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I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are

by kh1 6y ago

I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Japanese). On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. So you shouldn't feel bad about it, taking small steps serve you well in the long term.

matt-attack 6y ago
How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??
- kleton 6y ago
  Nowadays you draw it in your phone/computer. In the old days you looked up by "radical" and number of strokes in large tables.
- kh1 6y ago
  When you finish middle school, you're supposed to learn most of kanjis used in real life.[0] At that point it's pretty rare to encounter kanjis that are completely foreign to you. But there's electronic dictionary on which you can draw to search for kanji.[1] I used one of these in high school. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji [1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales/jp/ja/exword/product/X/XD/XDS/XD-SX4900WE/assets/XD-SX4900WE_Seq1.jpg https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...
- charcircuit 6y ago
  The easiest way is just using OCR which for example the Google Translate app lets you do. After that you can search by drawing it or search by the radicals that you recognize in it.
eternalban 6y ago
> On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. Do you have any thoughts on the implications (social, mainly) of logographic writing systems? Also would be interested in having a sense of the historic patterns of literacy in Japan in context of Tokugawa caste system. /tia
charcircuit 6y ago
>Those kanjis are the easy ones One thing to note is that the order they are learned is not from easiest to hard. The order is more based off the complexity of the meaning of the kanji.

by kh1 6y ago

matt-attack 6y ago

How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??

kleton 6y ago
Nowadays you draw it in your phone/computer. In the old days you looked up by "radical" and number of strokes in large tables.
kh1 6y ago
When you finish middle school, you're supposed to learn most of kanjis used in real life.[0] At that point it's pretty rare to encounter kanjis that are completely foreign to you. But there's electronic dictionary on which you can draw to search for kanji.[1] I used one of these in high school. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji [1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales/jp/ja/exword/product/X/XD/XDS/XD-SX4900WE/assets/XD-SX4900WE_Seq1.jpg https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...
charcircuit 6y ago
The easiest way is just using OCR which for example the Google Translate app lets you do. After that you can search by drawing it or search by the radicals that you recognize in it.

eternalban 6y ago

> On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. Do you have any thoughts on the implications (social, mainly) of logographic writing systems? Also would be interested in having a sense of the historic patterns of literacy in Japan in context of Tokugawa caste system. /tia

charcircuit 6y ago

>Those kanjis are the easy ones One thing to note is that the order they are learned is not from easiest to hard. The order is more based off the complexity of the meaning of the kanji.