Learning kanji is tough. Especially for kids. In this post I just want to introduce what kids in Japan have to go through. It's on my mind because my son is sitting right across from me, moaning about his kanji homework.

(Title graphic from my son's book. Well, that's one of the kanji books anyway. He has a few. This is the one he's working on right now, anyway.)

Kanji is the Japanese word for Chinese character. Japanese doesn't use as many as they do in China, but they use a lot. To make it even harder, many of them have at least two readings (and often more), a native Japanese reading and a Chinese reading. Often you can predict which reading to use when you see a kanji based on the sentence and word, but not always. This makes learning them a challenge for adults, but it isn't any easier for kids.

The government defines 2,136 kanji as essential to literacy, called the jōyō kanji. Really it's a baseline because one is likely to encounter many outside this list in daily life, but it's a nice guide. Kids have to learn all of these jōyō kanji in their 12 years of compulsory education, 1026 in from elementary school (grades 1-6) and 1110 in junior high and senior high (grades 7-12).

They break it down further and give a list of which kanji to learn in every grade. It starts off easy enough, with only 80 to learn in first grade, but that quickly doubles to 160 in second grade and grows further to 200 in third grade. Well I won't list it all, but it stays pretty high all the rest of the way.

How do kids study? In each grade, they will break it down week by week. Watching my kids, I'd say it averages about ten new ones per week. Some weeks involve more, some less, and some weeks will be review weeks. In weeks for new kanji, they will read a story daily that features the new kanji, they will get some tips on how to draw it and recognize them from their teacher, and they will write them a lot. And I mean a lot. They will fill pages with each character.

The story and tips you probably think are ok, but I'm going to guess most people reading this will freak out at the idea of writing so many kanji daily for so long. Or maybe not, but most foreigners in Japan really seem to get hung up on that part and spend entirely too much time complaining about it.

If you think about it, it really isn't so different from what we do with English. In the US we fill pages with the letter "a", then more pages with "b", and so on when we are in first grade. Then we do it all over again in second grade with the same letters in cursive. At least that's how it was when I was a kid. I think a lot of schools have gotten rid of cursive now. So it goes. At any rate, Japanese schools use the same idea, they just happen to have many more characters than the 52 of English (or 104 if we add in cursive) to memorize so it takes more than two grades.

Memorizing writing—be it Latin letters or Chinese characters—is mostly muscle memory, writing it so many times that you can do so without really thinking, and the training the Japanese schools employ does do a good job of this.

Anyway, like I said at the beginning of this post, my son is doing his kanji homework and complaining about it. I just gave him a ten minute break and grabbed his book. This week his kanji are: 借, 仲, 底, 浅, 焼, 利, 笑

Here's photos from his book:

You can see it gives the kanji. Below each kanji is the reading or readings they are studying this week. Below that is the stroke order for writing the kanji, space to practice writing it step by step, and some sample sentences, and below that is sample words using the kanji.

Hmm... looking through it, this week is actually fairly easy. Lucky him! There are a few more pages to the unit giving more practice using them. The teacher will also give lots of practice writing them, one of which is filling up sheets of paper with each kanji. This doesn't help with learning the readings so much, but it does help with learning the stroke order, learning how to balance the kanji, and just all around turning the drawing of it into muscle memory.

Anyway, I thought you guys might enjoy a look at this process.

Incidentally, I could probably benefit from the writing practice. I can read a lot of kanji, so I don't really have much trouble there, but writing is another story. Luckily these days we have computers and smartphones, so all I have to do is write the pronunciation of the word and the computer will pick the kanji I want based on the pronunciation and the surrounding words (and if it picks wrong, I can easily bring up a list showing more). Ain't technology great?

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.

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