3 ms·
This is remarkably useless, and the premise is misguided. You can't just "learn a kanji", because the common ones have many readings and rarely stand alone: yo
by Clewza313 6y ago
This is remarkably useless, and the premise is misguided. You can't just "learn a kanji", because the common ones have many readings and rarely stand alone: you need to learn them in context as compounds, where the meanings vary wildly. Here's just one: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F
As a rough analogy, imagine a site that proclaimed you can learn English simply by memorizing these 777 Greek roots: astron, grapheia, logia, nomos, tele, phone, kryptos etc. Useful, yes; sufficient, hell no.
- tkgally 6y agoI agree. In my experience at least, learning high-frequency vocabulary first can indeed speed up the acquisition of second-language literacy. In the case of Japanese, though, individual kanji function mainly as subcomponents of vocabulary, not as entire words. If you are still getting used to recognizing individual kanji—if they still look mostly like indistinguishable squiggles—it might not hurt to practice them in order of frequency. But if your ultimate goal is functional literacy in Japanese, it would be better to spend more time learning high-frequency words—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.—and how they are written, whether that be in hiragana, katakana, kanji, or some combination.