How do engineers learn kanji?

With over 2,000 common kanji to master before becoming a fluent reader, Japanese is often considered one of the most difficult languages to learn from scratch. It takes over 10 years for natives to learn them, and the method itself is quite strenuous: writing lines after lines of characters.

As an engineer, Marion tried to adopt a more innovative approach to answer a seemingly simple question: how to hack my way into learning kanji? We had a chance to welcome her for a fascinating dive into the world of 漢字.

Learning kanji, one ad at a time

When she first landed in Japan over 9 years ago, the initial learning curve seemed pretty steep: “the only thing I could say back then was ‘ima nanji desu ka’, and there was basically no smartphones, hence apps, to help you learn. I got a job at a Japanese IT company where no one could speak English, so I had no choice but to get serious about learning” Marion starts. “I remember the first thing I did was to look at ads in the train: trying to recognize simple kanji I already knew, and working by association to understand the meaning of combinations of them. What’s interesting is that I don’t remember using this method when I picked up English. This seemed to be very specific to Japanese language, and pretty efficient too”.

That’s when Marion started to look into how natives were learning the language: “Obviously, since they hear it from a pretty young age, they already have the right vocabulary. But when it comes to kanji, I realized the method that’s considered the most efficient is writing them. A lot of them. What I would call a bottom up approach”. That’s also when she thought about her goals, why she wanted to learn Japanese “basically, being able to talk and read”, and what was the best way to get to that point. “I was spending time talking with locals, so my spoken Japanese was getting better” she continues, “But I still needed to find a way to recognize all those weird characters”.

Memory is just a database

One of the skills engineers have is to be able to turn complex systems into recognizable patterns, in order to understand them: “I realized that what I was doing in the train by reading ads was basically building a web of kanji: creating connections between the ones I knew, and the ones I wanted to remember. And I thought, maybe we can use that web as a way to learn”, at which point her engineering background came in handy “We have a few computer science concepts that I thought I could apply to kanji learning. And conveniently enough, databases are somehow modelled on how memory works, so things come full circle. For example, the more often a specific memory entry is accessed, the easier it will be to access it later. The opposite works too, which is the idea of graceful degradation: we remove data from a database after it’s not been used for a long time”.

Except databases don’t have feelings: “When I was hanging out talking to my Japanese friends, I also found out that whatever you feel at that moment is a really strong learning reinforcement. For example, the shame that you feel when your sentence is all wrong (laughs)”. Positive emotions work too “Of course, the excitment of remembering a kanji or a sentence will also create a strong link in your brain”.

Introducing suiren.io

So what is Suiren? “Ok so first of all, it’s a very basic MVP built on Rails. It’s the product of all these observations I made regarding kanji learning, and it basically lets you browse kanji through associations: you start with one kanji or a combination of them, and it builds a web of other kanji linked to those first one or two. Obviously it’s not targetted for total beginners, but it becomes very powerful when oyu reach a certain level” And it looks really, really cool. Marion’s favorite feature? “So you can ‘grab’ that one set of kanji and move them around your screen. It’s completely useless, but it’s probably the feature I am the most proud of (laughs)”.

When asked about how it was built and what she’d wish for in the following iterations, Marion has a few ideas: “First of all, it’s powered by the Jisho API, which is awesome but also has its limitations. For example their data is not really well structured, and you don’t have any categorization by level. That’s one thing I’d love to add. I also wanted to be able to show more nodes, but this version is already quite heavy to process on the front-end. I don’t think I need that many additional features, but making it a bit more convenient for beginners could be a first step”.

What’s next?

So what’s next for Suiren? “Well, I did create a Twitter account, and… it escalated quickly. People got really excited about it, for the idea and probably the simplicity, but also because they do find it useful”.

As for Marion, she’s leaving Japan after 9 years… and Suiren is a very nice way to leave her mark, while keeping a connection with her second home.

Thanks a lot for the talk Marion!