All the tools I’ve seen out there are about learning Kanji Now! Fast! Locking it in your brain forever! Special mnemonic techniques! Learn hundreds of Kanji in a few days, remember them forever!
While it would be lovely to flip a switch and immediately understand another language. These things take time. So I’ll ask the question - what if it took 2 months to learn 1 Kanji?
Not 2 months for every Kanji, just some of them. Some you pick up immediately. Some take weeks. But suppose one took 2 months. Is that bad?
What if taking 2 months was the best way to learn that Kanji? What would that mean for all the special memory techniques out there?
Consider this. You use a special method and get that Kanji in your head. Great. Now what? What can you do with it? How would you use it? How do the Japanese use it?
When you see that Kanji, what do you want to pop into your head? Its English meaning? An English keyword? An English story? All of its ON and KUN readings? A memorized list of Japanese compounds? A photograph from some learning software?
This is a question that I don’t think we ask as language learners. We want the map, the list, the key. We want the Kanji in our head now.
Meanwhile, we don’t do any of that in our native language. We understand the meaning of the words we use because we’ve seen them used six-ways-from-sunday.
We effortlessly use words like “up” and “set” that have hundreds of definitions without a second thought.
Did you memorize all the uses of “set”? Can you even name 20 of them? 10? And yet you can understand every one of them.
You know what pops in my head when I hear the word “set”? Nothing. Not a thing. There is no context. It doesn’t mean anything until a person gives it meaning by putting it in some context. Without context, it means nothing so I think of nothing.
When I listen to someone speak, when I read, I don’t think in words and characters. There is a thought in that person’s head, he wants to get it into mine. The characters, words and grammar are just the carrier signal, nothing more.
So. Why hang so many “things” on each Kanji? Is recalling all that information at will somehow more special than wasting time memorizing all the definitions of “set” and “up”?
Well, I need to know 2000 Kanji to read a Japanese newspaper. No you don’t.
Well, if I’m reading a book and I see a word with Kanji I don’t know, I have to look it up. No you don’t.
I can’t just read any book if I don’t know every word. Yes you can.
I have to read books that are at my reading level. No you don’t.
I built my intuitive unthinking feel for “set” and “up” by reading and hearing those words used. How can I build the same feel for Kanji, for Japanese vocabulary, for Japanese grammar, by avoiding reading until I’ve “learned” all this stuff?
Intuitive unthinking feel. That is what we have in English. That is what we want in Japanese.