How does NativShark teach kanji?

The Japanese writing system has 3 types of characters: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

Hiragana and katakana represent the sounds of Japanese.

Kanji represent ideas and are used to make words.

Maybe kanji is a scary word for you. Maybe this is your first time seeing it. Or maybe you think they're beautiful and you want to stare at them all day.

Wherever you may find yourself in regards to kanji, there are many ways to learn them without it becoming a stressful experience

We do a few things to ensure that kanji stick with you.

Kanji elements

Kanji are made of elements. One or more elements may come together to form a kanji.

Sometimes, elements can be kanji by themselves, and sometimes they only help build other kanji and do not mean anything on their own.

This means kanji can be broken down and understood.

With this in mind, let's take a look at 歌:

The kanji 歌 (song; sing) is actually made up using three other kanji: 可 (passable; acceptable) (which appears twice) and 欠 (lack).

Let's break this one down.

First, on the left side, we have two of the same kanji above one another:

可 can have a few meanings depending on what words we use it in, but when we use it as an element to build up other kanji, we just use passable for the sake of simplicity.

So we have two 可 (passable) kanji on the left side of 歌 (sing; song).

What's more, 可 can be broken down even further:

口 (mouth) and 丁 (neighborhood) are simple enough that we can remember them by sight, exposure to lots of Japanese, and patience.

This is easier to do when we tie them to vocabulary, all of which NativShark does for you by default.

Learning kanji

You might be a bit worried about being able to keep track of everything, looking at the above.

Thankfully, there are many methods we can use to our advantage when it comes to keeping track of all of these 2,200+ kanji in our brains.

The first:

A deep breath.

Learning Japanese to a high level of proficiency is a long process. It's going to take years.

This means that there is no rush to perfectly memorize everything as soon as possible.

When going through NativShark, we introduce kanji to you early on to get you used to seeing them how they're used in real life.

You don't have to worry about memorizing them, that will come naturally in time thanks to the next techniques.

There is also a lot to be said about mindset when approaching anything involving learning. If you firmly believe that you can't do it, then you're going to act in a way that makes you right.

Thankfully, if you convince yourself that you can do it, you'll subconsciously act to make that true. So the first step is to tell yourself you can do it, even if you don't quite believe it at first.

The second:

Mnemonics.

In short, mnemonics are short stories that we make based on the elements of a given kanji that help in memorizing the English representations of a given kanji.

You tie the elements into a short story, about a sentence long. This story includes all of the elements and leads you to the English representation.

Here's an example of this with the above kanji and elements in mind:

欠 (lack) is made up of 人 (person), which is a kanji in and of itself, and 勹 (wrap), which is simply a building block, not a standalone kanji.

The meaning of wrap for 勹 is based on its use among the kanji it's found in. Namely, it appears in 包 (wrap; cover), which is a combination of 勹 and 己 (self).

Let's make a mnemonic for 欠 (lack) using 人 (person) and 勹 (wrap):

📚

A person is wrapped in a blanket when they lack heat.

With that, we're now able to make a mnemonic for 歌 (song; sing), which uses 可 (passable; acceptable) and 欠 (lack):

📚

Two judges say it is passable, and one says something is lacking after they listen to your singing.

Note that it doesn't matter that we use "singing" in the mnemonic above instead of "song" or "sing."

With that said, mnemonics are only good for getting the English representation in our head, not any Japanese.

They mainly just warm us up for the real learning. And that happens in...

Context and Vocabulary

Breaking kanji down as we did above helps us to sort the general idea of a given kanji in our heads.

This is not the only step.

The biggest factor for deeply understanding kanji is seeing them in words and context.

As we learn words, we also learn the kanji that make them up.

We won't need to rely on mnemonics and elements in time. Eventually, we'll be recognizing kanji just by their shape and the context (words, sentences, places) in which we see them.

In fact, every learner on the NativShark team has forgotten all of the mnemonics they learned kanji with.

That knowledge has been replaced with vocabulary.

After you get comfortable with a certain kanji and a piece of vocab it is found in, feel free to forget your mnemonic as well!