Hello, It's been a while! I hope you've been practicing your Hiragana and Katakana! Once you're confident enough with those, let's move on to the next stage: Kanji.
Kanji is a tad different compared to Katakana and Hiragana. While the latter two represent Japanese letters, each Kanji character is more of a representation of different words.
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein
Uses of Kanji
Kanji is mainly used in writing to represent parts of Japanese (mainly words), such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. This doesn't mean you can write Japanese entirely in Kanji!!!
There are words that don't have any corresponding Kanji, so you'll then have to use either Katakana or Hiragana.
Learning Kanji
Now I'm going to be honest with you; Kanji takes years and years to practice and master. There are well over 50, 000 Kanji characters in Japanese! To put that into perspective, even if you learned a new Kanji everyday, it would take you over 136 years to memorize all of it. You might be thinking, "Well, I might as well give up here". NO, YOU CAN'T GIVE UP YET!! While there are probably enough Kanji to last a lifetime, you only need to know about 2, 000 characters to be considered fluent. Seems a lot more doable now, huh?
Starting Line (Learning Structure)
2, 000 Kanji characters still seem to be a bit daunting, especially considering you're not sure where to begin. Fret not, I'll explain the steps that I use to learn Kanji characters.
1. Learning the meanings
Let's take the kanji 食 for instance. the meaning of the character is 'eat' or 'food'. Regardless of how you pronounce it, it will always mean the same thing. Now if you pair it with a different Kanji, let's say 堂 (hall/public chamber), you'll know that it's some sort of a food hall/dining hall.
You might not be able to read the sentences aloud, but once you associate the kanji to their meanings, it'll be a lot easier to read and understand Japanese sentences.
2. Learning the most useful reading
Now before we get into this, you'll need to know a few things. One of it is that there are two types of Kanji reading: Onyomi and Kunyomi.
I won't get into detail of WHY there are two types of reading, but if you're curious, a good site to read up on it is in the link below:
The other thing is that for most characters, they have at LEAST one Onyomi reading and one Kunyomi reading (there are also those with multiple Onyomi and Kunyomi readings so haha let's suffer together).
So how do we pick the "best" reading to learn? Well, it would be the one that's mostly used in making sentences! For example, let's use the Kanji 食 again. There are several Onyomi (ショク、 ジキ) and Kunyomi (く.う、 く.らう、 た.べる、 は.む) readings for 食.
If you go through the online Japanese dictionary (https://jisho.org/) you'll notice that most of the words containing use the ショク pronunciation for 食, so we'll memorize that reading!
As for the other readings, they can gradually be memorized as you expand your vocabulary.
For instance, you'll learn that 食べる takes on the た reading.
And that's it! You'll have to consistently and constantly practice kanji characters as well as their readings so that you don't forget them the next day. Practice makes perfect, happy learning!
P.S. These steps are for those who are complete beginners to Kanji, so some of these steps might appear to be inefficient to those at a more advanced level!
Note: I'm learning at the same time as writing these posts! If there is anything that I've mentioned that is wrong/unsatisfactory, do send me a message, thank you!