Mastering Japanese Kanji – 7 Guerilla Tactics

The adoption in around the 6th century CE of kanji by the Japanese from Chinese emissaries was a blessing for the Japanese language since it was the first time the language appeared in written form. At the same time, the act was destined to seem like a curse for the thousands of non-native Japanese speakers who have tried their hand at learning kanji. Simply put: mastering kanji is hard!

To the brain of the typical Westerner who has been raised on an alphabet-based Indo-European language like English, Spanish, or German, the prospect of learning and mastering kanji presents a special challenge. Each kanji is a pictograph, ideograph or phono-semiotic (ouch!) character and can consist of up to twenty individual strokes which need to be drawn in a particular order. Most kanji have three or more possible pronunciations and must be used in combination with one or more other kanji just to form a single word.

So, where does one start on the road toward mastery? Rather than repeat for you the conventional wisdom about mastering kanji, I will share with you seven tactics I learned as a veteran kanji studier.

In my case, I needed all the help I could get: after four...