Step 3: Start Studying Kanji
Estimated Time to Completion: 6-12 months
Why Study Kanji?
If you’re studying Japanese, at some point you will be encouraged to start learning the Chinese characters adapted for Japanese known as 漢字 (kanji). If this is your first time studying Japanese, then this time is now 😁. You’re welcome!
You won’t be able to avoid kanji if you want to read Japanese manga. But unlike ひらがな (hiragana) and カタカナ (katakana), which have 46 distinct characters each, there are 1000s of kanji that show up in manga. Yikes!
Kanji are commonly used to form verb stems, adjectives, and nouns, which means that they come up a lot in manga. Unless you are reading manga aimed at elementary school children, there’s no avoiding kanji, even when they come with ふりがな (furigana). For instance, in the 5 panels of SPY×FAMILY below, you will encounter 25 kanji (shown in red).
That’s a lot of kanji, considering there’s only 5 sentences. (Well, maybe 7 if we are being charitable.)
The truth is you can get by without studying kanji directly. Sure, you might be limited to reading manga with furigana, at least initially. But honestly, a lot of great manga uses furigana, so you won’t be too limited. If you take this approach, you’ll pick up kanji from the words that use them as a byproduct of reading manga.
But while this approach has worked for some, I don’t recommend it.
Without taking time to study kanji, you will have a much harder time reading manga because you will be at a disadvantage when it comes to learning new words.
Specifically, you’ll be spending more time with the painful drudgery of looking up new words, looking up the same words again more frequently, and taking longer to look words up.
I’ll get into how kanji study can help you understand new words you’ve never seen before (preventing you from looking them up) and help you remember new words more easily (so you don’t look them up as many times). But for now, let’s look at what I consider the main reason you should study kanji: reducing the time spent looking up new words.
Because kanji are so commonly used, you will often need to handle kanji when you are trying to learn a new word. When you encounter unknown words that use kanji, you have two options for looking the word up: (1) rely on the furigana, or (2) look up the word by its kanji.
If you opt for (1), you will be squinting a lot and you’ll have moments where you struggle to look up words because the furigana is hard to read. This is because you’ll need to decipher the furigana to look up words you don’t know. And this can sometimes be difficult.
For instance, do you know how to pronounce 平凡 from the furigana in the first panel in SPY×FAMILY?
It’s kind of hard to read, right?
You might cycle through へいはん, へいばん, へいぱん, and へいほん before you figure out the word is へいぼん, which means “ordinary”.
Alternatively, you can opt for (2) and look up the word by writing out the kanji 平凡 stroke by stroke in your dictionary app. In the case of 平凡 this isn’t terribly difficult.
But writing out kanji when you haven’t studied them can be difficult, especially with more complex kanji like 敵襲.
In contrast, consider how much easier looking up 平凡 is if you learned 平 or 凡 through a separate kanji study. In such a case, you can just look up the kanji you know, like 平, and then scroll through common words that use 平 until you find 平凡.
It’s even better if you already learned 凡, because 平凡 is one of the most common words using 凡:
While I’m a fan of jumping into reading manga as soon as possible, doing so without also starting a dedicated kanji study is signing up for a painful slog. One that will last until you have learned to recognize over 2000 kanji—a long time.
Spending more time looking up words may seem like a trivial concern, but this “trivial” concern adds up. Instead of learning Japanese, your precious time will be taken up with avoidable inefficiencies that can slowly destroy your ability to enjoy the manga you are reading.
The irony is that while learning the kanji can look like an unnecessary time suck, it not only will remove these inefficiencies around looking up words, it will actually speed along your progress.
Studying Kanji Means Learning Kanji Keywords
Now that you know why to study kanji. But what does studying kanji even mean? Unlike hiragana and katakana, kanji are normally associated with multiple sounds, with multiple words, and with multiple meanings. And the particulars of each kanji depend on whether the kanji is used alone or in conjunction with other kanji.
Because so much information is associated with individual kanji, “studying kanji” can mean a lot of different things. For instance, kanji study could involve learning how to write each kanji out with the proper stroke order.
Kanji study could also entail the learning of the different sounds—the 訓読み (kunyomi) and the 音読み (onyomi)—that are associated with each kanji.
But fundamentally, all kanji study relies on learning one or more meanings associated with the Chinese characters themselves. These are “kanji keywords,” and every kanji study involves learning at least one keyword for each kanji. For example, the kanji keyword for “水” is “water.”
While all kanji study is intended to help you identify and remember kanji, learning kanji keywords should be your main focus if you want to read manga. That’s because knowing kanji keywords will accelerate your ability to learn new Japanese words.
Kanji Keywords Help You Learn New Words
When you know kanji keywords, you will gain two distinct advantages when it comes to learning new Japanese words.
The first advantage is that kanji keywords give you a memory aid, which reduces the amount of time it takes to learn a new word. If you are learning a new word that is made of multiple kanji, you can often use the characters as a memory aid for picking up the word itself.
For instance, if you know that “曜” means “day of the week,” then “水曜,” which means “Wednesday” is made of two characters you know. That allows you to come up with a memory aid like “water day of the week” equals “水曜” equals Wednesday because “water” and “Wednesday” both begin with “w.”
This memory aid feature of kanji study is GOLD, because you need all the help you can get to remember new words. After all, this isn’t Spanish where you get the benefit of a shared linguistic root. You’ll need every bit of help you can get to remember new words.
The second advantage is that kanji keywords can often help you guess the meaning of a word based on its kanji alone, even if it’s the first time you encounter the word. If the memory aid is GOLD, guessing a word from kanji and context is PLATINUM.
For instance, if you know the kanji “海” means “sea,” then you might guess on your first go that “海水” means “seawater.”
This is great news, because if you can figure out what a word means without looking it up, then you avoid the painful and time-consuming step of having to search in a dictionary to look up the word.
Instead, you can rely on the kanji keywords and context to figure out what is going on. And because you will be reading manga with furigana to start, you’ll have all the info you need—the pronunciation and meaning—to pick up these new Japanese words without having to pick up the dictionary.
If you are still struggling to grasp the benefits of what kanji study can do to accelerate your ability to learn new Japanese words, imagine how much faster you could have learned English if you already knew the common Latin and Greek derivatives used in English.
For example, you would know from Latin that “aqua” means “water.” So when you encounter the words “aquarium,” “aquatic,” “aquifer,” and “aqueduct,” you would immediately know that each has something to do with water. In this way, knowing the meaning of the Latin derivative breaks down the difficulty of learning entire families of new words and accelerates your acquisition of vocabulary.
If you keep the benefits of kanji study in mind, it should be clear that learning kanji keywords is worth your time. I have learned many, many words just by reading the furigana, guessing the meaning from the kanji and context, and continuing with reading manga without the speed bump of pulling out the dictionary.
However, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees when you study kanji if you don’t keep your goal—learning to read manga—in mind.
Don’t Study Anything Other Than Kanji Keywords
As you now know, the primary benefit of kanji study comes from learning kanji keywords (e.g., “火” means “fire”). But here’s something most people don’t know—learning kanji keywords is the ONLY thing that matters if your goal is to read manga. That’s because everything else you can study about kanji won’t help you read manga or pick up new words any faster.
Studying anything else is a waste of your time.
For instance, it’s easy to find yourself studying the kunyomi and onyomi that go with each kanji because these often appear in pre-made kanji flashcards or in kanji study guides, like the Kodansha Kanji Learners Course:
Ignore this extra information and instead focus only on learning kanji keywords.
Once you start reading manga, you’ll naturally learn the onyomi and kunyomi as a native speaker would through contextual reading of native Japanese. And that process will start sooner if you focus only on learning kanji keywords.
Avoid Learning Mnemonics, Radicals, and Stroke Order
While it might be obvious that learning kunyomi and onyomi are not worth your time, it’s still easy to study more than is necessary to learn kanji keywords. That’s because the mainstream advice is that you need to learn the radicals, the stroke order, and a mnemonic story for each kanji to help you learn kanji keywords.
This is the approach popularized by Heisig in Remembering the Kanji, and shows up in the Kodansha Kanji Learners Course as well. But if your goal is to read manga, this extra effort will be a tremendous waste of your time. While some people may have found Heisig’s approach to be useful for learning the kanji, I can assure you that the method is overkill and unnecessarily slow.
The problem with the Heisig approach is not its efficacy. The problem is the degree of memory building it strives for.
Heisig’s approach is aimed at helping students to remember how to write kanji by hand. This necessarily requires learning to reproduce the subcomponents of each kanji on command.
In that case, Heisig’s approach makes sense. Without a systematic approach, the sheer complexity of some kanji and the subtle differences between nearly identical kanji will make it exceedingly difficult to remember how to write kanji correctly. Just try writing 憂鬱(ゆううつ) and you’ll see what I mean.
But your goal is to learn to read kanji in manga. This is an entirely different endeavor from writing kanji.
Where writing kanji requires you to reproduce a kanji stroke-by-stroke from memory, reading kanji only requires you to recognize a kanji in context.
Unlike studying kanji for reproduction, which requires a perfect recollection of the radicals and the stroke order to write kanji, studying for recognition merely requires identifying the kanji as a whole.
You can learn to recognize different kanji even if you can’t perfectly reproduce them in writing, just as you can recognize your friend’s face even if you can’t reproduce it in a sketch.
Learning how to reproduce kanji is a time-intensive endeavor. So if your goal is to read manga, you don’t need to practice stroke order or learn kanji radicals.
You also shouldn’t learn mnemonics for each kanji.
While mnemonics are general-purpose memory aids, Heisig advocates learning specific mnemonics for every kanji. This allows you to reproduce a kanji by recalling its constituent subcomponents.
Heisig’s mnemonics are stories that connect the radicals to a kanji’s keyword. For instance, the kanji “亡” with the keyword “deceased” is described through a mnemonic narrative involving the radicals “hook” and “top hat”:
While memory aids can be great when used appropriately, your goal is not to learn which radicals go with which kanji keywords. Your goal is to learn that the keyword for “亡” is “deceased.”
Because Heisig’s mnemonics only help you connect radicals to kanji keywords, mnemonics are generally a poor use of your time.
So just learn that the keyword for “亡” is “deceased.” That’s all you need to know to read manga faster.
Remember the reason you are studying kanji in the first place—to make reading manga easier. Your goal, your singular goal with kanji study, is to learn kanji keywords to help you pick up Japanese words with ease.
Don’t slow yourself down trying to pick up unnecessary information about each kanji.
And don’t slow yourself down by studying kanji for reproduction.
Study kanji for recognition.
If you do, the time you save and the rate you learn kanji keywords will astound you.
Study One Kanji Keyword for Each Kanji
Your goal with kanji study is to learn kanji keywords for each kanji. With many of the early kanji you encounter, this is often a straightforward task. For example, everywhere you look you will find that “水” means “water,” and that “火” means “fire”.
But many kanji have multiple keywords, and these keywords often are ambiguous. For example, The Kodansha Kanji Learners Course teaches that “流” has 3 different keywords.
And these keywords are different if you look in the Shirabe Jisho app:
To make matters worse, the shared keyword “current” is ambiguous if you learned it in isolation with “流”. Is this “current” as in a “swift-flowing current”? Or “current” as in “current events”?
Should you try to learn all the kanji keywords for each kanji? And if not, how do you choose which one to learn? The answer to these questions matters because you will be signing up for a lot of work when you encounter kanji like “運,” which has a multitude of keywords including “carry,” “luck,” “destiny,” “fate,” “lot,” “transport,” “progress,” and “advance.”
At first it may seem wise to pick up all the keywords because this extra knowledge can help you learn more words more easily. For instance, knowing all the keywords for “運” can help you remember “運” means “luck” and “運ぶ” means “to carry.”
But to get the benefit of multiple keywords, you will have to increase the scope and difficulty of your kanji study, as studying a single kanji would require you to perfectly recall all of its keywords. That’s a tall order and a daunting task for the thousands of kanji you will need to learn. While knowing all of a kanji’s keywords is great in theory, in practice this approach will make your kanji study boring and frustrating, and likely derail your Japanese study altogether.
More importantly, the extra benefit provided by learning more than one keyword for each kanji is just not worth it.
That’s because all you need to know is one keyword per kanji to start recognizing individual kanji when you are reading manga, which is ultimately how you will leave the furigana behind. And if your keyword is chosen well (i.e., it maps onto the most common words using that kanji), then you will already be gaining the major benefit of kanji study—picking up new Japanese words with ease.
Remember, it’s much better to learn that a kanji has another keyword associated with it by looking up a new word as you read manga than by needlessly extending your kanji study. So just learn that “運” means “carry” OR that “運” means “luck” and move on to your next kanji.
By committing to learning only a single keyword per kanji, your kanji study will progress as quickly and as effectively as possible.
But this begs the question: how do you choose which keyword to learn? Why decide to learn that “運” means “carry” rather than “luck”? For the most part, the specific keyword you choose to learn doesn’t matter—all that matters is that you choose one keyword.
But to gain the most benefits from your kanji study, it’s best if you can choose keywords that are useful and easy to remember. In practice, this means you should choose to learn kanji keywords that are distinct, clear, and commonly used.
Choose Kanji Keywords That Are Distinct
Learning a distinct keyword for each kanji is important because doing otherwise will make it difficult to keep different kanji straight.
If you learn the same keyword for multiple kanji it will be harder to keep these kanji distinct in your mind because they will be conceptually entangled. This will in turn make it harder for you to remember these kanji and make the keywords less useful than when you start reading manga.
For instance, both “顔” and “面” have the keyword “face,” but it would be better to keep these kanji keywords distinct by choosing to learn a different keyword for each of them.
Finding a distinct keyword for each kanji is almost always possible. Even when kanji have supposedly identical keywords, they are ultimately used in words. And because words are always chosen for particular contexts, all kanji—even kanji that share keywords—will have slightly different connotations.
For instance, “顔” is often associated with a human face, while “面” has a more general usage, such as in “face of the earth.” That’s why I recommend learning the keyword “surface” for “面,” and “face” for “顔”. Doing so differentiates these two kanji in a way that reflects their actual usage and allows you to learn distinct keywords for “顔” and “面.”
Review Example Vocabulary to Clarify Kanji Keywords
Choosing distinct kanji keywords is not enough: you need to also make sure the keyword you are learning is clear to you. A clear keyword is important because abstract or ambiguous keywords will be difficult to remember. More importantly, if the keyword conveys a concept that isn’t clear to you, it won’t provide that helpful context that allows you to pick up new Japanese words when you are reading manga.
Take for example, “歴,” which contains the keyword “curriculum” in many dictionaries:
However, “curriculum” is an ambiguous keyword because it can mean multiple things. For instance, curriculum” can be used in the sense of a school curriculum—the subjects you study in school. But in the case of “歴”, “curriculum” is meant in the sense of “curriculum vitae”—a personal record of career, qualifications, and education.
If you mistakenly assumed “curriculum” referred to school subjects, you would miss out on the benefit of the keyword. That’s because you would likely fail to see the connection between the keyword and the relevant Japanese words that use “歴” in the intended sense of “curriculum”. And that means the keyword would not be acting as a helpful memory aid.
Remember, kanji keywords are most helpful as memory aids when they are related to the meaning of new words. So unclear keywords will hinder your ability to pick up new words. And this can add up when you consider that many words may rely on a single keyword.
For instance, all of the following common words use “歴” in a way that a clear understanding of the keyword “curriculum” could help you remember:
- “履歴書,” which means “resume”
- “学歴,” which means “academic record”
- “経歴,” which means “career”
- “前歴,” which means “[one’s] past record”
- “職歴,” which means “work history”
- “略歴,” which means “brief personal history”
Unfortunately, most kanji keywords are ambiguous or abstract. That means you won’t be able to study kanji keywords blindly and expect to reap the benefits when you start reading manga. Instead, you will need to make sure that you learn kanji keywords in a way that makes their meaning clear.
As the example with 歴 shows, sometimes a little context can go a long way in clarifying the meaning of a kanji keyword. That’s why the best way to clarify the meaning of kanji keywords is to make sure you study them alongside example vocabulary. For example, Kodansha Kanji Learners Course includes example vocabulary that illustrates the meaning of kanji keywords:
You might be concerned that reviewing example vocabulary would prolong your kanji study because it increases the amount of information you study for each kanji. But in reality, studying kanji keywords alongside example vocabulary does the opposite—it helps you learn kanji keywords faster. That’s because example vocabulary will make abstract and ambiguous keywords concrete. And concrete concepts are easier to remember.
For instance, it is relatively difficult to learn that the keyword for “詞” is “part of speech”, because “part of speech” is a somewhat abstract concept. However, if you study “詞” along with the words “動詞,” which means “verb,” and “名詞,” which means “noun,” the kanji keyword will be easier to remember.
So make sure that you review illustrative example vocabulary when studying kanji to clarify the keywords you are learning. Doing so will speed your kanji study and ensure it is time well spent.
Choose Kanji Keywords That Are Commonly Used
The last point to keep in mind is that even if you can learn clear and distinct kanji keywords, you want the keyword you choose should be commonly used. Unless a kanji keyword is used in commonly occurring vocabulary, it will not be a useful keyword to learn.
So, if a particular kanji keyword is used only with uncommon words, don’t learn it. Sometimes, this will require you to learn the most common word that uses the kanji as your keyword.
For instance, “昭” has the meanings “shining” and “bright,” but no common Japanese words use these kanji keywords. Instead, all common words using “昭” refer to the “昭和時代(しょうわじだい)” or Shōwa Period (1926-1989).
So when you learn “昭,” it is much more useful to learn the keyword “Shōwa Period” than “shining” or “bright” because that is how you will see this kanji most frequently used in practice.
This same rule applies to the example vocabulary you review as well: only choose common words to provide context to a kanji keyword. You’ll be missing out on obtaining a useful word and be risking learning a keyword that is not useful.
The Amount of Kanji to Study
Now that you know how to study kanji, the next question is how many kanji do you need to study?
The answer is simple—the amount that is useful to know. Kanji are not created equally. Some show up on almost every panel of manga, while others may only show up once in an entire series. For illustration, let’s take a look back at the kanji that appeared in the excerpt from SPY×FAMILY I showed earlier:
If you count, you’ll find that there are 25 kanji in these five panels. However, only 21 different kanji appear because 目, 立, 子, and 手 show up twice. If we look at the frequency rank—how commonly a kanji shows up in written Japanese relative to other kanji—you’ll find that each of these 21 different kanji show up frequently in written Japanese:
| Number | Kanji | Frequency Rank |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 目 | 76 |
| 2 | 立 | 58 |
| 3 | 普 | 757 |
| 4 | 通 | 80 |
| 5 | 演 | 267 |
| 6 | 真 | 279 |
| 7 | 髄 | 1652 |
| 8 | 見 | 22 |
| 9 | 平 | 128 |
| 10 | 凡 | 1730 |
| 11 | 父 | 646 |
| 12 | 子 | 72 |
| 13 | 小 | 114 |
| 14 | 手 | 60 |
| 15 | 片 | 1076 |
| 16 | 塞 | 2084 |
| 17 | 敵 | 1205 |
| 18 | 襲 | 1130 |
| 19 | 備 | 356 |
| 20 | 仕 | 439 |
| 21 | 方 | 46 |
Note that the least frequently occurring kanji is 塞, which is the 2084th most commonly occurring kanji. Does this mean you should study at least 2084 kanji?
Actually, 2084 kanji is about all the kanji you should study, because once you get past the first 2000 kanji, the remaining kanji show up only rarely. As shown below, with 2000 kanji under your belt, you will know almost 99% of all kanji that show up in manga.
| Kanji | Newspapers | Magazines |
|---|---|---|
| Top 100 Most Frequent | 40.2% of all Kanji | 37.1% of all Kanji |
| Top 500 Most Frequent | 79.4% of all Kanji | 74.5% of all Kanji |
| Top 1000 Most Frequent | 93.9% of all Kanji | 90.0% of all Kanji |
| Top 1500 Most Frequent | 98.4% of all Kanji | 96.6% of all Kanji |
| Top 2000 Most Frequent | 99.6% of all Kanji | 98.6% of all Kanji |
For the graphically inclined, the image below shows the percentage of kanji used in Japanese magazines as a function of the number of kanji. (The dotted line represents magazines in general, and the solid line represents a selection of 90 women’s magazines):
As you can see, you are north of 95% of the kanji used in magazines at 2000 kanji. Studying significantly more than 2000 kanji will not be a good use of your time because such kanji rarely occur. And that means they will not help you pick up many commonly used words.
My recommendation is to not go beyond the 2136 kanji characters that are officially designated as commonly used, or 常用漢字 (jōyō kanji). If you go through the Japanese education system, you will study 1026 of these jōyō kanji by the time you complete elementary school—教育漢字 (kyōiku kanji)—and round out the remaining 1110 by the time you complete high school. Since these are the kanji studied by native speakers, it makes sense to limit your study to these kanji as well.
One last thing to keep in mind: don’t be surprised when you see kanji you don’t know when reading manga. Knowing 99% of kanji that appear in manga sounds like a lot until you consider how many kanji show up. Remember, if 25 kanji show up per page of manga, on average you should expect to encounter a kanji you haven’t studied once every four pages.
When you run into words using rare kanji, don’t sweat it. Just look up the word as you would with any word and move on. There’s no need to “collect” rare kanji.
The Order In Which You Should Learn Kanji
Now that you know how to study kanji and the amount of kanji to study, the last thing to figure out is which kanji to learn first and what order to follow. This is a somewhat trickier question. On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter the order you choose, as long as you end up studying the relevant kanji.
But at the end of the day, you want to learn the kanji in the most useful order. For the most part, it is most useful to prioritize learning kanji by how frequently they occur in native Japanese, as these are the kanji you will see the most often. But frequency of use is not the only point that matters—a competing concern is learning kanji in an order that makes them easier to remember, which will minimize the time you spend studying kanji.
That’s why it is actually most useful to first study the 1026 kyōiku kanji in the order taught in Japanese elementary school, which is designed to be easy to remember, before learning the remaining 1110 jōyō kanji in order of frequency rank.
The kyōiku kanji order makes it easy to learn new kanji by grouping kanji that have related keywords.
For instance, the first characters taught in elementary school are the numbers one through ten, starting with “一” (“one”), “二,” (“two”) and “三” (“three”). Other smart ordering includes teaching kanji with keywords that are conceptual opposites, such as “大” and “小,” with keywords “big” and “small.” The kyōiku kanji also prioritizes kanji with unambiguous keywords, like “口” (“mouth”) and “川” (“river”), which are easier to remember because they represent concrete concepts.
As these examples show, the kyōiku kanji study order itself makes kanji easy to remember. While this order does not teach kanji in the order of frequency rank, it will allow you to get through your kanji study more quickly and start benefitting from your kanji knowledge while you read manga, which is the goal.
However, once you learn the kyōiku kanji, it is best to prioritize the remaining kanji by frequency of occurrence, not by the official ordering of the Japanese education system. This is because the official jōyō kanji order begins to teach words that are “nice-to-haves” over essential kanji in an attempt to retain smart ordering.
In fact, you will begin to see that you learn some markedly less useful kanji in order to get the benefits of smart ordering even as you approach the end of the kyōiku kanji. For instance, in Grade 6 (the final kyōiku grade) you will learn “蚕” (“silkworm”). This is the 2272th most frequent kanji, and barely worth learning as it so rarely shows up. Meanwhile, you will not yet have learned “違” (“difference”), which is the 344th most frequently occurring kanji.
Because the benefits of smart ordering are outweighed by the costs of avoiding common kanji, it’s best to avoid studying kanji in jōyō order after you learn the first 1026 kanji. Starting with your 1027th kanji, you should begin prioritizing by frequency of occurrence as this will then be the most useful order to continue your study.
Where to Study Kanji
If you want to learn kanji in the way I describe here, then I strongly recommend using the Ashiba app.
There are a number of popular resources out there, including Remembering the Kanji, Kodansha Kanji Learners Course, Anki decks that incorporate the information from these textbooks, and the app WaniKani by Tofugu. However, each of these resources has its shortcomings.
Kodansha Kanji Learners Course has all the information you would need, but their example vocabulary often includes uncommon words. Remembering the Kanji lacks example vocabulary altogether. And WaniKani requires you to study kanji radicals, memorize mnemonics, and learn keywords that are not tied to common vocabulary.
Many people have used these resources to learn kanji. And many people have also used these resources and burned out their desire to learn Japanese altogether—myself included.
I originally trudged through Kodansha Kanji Learners Course in 2008 and quit learning Japanese after learning the kyōiku kanji. I had tried to learn all the information about each kanji—onyomi, kunyomi, mnemonics, stroke order, example vocabulary—and it was too much. In 2016 I started learning Japanese again and I used Anki with kanji cards based on Remembering the Kanji. This time I made it through the jōyō kanji, which took another full year.
But then I found that most of the keywords I had learned were unhelpful when reading manga because they were unclear, as they lacked context from example vocabulary.
Finding a sustainable way to learn kanji is no small feat. So beware before you commit to popular options.
The Ashiba app is not free, but it will save you time, prevent you from burning out on kanji study, and prove effective when you start reading manga. I’ve selected each kanji keyword to be distinct, included example vocabulary alongside each kanji for clarity, and ensured all keywords are tied to commonly used vocabulary.
But regardless of what resource you use to learn kanji, make sure that the keywords you learn are useful and clear. Doing so will pay dividends in your ability to remember the kanji you study, and in your ability to pick up Japanese words when you begin reading manga.