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Started learning the 常用漢字

Learning these in 五十音 order, which is the order in the official table published by the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs, is obviously not something you would recommend to most people learning Japanese. But we have been “learning Japanese” for sixteen years.

We took learning Japanese very seriously for maybe the first year or two, but then settled into an unfortunate complacency. At the start of 2025 we started trying to take learning the language seriously again. And we have followed an idiosyncratic strategy that keeps us motivated

We learned the kana with pen and paper in 2010. We learned basic grammar from an iPhone app around the same time. We bought Heisig's Remembering the Kanji and then failed to stick to it. We did a Mandarin Chinese course at university circa 2014~2015. But otherwise: complacency.

Nonetheless, obviously, as people interested in Japanese culture, we have acquired many little bits and pieces of Japanese over that near decade-and-a-half of complacency. There are many common kanji and spoken words we have learned without putting in any effort whatsoever…

Then starting early 2025, we have started doing 3 things: watching anime without subs, paying close attention to spoken lines when consuming translated anime/VNs, and looking up and adding any unfamiliar Japanese word that interests us to an Anki deck, and doing daily reviews.

So for the last 1.5y we have a flood of thousands of words entering our brain, everything from the mundane to the lyrical to technical vocabulary. Every single word we have learned has been something a character says at some point, and it is tagged in Anki with where it came from

From a pedagogical point of view we are breaking all the rules of how one “should” learn. You should gently climb the hierarchy from simple vocabulary and simple texts all the way up to complex vocabulary and complex texts. Instead we're just being vocabulary omnivores.

But we see it like this: any input is good input, and having a “good” learning strategy is worth nothing if you aren't invested in it and won't stick to it. We are autistic enough that we resent anything flashy and appified, and it's easy to be invested in works we already love.

Moreover, watching anime without subs and looking up every other word, or even with subs, looking up every hundredth word, is a serious workout for your brain, in word segmentation and disambiguation. Likewise for reading a VN untranslated and looking up by ear or by writing out.

So, why are we learning the Jōyō Kanji (wow, a macron, 久しぶり) in gojūon order?

Ultimately, because that's the order they're published in by the 文化庁,an inherently trustworthy source that appeals to our sensibilities. It's a lovely PDF with a carefully chosen typeface.

But it also turns out to be a fairly reasonable order to learn them in if you have our particular circumstances. Ordering by stroke count groups a lot of kanji that look confusingly similar together, which is probably a terrible thing for our memory. It's also very… artificial.

Stroke count order also has the problem that each study session would get progressively longer than the previous one, which is terrible for motivation and planning. It is better to have the difficulty be roughly the same each step of the way, to maintain a steady pace of learning

The normal thing to do is probably to learn them in 教育漢字 grade order. But that only covers half of the 常用漢字, and there isn't a nice table with standard readings. Maybe we're too contrarian for our own good. But so far, half the kanji are words we already know. We'll see.

Geez, why am I rambling about learning kanji, that took as much time as the entire process of deciding what to learn. I hope it was at least interesting…

Ah, right, we can reinforce the learning by adding each kanji to an Anki deck, and unlike all our vocab cards which have both kanji and kana on the face of the card, we can put the readings only on the back of the card. This will help with our tendency to rely on pronunciation…

An advantage of learning the kanji in 五十音 order is that it will put kanji with similar readings together in our memory, which should help with attempting to pronounce unfamiliar words. I think that's more useful than the grouping we'd get from stroke count or grade, at least.

We're convinced that learning vocabulary items, kanji included, in some kind of context is useful for recall. There's lots of words that are easy for us to remember because they're from particular Monogatari episodes, for example… and context gives a stronger idea of meaning.

This learning strategy does lead to funny things like knowing the names of the senses and various philosophical terms from Otonashi Ayana, knowing words for romantic jealousy because of Kanbaru Suruga, knowing the names of fields of science because of Godzilla Singular Point…

Knowing words related to guitars because of K-On, knowing words related to guns because of Angel Beats, knowing words for strong feelings of contempt and disgust from Needy Girl Overdose, knowing words for military commands from Evangelion, knowing words for chuunis from Haruhi…

I timed it and, once accounting for Anki reviews, looks like we will be spending optimistically an hour and a half on Japanese study every day for the rest of the year if we keep this up ^^;

two days into this, it's cool how we seem to be validated already in not wanting to learn kanji or radicals by mnemonic. we've now seen two kanji which have something to do with using one's hand, and one day later (yesterday) it suddenly clicked that they both have a 手 left side

and instead of using an english-language mnemonic, we can remember kanji readings and meanings by reference to familiar words: 亜細亜の亞、物の哀れ、挨拶の挨、曖昧の曖、お握りの握、安心の安、以外の以、囲碁の囲、医学の医、依頼の依、

learning kanji is so much fun… 威 and 為 were fun to write, and there's always the puzzle of figuring out where we know something from… like 異 is in 怪異 and 異世界, 畏 is in 畏敬 and 畏怖, 委 is in 委員長, and 偉く needs no introduction

studying kanji after a year and a half of stuffing any vaguely interesting kango we encounter into our brain is turning out to be good timing, because there's a decent chance any new kanji we have to learn is in some term we learned recently. for example, 遺(イ) was in 遺伝子