco and a drink when push came to shove.

It wasn't until I was in College and needed to take a series of electives that I stumbled upon the idea of trying a foreign language more seriously. I had always heard that you can't learn a language after about the age of ten, because, you know, scientific reason about the brain and neurons. I decided to give it a try anyways.

I had given a few feeble attempts at learning Japanese while in high school, but had always stumbled on learning the various characters; I just couldn't quite crack the system to memorize all of the kanji and it seemed downright impossible. I had also always been interested in German, since some of my family traced its roots back there. In the end, having a full Computer Science degree course load, I decided to try the language that both suited my fancy and seemed at least surmountable: German.

It turned out my college courses in German were really good: the class was actually conducted in German and it forced me to actually try to use the vocabulary that I was learning. On top of that I supplemented my learning with some great audio resources: Pimsleur and, my favorite (even to this day): the Michel Thomas German series. Suddenly I was able to handle basic conversations and through that gained confidence that I could actually learn a foreign language.

My next step towards learning to love learning languages was a semester abroad in Potsdam, Germany. It was, for me, a turning point in my life where I really got a chance to grow into an individual. I made a number of great friends that I still am in close contact with to this day and it spurred me on to keep learning, eventually reading through all of the Harry Potter books auf Deutsch.

Back in June 2017, I saw that Duolingo opened up the beta for their Japanese course and I decided to give it a shot. I got hooked on it, but like most Duolingo courses, it only can go into so much depth and I started to get an itch to dig deeper. Looking for resources on the internet I was amazed at how many fantastic resources there are for Japanese. In particular I stumbled upon NihongoShark's website and decided to try out the Hacking Japanese Supercourse after checking out the free newsletters for a few weeks.

One key piece of advice early on was to break up learning the kanji into multiple phases. I had always tried to learn not just the meaning, but the different pronunciations at the same time. In this book, it was saying forget that, just learn all of the meanings first, then learn vocabulary and you'll get the reading through that. The readings on their own aren't that valuable when you aren't guaranteed to know which one to use given a particular word anyway.

I started in November in earnest, working through the Jouyou kanji; the set of 2136 kanji that cover the kanji used in Japanese newspapers. Ones outside that list are pretty rare apparently and if they do show up, the use the furigana to let you know how the kanji is to be pronounced.

I worked through 20 new kanji a day, reviewing 100 at first and then upping that to 120 after a month or two when I found I wasn't seeing old kanji often enough. I did this every day, usually before bed, and it took on average 45 minutes per day. I managed to stick with it even though I got a number of colds and the flu during this winter season.

By being consistent with my practice and never breaking the chain of days, I've now reached my goal of having seen all of the kanji in the NihongoShark Anki deck. That doesn't mean I've learned them all perfectly yet, but it's the first big step into finally learning the language that I've always dreamed of being able to speak and read.