How to study Kanji - part 5

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

In my previous posts I have written on how to study radicals first, the importance of getting a good text book for studying Kanji, and the way to get your brain to remember Kanji in an effective way. One important remaining question is: how many new Kanji should I try to remember every day?

I have written before how those "one Kanji a day" websites are not really effective for your Kanji study. Even if we assume that you want to memorize only the 1,945 Kanji "for common use", a pace of 1 per day means it will take you more than 5 years just to complete the list. This is not acceptable.

However, from my experience I can say that studying Kanji at a too high pace is not helping either. I studied in a Japanese language school in Tokyo for 6 months, and in our classes we would see up to 10 new Kanji per day. These were mainly Kanji from the JLPT1 level, some of them even Japanese would have difficulties to read. Most students (me included) would somehow manage to pump these Kanji into our brain for the Kanji test the next day, but a day later we would have forgotten all about them. Reviewing them for some longer time might have helped, but there was little time for that, since the next day we would have to remember 10 new Kanji again, and the next day again, and again, and again. The result was that especially the last few months of my time in the Japanese language school were ironically the months when I made the least progress in my Kanji study...

Even worse, I found that I often confuse the Kanji that I studied during those few months. This is very bad, because it takes a long time to "delete" such wrong information and replace it with the correct information.

To conclude, too slow is not getting you anywhere, but too fast is not much better, or even worse in the long run.

What I recommend is to keep a high pace, without going too far. Typically I would study 5 new Kanji per day, but whenever I noticed that that pace was too high, I took some days to review the Kanji I learned during the past days, without introducing new Kanji to my pack. This resulted in a typical pace of about 80 new Kanji per month, sometimes just 50 or 60, sometimes 120 or more. For comparison, "1 Kanji a day" plans will give you only about 30 Kanji per month, while the Japanese language school would try to force us in a pace of about 200 (!) new Kanji per month...

Notice that if you can keep up the pace of 80 Kanji per month, you will complete the set of about 2,000 Kanji for "common use" in 2 years time. I feel this is a good pace, leaving you with enough time to do other things, and not so high that you start hating your study which is never a good thing.

In conclusion I would recommend you to:

• study Kanji at a pace of 5 new Kanji per day
• take "days off" whenever you feel you can't keep up with the pace
• aim for about 80 new Kanji per month

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