How To Remembering Japanese Characters

Now a day’s everyone wants to learn another language but the main thing stopping them is where to start and how to manage their time. I myself have been on the journey of learning five other languages so I understand what it’s like to be so overwhelmed with languages. One language that I wanted to learn at some point that I'm going to talk about today is going to be Japanese. A great place to start would be remembering Japanese characters. It’s always good to know the written form of a language especially if you’re going there to travel or in order to clarify things that you don’t understand verbally but might written wise.

So in Japanese there is combination of about three writing systems. Those are kanji, hiragana, and katakana.

(This is a Kanji chart used by 2^nd graders from kanjiproduct.blogspot.com)

(This a list of Hiragana pronunciations)

 

(This a list of Katakana pronunciations)

 Kanji is by far the most difficult writing system in Japanese since it based on a memorization of characters that were based on the Chinese language. Hiragana is mainly used to write grammatical markers and endings that cannot be found in Kanji. Whereas katakana is used to write foreign words that have been adapted in the Japanese language like computers and systems.
Now in order to remember these characters you must grasp the use of stroke order, which is the way characters are written.  When writing a character you must begin at the top then go down from left to right. Not only will it help you with writing characters correctly but you’ll be able to have a better memorization of the characters. For example, let’s take the number 4 in Japanese and write its stroke order.

You notice how the character goes from the left up then the right down? This is how most characters are written. This is also Kanji by the way but don’t worry about remembering all Kanji (there’s like 40,000 kanji to remember) but the most basic one’s like numbers is a must. I prefer learning Kanji from textbooks but I like most am on a budget so I go hunting for my material on eBay where I can find $30 textbooks for only $10 sometimes. For example a  book  I’ve been looking to buy lately called “Crazy for Kanji: A Student's Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters” sales for about $19 dollars on average but I found it eBay for $8.77 WITH free shipping!

I hope you guys found my guide interesting! Happy language learning!