Best way to approach kanji and memorize it

[mikoto_ssu]

greeting everyone!
am not sure if this question was already asked before, however I'd like to hear the advice of people experienced in the language.
now, i know what both the ON-yomi and KUN-yomi mean. i know their definition their history. when and how to use them. in short i already looked them up in various places until i completely understood their use.
the point that's still confusing for me is the way to approach the kanji memorisation. i will be writing two different approaches to learning kanji that grasped my interest and wait for your advice on wich one is better.
1- first is the absolute memorization ( the one am adapting at the time being): using different flashcard apps and software you can drill numerous kanji (up to 2000+) in your mind throughout daily routine, and then when it comes to jukugo or compound kanji, you just glue every possible pronunciation together until you find the right meaning and sound. but as everyone may know, every kanji has up to 10 meanings and pronunciations. so managing to memorise every single one along with it's kunyomi and onyomi is not an easy task at all and require a strong memory. not to mention the use of those two doesn't always abide by its typical rule.
here enters the second approach i want to try, but am still worried if it's effective or not.
2- memorizing kanji along with their kunyomi while at the same time acquiring the jukugo+onyomi as a vocabulary through reading experience (novels, VNs, random text...). that way you don't need to worry about learning the on-readings since you will consider the jokugo as a single word.
eventually, you will get accustomized with the on yomi reading being common to one character and then you will be able to guess how to read a jukugo right after the first time you stumble upon it.
while this approach personally seems to suit my mind, am still worried if it will let me cover most of the necessary kanji, vocabulary and expressions to read novels and be able to hold a casual discussion (yes casual discussions are enough). in the first place, the main purpose am learning Japanese is so i can read novels and translate them into English.
so with this, I'd like to hear your opinions about the best way to approach learning and memorizing kanji.
thank you.

 

[Lacota]

Personally I use a flash card system, alongside a Kanji notebook to practice writing. With each Kanji, I practice using it in numerous sentences or phrases with different readings/furigana. I limit myself to about 6 or 7 Kanji a week. I know many people learn much more Kanji in a shorter space of time, but I feel that learning few and for longer will help cement it into your mind. This is my approach, and it works for me. Rushing the learning process isn't always best.

 

[mdchachi]

The first approach lends itself to studying, especially if you're trying to achieve some academic milestone such as passing a test. The second one is better overall -- constant exposure. Probably some combination of both is the answer.

The third way is just give up -- that's the one I follow. My kanji retention maxed out almost 20 years ago and has gone downhill since then. But fortunately technology has become a lot more helpful in the meantime. If I enter a restaurant and encounter a handwritten 蟹火鍋 on the wall, it's a simple matter to use my smartphone to draw the characters with my finger and quickly look them up and say "oh yeah" that's カニ, I should know that.

Obviously if your goal is translate novels though, you need to go deep. Study & immersion.

 

[SomeCallMeChris]

As far as study type '1', I think it's really quite a waste of time to study kanji and their readings in isolation. You can memorize all 5 readings for one kanji and all 3 readings for that kanji, but when you encounter a compound of the two characters together you now have 15 possible ways to pronounce it... which doesn't help at all. That kind of study is a trap to be avoided.

If you wanted to do that -kind- of study anyway, you can improve on it by studying kanji with vocabulary that uses each reading. Of course now you're studying vocabulary in isolation which can be misleading for all but the simplest words. I think it would even better to limit yourself to one common word per kanji if you were doing this kind of study.

I highly dis-recommend any of the apps (and they are legion) that give you kanji flashcards for this first style of learning. They don't exist in huge numbers because people like this style of app, but rather because it's really, really easy to consult the free KANJIDIC database and do random flashcard drills on the same basic information.

If you want a flashcard app (and I think flashcards are very useful), then I strongly recommend using the 'smart' flashcards of a Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) rather than simple 'dumb' flash cards. Anki Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcards is the one that I use and is pretty popular, but there are others (Memrise, Surusu, etc.) The important feature these programs have in common is that they show you cards you get wrong -more often- so that you can memorize them, and words that you get right -less often- so that you don't waste time reviewing material you already know.

I think your study type (2) is perfectly valid and is in fact more or less what a lot of people do.

The third way of studying is to use a system like Heisig's Remembering the Kanji (which I used and rather like) or KanjiDamage. In any case the goal here is to learn to write and/or recognize the character and tag it with an English (or your native language) name to associate it with. For those of us who early on found the kanji completely impossible jumbles of lines that could never be distinguished, this kind of system is indispensable.

For people who can just look at a character a few times and forever after reliably recognize it among similar characters that may only differ by a stroke or two.... such systems seem like a waste of time. Not all of us are fortunate enough to have such a memory though, which is why Heisig continues to be popular and other similar mnemonic systems like KanjiDamage are appearing.

Hopefully that helps you understand all your options.
がんばって！

 

[Mike Cash]

You do realize that learning Japanese and learning kanji aren't the same thing, right? Simply learning a bunch of kanji, no matter how you go about it, isn't going to end up with you able to hold conversations or translate novels.

You don't need a program of how to go about learning kanji; you need a program of how to go about learning the language. Get started good on learning the language first and the "How do I learn kanji?" question will resolve itself.