102 Kanjis in 17 days

We have been studying kanjis for 17 days now (excluding the weekends) and have in that time learned 102 Kanjis. As we study 6 new per day.

First off maybe I should explain what a Kanji is. Kanjis are the characters in Japanese that are taken from Chinese. They are small pictures that represent words, basically. In Japanese however there really isn’t much focus on what the Kanji actually means by itself (we only learn that for like half of them, the others we have no idea). What’s important is how the character is pronounced, the pronunciation by itself or combined with the pronunciation of some other Kanji makes up a word. The really difficult thing is not to learn how to read and draw the Kanji or learn what the character itself means, but to learn the many different pronunciations that each character has. Some of them can be pronounced in 4 different ways depending on what other Kanjis it is stuck together with, and there is little to no system of which pronunciation comes when. But it is quite fun, it’s fun to ride the train and be able to read more and more of the commercials each day.

As a salute to the Kanjis we have learned so far I will post them all in the order we learned them here, and after that I will have a video of me drawing every one of them.

It really doesn’t look like it’s a lot in that small little box above here, but I assure you learning them is the accumulation of many hours of practice. Note also that you have to learn to draw all the lines in the correct order. I forgot the order of some of the Kanjis which is why I redraw them in the video.