Learning Japanese (1) Do not avoid Kanji

Series on my personal and opinionated views about learning Japanese. Especially focused toward English speakers, who have the bad habit of thinking English is like the universal language on Star Trek. Yes, English is the most widely understood language in the world, but you made the choice to live outside of your home country. Stop acting like a 19th century British Empire colonial and start learning the local language.


Do not avoid Kanji

You can learn to communicate well without a comprehensive understanding of kanji but you will never become truly fluent. Also, in many jobs Japanese will hesitate to hire someone who can't read the memos or proactively participate in meetings because of a lack of reading and writing skills. You don't have to be perfect but learn enough to get around and to write via aid of a computer or a mobile device.

The English alphabet is not a good equivalent to the difficulties of learning this daunting writing system, but before you dismiss kanji as arcane, difficult and unnecessary, first spend 30 minutes teaching non-English speakers the rules of English spelling and phonetics. Or think about this phonetic joke. Read this word ghoti. Most will read it as something like 'gotty' but if you get creative with the English rules of phonetics it could be read as 'fish'. Now, multiply this silly occurrence by many thousands of words and you have the hurdles non-native English speakers face learning English writing and reading.

Kanji is not an letter system, it's a character system. This means each character holds a lot of information. Explaining the beauty and elegance of kanji is sort of like explaining the beauty and elegance of Shakespeare to a beginning English speaker. Near impossible, but nonetheless there. If you don't like Shakespeare's writing replace it with another writer you think is great. If you don't like reading, go fuck yourself.

There are several good systems for learning kanji but I'll leave those up to you to find. Overall, I think learning kanji is a matter of balance- textbook study and repetition but also reading books you enjoy and making the effort to handwrite letters or memos whenever you can.