A Better Way to Study Kanji (1)

There's a million ways out there to learn kanji. Some people will tell you to throw a poster up on the bathroom wall and study whenever it's "convenient" while others focus on the importance of mnemonic devices. As for myself, I've often taken the "hard" road and opted for the brute-force method of rinse and repeat. As far back as my high school study days, I spent a lot of time writing out characters. I started with hiragana and katakana. I wrote and I wrote. Then I wrote some more. And you know what--it worked! I had the kana down pretty quick.

Then comes the behemoth-like enigma known as kanji. It sends chills running down the spine of many a student of Japanese and is the source of great controversy when it comes to learning methods. My six years in Japan (and 14 years studying the language) have taught me one thing about kanji: you can't learn them in a vacuum. This should come as common sense to most people who have spent a lot of time with the language. Kanji didn't pop out of nowhere. It's changed and grown along with the spoken language and the rest of the written language. Some characters come straight from China. Some have undergone some changes. Some were made right here in good ol' Nippon, too.

One thing I've always kept in mind is the components that make up a kanji character. With thousands upon thousands of characters to learn, the number may as well be infinite. But the components, my friends, are much more finite. They're also a lot easier to remember.

Let's look at a few characters. Some you may know. Some you may not.
設　投　股

At a glance, they might look a bunch of random characters tossed together. Many students of Japanese might approach these characters one by one, trying to remember them like "Okay, so first I draw four horizontal lines...then a square...then this hump sort of thing followed by a couple strokes that look like a table." Frankly, it's going to be pretty hard to tackle a few thousand (or even a few hundred) characters like that.

A closer look (at the right side) will show that they all have something in common: a ル on top of a 又(また). This little guy has a name, and not surprisingly, it's called るまた.

Did a spark go off yet? Now that you've got a name for part of the kanji, you can file that in your brain. るまた= ル on top of 又. That's a lot easier to remember than the above mess, right? Just categorize these pieces the same way you do あ(the character)=あ(the sound). It's easier than you think.

But where do I get started? How do I learn the names for all these pieces? Well a good place to start is a site like this or this that has a list of radicals. (If neither of those sites meet your fancy, just trying googling 部首 and 一覧 and see what pops up.)

Radicals, or 部首 in Japanese, are the components of a character that are traditionally used to classify them in dictionaries. Knowing the different radicals will give you a good working knowledge of the components that are out there to learn. For example, the below characters all share the common radical.

汗　泳　消　海　油

The radical is called sanzui and is the first three strokes on the left side. Just being able to recognize that this is a common component (and one that has its very own name!) will help expedite learning and systematize memorization.

Look forward to more on radicals, and other kanji components, in upcoming articles!