How to study Kanji - part 4

This is a fourth part of a number of posts on how to study Kanji.

So, you have had a look at radicals, you have your Kanji text book. What next? From now on, the battle begins: can you get your brain to remember about 2000 Kanji, within a reasonable time? Don't forget that you have to memorize not only the Kanji and their meaning, but also their pronunciation. This is an impossible task if you are just going to watch your text book. So, what to do?

Humans have a short term memory, and a long term memory. Things that are important are put into your long term memory so that you can remember them for a long time. On the other hand, information that you only need for a short amount of time is put into your short term memory.

The problem with your study of Kanji is that to your brain Kanji are not really important information. So, what happens is this: you read the Kanji you want to study, you can remember it for a few minutes or hours, and after that the Kanji is removed from your short term memory. You have forgotten all about it. You have made no progress.

The point is thus to force your brain into putting the Kanji information into your long term memory. This is not an easy task, as your brain does not regard Kanji as important information. So, the question is how to make your brain this Kanji are important, and make it put the information in your memory for long term storage?

There are several strategies that can be used for this. I can think of at least 3:

1. repeated exposure: expose your brian to the Kanji multiple times
2. active exposure: don't just passively read or watch the Kanji, but actively write it yourself
3. diverse exposure: don't limit yourself to 1 way of exposure: watch/read the Kanji, read out loud its pronunciations, focus on the radicals and components of the Kanji, make a story for the Kanji, and use flash cards.

There might be more scientifically correct names for the three strategies I mentioned. But anyway, I will try to explain the idea I have about each of them.

The first one is to expose your brain to the Kanji repeatedly. Allow your brain to store the Kanji in your short time memory and erase it again a number of times, and the chances that it will put the data in the long term memory will increase. This strategy is true for many kinds of information. Very few people can memorize for example a text in 1 time. But if they read the same text a number of times, memorizing and forgetting it a number of times, gradually the text is stored in their long term memory. This explains how 80 or 90 year-old people can still remember unimportant things like children songs even though they memorized them 70 or 80 years ago.

So, repeated exposure is one strategy. But it is relatively time-consuming if the exposure is limited to just a passive exposure like reading or watching the Kanji. You might have to watch each Kanji hundreds of times in order to be able to remember 2000 of them...

If you, on the other hand, do more active exposures, the transition from short term to long term memory becomes faster. So, instead of just watching the Kanji, write it yourself. Write it again and again. The next day, write it again. And so on.

Finally, diverse exposure. It is easier for our brain to remember things if we use different parts of the brain. So, by combining different ways of exposure, we can stimulate different parts of the brain, and thus speed up the process of memorization. In the case of Kanji, it is better to use a combination of ways to remember Kanji. Read them, write them. Read out loud their pronunciation, write them (again and again), study words containing them. This makes it easier to remember them. Study the radicals and components of the Kanji, and make connections between them and the meaning and pronunciation of the Kanji. Where necessary make a story from the components to help you remember the meaning of the Kanji. 

I have found that the best way to combine many ways of memorization is to make or buy flash cards. On one side of a flash card is the Kanji, on the other side its meaning and pronunciation, and perhaps some vocabulary using the Kanji. Decide a set of Kanji cards to study, read the cards, write out the Kanji on the cards, read out loud their pronunciation. Hide the Kanji side of the cards, and see if you can recall each of the Kanji. If yes, do things the reverse way: hide then meaning/pronunciation and see if you can recall them by watching the Kanji. If yes, see if you can write the Kanji when seeing its meaning. And so on.

Some time later (the next day of a few dys later) check what you learned. If you can still write out the Kanji without watching it, if you can still remember the pronunciations, put the card in your "memorized" stack. If not, study it again, and check again later on. The cards in your "memorized" stack to0 have to be reviewed after some longer time (a week, a month, etc). Each time make the time interval longer and longer, until you really have no need to review the Kanji again.

This flash card strategy combines the 3 points I mentioned: repeated exposure, active exposure, and diverse exposure. You can make your own flash cards (which is rather time consuming - I speak from experience), or you can buy them. The White Rabbit Press flash cards (for which you can find a banner on this site) are my recommendation, but there are other choices too.

This is the way I memorized about 2000 Kanji.

 

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