How to remember all the kanji?

Hello,
I have been Learning Japanese for about 9 months now. I am able to score about 140/180 in the N5 Mock exams. I want to try to give N3 in December. I mostly learn Japanese by self-study but I also study at a Language Institute which helps me get any doubt cleared. But the main problem I am having right now is remembering all the kanji I have learned so far. I know about 200 Kanjis but I forget some of kun yomis or on yomis . like what is the right way to remember them ?? I remember all the kanjis kun yomi and on yomi as for now but I think it would be challenging to keep all the kanjis in mind as I would learn more kanjis.
What is the right way to learn Kanjis ?? Any book ?? what method or way do you use to remember them ?
Please help me out as its kind of important for me to get JLPT N3 by December
Thanks a lot for the help in Advance !!!!

The best thing to do is write out each and every example and read through them every once in a while. For example, you know the kanji for new is (atarashii) so write out an example with that pronunciation. But new is also pronounced ni as in Niigata, so write out an example of this, preferably with furigana. Read through your examples every once in a while. This will really keep you on your toes.

すし。 said:

Hello,
I have been Learning Japanese for about 9 months now. I am able to score about 140/180 in the N5 Mock exams. I want to try to give N3 in December. I mostly learn Japanese by self-study but I also study at a Language Institute which helps me get any doubt cleared. But the main problem I am having right now is remembering all the kanji I have learned so far. I know about 200 Kanjis but I forget some of kun yomis or on yomis . like what is the right way to remember them ?? I remember all the kanjis kun yomi and on yomi as for now but I think it would be challenging to keep all the kanjis in mind as I would learn more kanjis.
What is the right way to learn Kanjis ?? Any book ?? what method or way do you use to remember them ?
Please help me out as its kind of important for me to get JLPT N3 by December
Thanks a lot for the help in Advance !!!!

Click to expand...

The most common way is to use flash cards and quiz yourself. Many people use anki, quizlet or memrise. You can make them yourself or use the decks that other people have made. Some of these software use spaced repetition to automatically increase the frequency of words you miss which is very helpful. Also I think kanji stick better if you quiz yourself on representative vocabulary more than specifically what is kun or on pronunciation.
For example rather than quizing yourself on
大
and the kun (おお) and on (たい・だい) pronunciations and the meaning ("big"), quiz yourself on words like
大きい = おおきい (big)
大阪 = おおさか (Osaka)
大好き = だいすき (like)

that way you learn the kanji and its pronunciations and meaning while you're learning vocabulary which you'll need to learn anyway. If you don't know some of the kanji in the compound words yet you can just use hiragana. For example 大さか instead of 大阪.

Of course you should also look for N3 level reading material and consume as much as you can. The more exposure and the more practice the better.

Good luck.

I think one of the hardest things about kanji is that they have multiple pronunciations, but the cheat code to figuring them out is by learning the pronunciations in context. Don't try to memorize kanji by themselves: learn WORDS that use those kanji and practice using that vocabulary to cement the kanji in your memory. If you're using flash cards, at the very least put example words using the onyomi and kunyomi on every card, and then have cards for the OTHER kanji in those words as well.

Then you can start leveraging the following structure to ask questions and learn new kanji in Japanese:

One of the most powerful tools moving forward is XOのX or XOのO... XOのXは何 (のX／の漢字) ですか?

A：あの…関心の「かん」は何の漢字ですか？「感じる」の「かん」ですか？
B：いいえ、「関係」の「かん」ですよ。「関する」そして「関わる」って事ですね。
A：そうですか。「関西」の「かん」と同じですか？
B：そうですね、「関西」の「かん」です。
A：へ〜、なるほどです。

This structure lets you ask in Japanese which other words use that kanji, which helps you build mental connections between those words. It's a bit like learning the greek or latin roots of words in English; once you learn the constituent parts of "anthropology," "philanthropy," "geology," and "misapprehend," you can start drawing connections and guessing the meaning of newly-introduced words like "biology," "misanthropy," "geothermal," and "thermodynamics."

nice gaijin said:

Don't try to memorize kanji by themselves: learn WORDS that use those kanji and practice using that vocabulary to cement the kanji in your memory.

Click to expand...

This, 100%. It's fine to use a mnemonic system or flashcards to learn basic kanji information, but ultimately, kanji are used to spell words. Flashcard cramming of very arbitrary, essentially meaningless information -- like phonetic sounds associated with a symbol -- is very difficult to retain even with SRS.

Permanently learning new words may not be 'easy' but it is relatively speaking much easier, and it is fundamentally a skill you've been practicing your whole life, just applied to a new language.