memorize more kanji and their readings

I think I’m done with this. A little bit more, and I’m through with the 1,945 kanji for the daily use. Besides, how much is “more” anyway? I can’t say I’ve memorized enough kanji for the rest of my life, but I definitely know more than I did when I adopted this goal.

I’ve just started learning kanji… lets see I know numbers, year, day, moon, month, sun, heart, and love, but that’d about it.

My kanji has fallen SO far behind. I used to know close to 500 characters, but now I’m lucky if I can remember 200. My favorite website is Jim Breen’s Kanji Dictionary. You can look up words by English means, by Romaji readings, or if your computer is configured to write characters (Microsoft has a pretty good interface that’s free to download), you can enter the Hiragana or Katakana readings.

I have a great piece of software called jishop. It’s a searchable graphic database of kanji, which can be looked up by meaning, reading (on or kun), or radical. If you know the radical but can’t remember the whole thing, you can search for all kanji that use that radical, and ta-da! You can see all of the kanji that include that particular radical.

It’s shareware, but worth the money to unlock all of the kanji—plus the database updates are free to registered users, which means it will be useful and functional for a long time to come.

I know the kanji and their Japanese readings (or at least one version of the Japanese readings) for mountain, tree, book, ‘japanese language’, river, man, woman, the numbers 1 – 10, horse, water, fire, thousand, ten thousand, yen, and ‘I’. Needless to say, such a random sampling of kanji is only useful in very rare situations…