300 Kanji in 30 Days — How to Study
Now, let’s talk about how you’ll actually be using kanji Flow to study everyday. I’m gonna give you my basic recommendations for studying and then, as you grow more accustomed to it, you can, of course, start doing things your own way.
I’ll try to make videos for the more complicated stuff just in case you need to see a walk through.
We need to change a couple of settings before we start.
Go back to your home screen and then load the Settings app. Scroll down and find kanji Flow near the bottom and select it.
Under Max Cards, slide the slider all the way to the left. This means that our maximum number of cards for Flow study sessions won’t be limited.
Scroll down and turn Write Examples First under Contextual Study off. This will allow us to study in a more systematic manner.
When you’re done with Settings, head back to the app.
Shared Lessons
In the Getting Started video we weren’t using a real Japanese lesson so I think it might’ve been difficult to see how the app really works. So, let’s get a real lesson with actual kanji and use it to learn how to study.
Tap Lesson List and then select Shared Lessons (you’ll need to be connected to the internet for this to work). Go to the search bar and search for Remembering… for now we just want to get the intro lesson so tap on that one and then tap Download. Once that’s complete, you can head back to the Lesson List and then tap on the lesson to open it.
Study Sessions
First of all, let’s make a quick change in options. Tap Options and set Kana Style to w/Kanji. This will make the card’s Kana entry and Kanji Entry appear together with only one tap. This might sound a bit confusing now but it’ll make sense once we actually start studying.
Tap Study. You’ll notice that you’re only getting 10 new cards in the Flow option. I think 10 new cards a day is a good amount when you’re starting out. If you’re an upper beginner or lower intermediate level Japanese user, you’ll probably already know a lot of the kanji that you’re going to be seeing anyway so it really shouldn’t be too much of a burden.
Once you really get going, I think 10 a day might be too much. I personally do 4 new kanji a day. I’m usually pretty busy on weekends so, while I definitely review the kanji I’ve already studied every day, (and you have to as well) I only add new kanji 5 days a week. That’s about 1000 characters a year. Efficient enough for me and not at all stressful. My study sessions only take about 25 minutes a day even though I currently have about 1200 characters in my active study list.
I’ve heard that some people do as many as 100 new kanji a day. That’s great if you can do it but what’s the rush? It must be really stressful. I think it’s best to keep it simple and easy so that you don’t get fatigued.
You should never feel fatigue or pain or any other kind negative feelings when you’re learning to do something. Pain and negativity will cause you to give up. You should always finish thinking, “I could do more than that.” And you will…tomorrow.
Keywords
Anyway, go ahead and select Flow. The first thing you’re going to see is a keyword. There should be one keyword associated with each kanji that you study. You will use these keywords as the components of the stories you’re going to create in order to memorize what the kanji look like. I have put in all of the default keywords for each kanji from the Remembering the Kanji book.
Sometimes, you’re going to disagree with the keyword. You’re going to think, “Well, yeah, this kanji is for mouth but the meaning is actually something more like orifice or opening.” Okay, fine. Change it. Tap Edit and then change it to whatever you want (just be sure to tap Save). It’s also totally fine to associate more than one keyword with a kanji if necessary (and you will be doing this for some of the more common primitives) but the key is to not let things get too complicated.
Try to keep it simple.
Mechanical Studying
Okay, so, how do you actually study new kanji? This is how I do it. I see the keyword and I say it out loud. If you’re on the bus or in a cafe and can’t speak out loud, that’s okay; just actively say it to yourself in your head. Tap the top section on the right half of the screen (tapping the left side will move you backwards through a card’s examples and tapping the right side moves you forward) and it’ll move on to the story for this kanji. Read the story out loud. The story for mouth is really simple because the the kanji is really simple. Things will get a bit more complicated as we go on.
Tap the center or bottom section and the card’s readings and the kanji will appear. Write the kanji down (yeah, you should have a pen and paper when you’re studying). As you write the kanji, say the story to yourself. If you don’t have a pen and paper handy or if you’re on the bus or something, just use your finger to write the kanji on the palm of your hand. Or at the very least, go through the mental process of imagining yourself writing each stroke in your head. What if you don’t know the correct stroke order? Tap the center again and then select imiwa?
Whoops…you might not get the kanji. Okay, let’s change a few imiwa? settings to make sure it’s working the way we need it to.
imiwa? Options
Open the hamburger menu (the three lines in the upper left) and then tap the gear for settings. Turn off any languages that you don’t need. I recommend turning off Auto search clipboard because it can be a bit annoying if you use the pasteboard a lot like I do. Turn on Recent at top (lists). And turn on Inline kanjis. Turn off all of the romaji; you don’t need it and if you think you do, then please stop. You really shouldn’t be using romaji if you’re serious about mastering kanji. I also recommend turning off any of the Readings, Character Sets, Look-up Codes, and References that you don’t need just to keep things cleaner.
Okay, then tap done. Go back to the dictionary. Tap the search bar and then search again (the kanji you searched for will be at the top of the recent searches list). Now we’ll get the kanji entry at the top. Select it and you’ll get to see the stroke order for the kanji.
If you’re having trouble with stroke order, check out Tofugu’s guide on the subject. Stroke order, like the characters themselves, are systematic. Just try to understand the system and you’ll find yourself having to worry about proper stroke order a lot less. You’ll probably still need to check sometimes, though.
Write it down.
If it’s a complicated kanji and you feel like you need to, you can go ahead and write it a couple of times or 5 or 10 times. Whatever you feel like is necessary for you. If you really don’t feel like writing kanji no matter what, that’s okay and it’s totally up to you. However, I really recommend that you do it. I know that you don’t need to be able to write kanji these days but I feel like the mechanical activity of actually writing the kanji will help you to internalize it more quickly. Mouth is really easy but things are going to get more complicated rather quickly and we want to build good study habits right from the start, so get to writing. When you’re done, go back to kanji Flow.
Tap the top section again (on the right half of the screen) and it’ll show you an example word. If you don’t know what the example means tap the hint button to get the translation. Don’t worry about trying to memorize new words or trying to double-up your kanji studies with studying vocabulary…don’t try to memorize the example. Just look at the word and understand that this kanji is used to write it. Say the example word.
Say it out loud.
If you think your pronunciation isn’t good, long press on the word and then select Speak. Listen to and repeat the word as many times as necessary. This is a computer generated voice but you can still get a better idea of how to say the word, in general. Tap done when you’re good to go. Tap again to get the next example word. Say it. Rinse. Repeat.
You only need to do this mechanical, active study style when you’re studying completely new kanji. Once you’ve got it pretty well memorized, it’s enough to just go through the process of recalling the kanji from memory. If you’re confident that you know a kanji very well, just recall it and then swipe it right. If you’re not quite so confident, re-read the story, write the character down while thinking about the story and each component, and then maybe look over a couple of examples.
I tried to put in common examples that include each of the kanji’s different readings. If there’s a common verb or adjective associated with the kanji, that’ll usually be an example as well. Go through the examples like this until you get back to the keyword. Say it again.
If you think you understand this kanji, no problems, swipe it right. If you aren’t sure, swipe it up and try it again tomorrow. If you think this kanji is kind of difficult and you don’t really know it, swipe it left. I think mouth is pretty easy so I’m gonna swipe it right.
Kanji Stories and Using Kanji Koohii
Hmm…now let’s say you don’t like a story. You need to like it. The story needs to be interesting to you so that it’s easy for you to remember. If it’s not interesting, make up a different story. Some people like to make up stories associated with something they know a lot about like baseball, music, or computer programming. Some people like to make up funny stories. Some people like to only use erotic stories. Whatever works for you is what you should use. I just put in possibilities for each kanji. If you know that you don’t like the example story I put in for but you also can’t come up with anything interesting yourself, let’s get some inspiration. Tap the center again to get the alert menu you used to open imiwa? but this time select Kanji Koohii.
The first time you select this you’ll need to sign-in or create an account if you don’t already have one. Once you create an account and sign-in (make sure you select Keep me logged in) you should stay signed in for good unless you do something like reset your device or reinstall the app. Tap done and then tap the center again and this time when you tap Kanji Koohii, you’ll actually get some results.
You’ll see a lot of stories from other users that you can copy or simply use to inspire a story you create yourself. If you like a story, long press to copy it. Once you’ve got the story you like copied, tap done to go back to kanji Flow and then tap the Example button in the lower left and then tap import. Once you’ve got your new story in there, tap edit to slide the story up to the top, then delete the other one and tap done.
The Remembering the Kanji Intro lesson has an example story for all 294 cards. Once you transition to the real, 3000 card lesson; you’ll have to come up with your own stories so it’s a good idea to get used to using Kanji Koohii and adding stories now.
Now just keep going through your cards, actively thinking about the keyword, story, components, and example words…speaking of examples…what if you don’t like the ones I chose? What if there’s a word that you closely associate with a kanji because you use it or run into it a lot? You should definitely be using that word instead of the ones I chose. Remember, this should be personal and customized to make it as easy as possible for you to memorize these characters.
Adding Examples
Tap the Example button in the lower left and scroll down. You can add the examples from the database into your examples list by just tapping on them. Generally speaking, you’ll find up to 8 common words for each kanji in the database. The commonality for these words is based partly from a corpus of Japanese newspapers so there might be some newspaper words that actually aren’t so common in everyday-spoken language, so do be a bit careful.
If the kanji isn’t so widely used, there may be some words here that really aren’t so common or that are actually usually only written using hiragana. And if the kanji is really quite rare, there might not be any words at all. When you run into kanji like this, you’ll usually find out that there probably is some use for it. It’s used in some very specialized word like the name of an era in Japanese history or it’s used to write a place name or it’s used in a person’s name. If you want to, you can hop on Google or Wikipedia and try to find something that you can use as an example. You can do a Google Image search from the same menu you access imiwa? and Kanji Koohii from, if you’re interested. If you don’t care, you can just leave it without any examples and that’ll tell you this kanji is just being used as a component or primitive. It’s entirely up to you.
If you don’t like any of the examples in the database then you can open up imiwa? and see if you can find some better examples there. If you find a word or two that you like or are more familiar with, you can tap on the word and, after opening the export menu using the share button in the upper right, tap Copy for the first word you like and then Copy and Add for any subsequent words. Head back to kanji Flow and tap Import. Delete any of the default examples that you didn’t like. I think I put in examples for about the first 50 kanji or so…after that, you’ll have to get your own examples. Remember, just tap to add them from the database on the examples menu or copy some from the imiwa? dictionary.
I recommend that you only have a couple of examples for each word so that you aren’t spending too much time going through them as you study. Again, don’t try to use this as a way to study new vocabulary. Our focus here is the kanji. You can worry about studying new words after you’ve mastered the writing system.
Transitioning
Once you’ve done your 30 days and studied the 294 kanji (yah, I cheated, “294 Kanji in 29 and a Half Days” just isn’t as catchy) in the intro lesson, you’ll need to transition over to using the full Remembering the Kanji lesson that’s available from the Shared Lessons menu. Go ahead and download that one and then let’s talk about how to get your cards transferred.
In your intro lesson, with all 294 cards selected, head to the Edit screen and then tap Export Cards. Tap the Cards to Pasteboard button at the top of the list. Go back to your Lesson List and select the new, full Remembering the Kanji lesson. Go to the Edit screen again but this time tap Import Cards. You’ll get a warning that the cards are all duplicates but don’t worry about that, choose Import Anyway. Next, tap Duplicates in the upper right…it’ll take a bit of time to process since it’s looking through a lot of cards. When you get the choice, choose Keep Newest Cards. That’ll delete all of the fresh copies of the cards you’ve already been using and just leave your old cards in their place.
Now, you can just go ahead and keep studying like normal. Again, I do recommend reducing the number of cards new cards you study each day to something that’s really easy for you to manage; 4 new cards a day works well for me. You can do that from Options; scroll to the bottom and then set your Max New Cards.
Study Every Day
That’s pretty much it. However, you must study every day. If you miss even one day, you’ll notice immediately that you’ve started forgetting. If you’re really busy, you don’t have to study a new set of kanji (go to Options to turn new cards off) but you must review the kanji you’ve already studied. You must review every day without fail. Remember that this system is trying to be as efficient as possible. So, it offers you kanji to review just before you are likely to forget them. If you don’t review, you will forget. But, what if you really just don’t have the time today? What if, no matter what, you’re just not going to be able to find 25 minutes to review? In that case, read on.
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Once you’ve finished studying for the day, go to the Edit view and select all of the new cards you just studied. It might be a bit difficult to find them all depending on which direction they were swiped. It’s probably easiest to go to the Options screen first, turn off new cards and then turn one of the sorting options to Soon or Hard. That way, your newer, already studied cards will be sorted near the top of the Edit screen. On the Edit screen, use the Select option, and then tap all of the new cards you studied today to select them. After that, tap Done and then Export and then select Examples to Clipboard. If you study a lot of cards everyday or have a ton of examples (again, about two per card is optimal), exporting examples could crash the app due to a lack of memory, so be careful. Don’t forget to turn the sorting option back off before your next study session so you can get a nice, random sort when you study again. Oh, and be sure to turn new cards back on, as well.
Go back to your lesson list and Create a New Lesson called something like RtK Reading. Go to the Edit tab and tap Import Cards. If you get a warning about dupes select Import New Cards. Go to Options and set the Study Style to Read. You can also set Kana Style to w/Eng if you want to have to tap less. I recommend you use this lesson to study whenever you have a free moment in the day: waiting in line, on the train, on the toilet or whatever; whenever you have a minute, pull this lesson out and study a few cards. Doing this isn’t as important as doing the actual RtK lesson, you have to do that one everyday, religiously, so this one can just be for if you have extra time. Once you start getting quite a lot of cards, it’ll probably start saying you have 100 or 200 cards due each day. Don’t worry about that; just do as many as you can today and then sync and/smooth your study dates tomorrow. Seriously, don’t stress about doing this one everyday; just consider it an optional booster. It’s also nice to have this to go through just in case you can’t find time to actually review your regular Remembering the Kanji lesson.
I think it’ll really reinforce your understanding if you have the chance to see your kanji being used in words in real sentences. You don’t need to be able to read the whole sentence, of course; there’re gonna be some kanji in there that you haven’t studied yet. Reading the sentence isn’t really the point. If you can read the sentence, great! Read it. If you’re worried about your pronunciation, copy the iSpeech girl (or guy, if you prefer). Her intonation is actually pretty natural most of the time. Slow her down and practice a couple of times. If you want to know what the sentence means use the hint button in the upper left. If there’s just a word you want to know, use the Analyze option (long press on the sentence) to analyze the sentence in imiwa? Like I said, reading the sentence isn’t really the point but that extra info and functionality is there to help if you need it.
Basically, you just want to get used to using the kanji in a realistic manner: seeing it surrounded by other kanji and being able to recognize it.
Final Words
What if there is a kanji you keep forgetting? That’s okay. There’s gonna be some tough kanji for everyone. You’ll probably run into kanji or words that you just can’t seem to remember, no matter what. I always forget how to say しつこい in English. I don’t know why; I just can’t seem to remember that word (it’s persistent, by the way). The best thing to do when you’re having some trouble is talk to someone about it. Hit up Kanji Koohii and their forums and see if anyone has any tips for you. If you still can’t seem to memorize it, just move on and don’t worry about it. Some kanji that you study later might give you some special insight that suddenly causes you to remember that kanji you were having trouble with. Really, it’s not a big deal. Japanese people forget kanji all the time. Just take it nice and easy, don’t create any unnecessary stress for yourself, and enjoy the journey.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any trouble or if anything here wasn’t clear. I’ll be more than happy to chat or Skype with you to help you get the most out of kanji Flow and your study time.
Happy studies!