The Secret To Learning Kanji

Ok, just a quick note here because I still have to finish my homework.

I'm studying kanji right now. For years, these characters simply would not stick in my head, no matter how hard I tried to pack them in, no matter how many hours I spent in front of my flashcards. Never, that is, until I discovered the Secret To Learning Kanji.

There are three aspects of kanji that you need to learn: their writing, their reading(s), and their meaning(s). To the beginning student, there isn't much you can do beyond rote memorization. However, with a little background knowledge, the studying begins to do itself. Once you become familiar with how kanji are constructed, it is vastly easier to read and understand new characters, thanks to a limited number of common groups of strokes that are often repeated and have specific meanings, similar to the role of Latin and Greek word roots in English. Even a cursory study of the meanings and readings of these key stroke groups paves the downhill road to literacy with teflon and oils it up for good measure.

So, to take an example from my homework tonight, the character "催" can be broken down into three groups of strokes - first, the two strokes on the left are a reduced form of "人", which means person. The three strokes on the top are "山", which is the kanji for "mountain", and the snarl of eight strokes on the bottom right is "隹", an old radical meaning "bird".

"Person", "mountain", and "bird". By assembling these primitive meanings, one will intuitively grasp the meaning of the verb "催す", which means, of course, "to hold (a meeting)" or "to develop symptoms of".

It's that easy.

But it doesn't stop there! Most kanji have multiple readings, and knowing the radicals helps there as well. The Chinese-derived reading (on-yomi) of the radical "隹" is "sai", and ... what do you know? The on-yomi of "催" is also "sai"! Likewise, the Japanese-derived reading (kun-yomi) of the radical "人" is "hito", and ... the kun-yomi of "催"? You guessed it - "moyo-o(su)"! Because, well, duh.