Some years ago I studied Japanese for some months, out of sheer desire to consume anime in its raw form.
The Japanese writing system is one of those systems that are so inefficient one eventually begins to love them. They’re a mess, but dually offer a sadistic pleasure for those who master them.
Other than two “alphabets”, hiragana and katakana, which really aren’t a problem, Japanese uses kanji, repurposed Chinese characters. You can read basic stuff knowing about 2200 of them, but there are a lot more.
Most characters do not have a single reading. That is in part due to the coexistence of Chinese loanwords and native words. As such, most characters have two readings. If English used kanji, the character for “water” would have many possible readings: “hydro-” (Greek root), “acqua-” (Latin root), “water” (native Germanic word). This makes it easy if you already speak Japanese and are learning to write in it, but is a nightmare if you’re a foreigner without vocabulary. Memorizing all these readings takes time.
But the route I chose to learn kanji was to first learn the meanings. Most characters can be associated with a single meaning, such as “water”. And it turns out there is a very effective way to memorize the meanings of characters, which is also, when not tiring, very fun.
Heisig’s method:
- Separate a character into subcharacters, called radicals
- There are about 150 of them. Give a distinct meaning to each. Sometimes they already have one in Japanese, but for some you just decide something random and stick with it.
- For each character, make up a short story, or just picture a scene, using the meanings of the radicals.
- The rule is: do your best to shock your brain. Usually a shortcut is to think of heavily sexualized, unrealistic situations, like dirty jokes. The brain does wonders at remembering stupid stuff if it sounds useful to find a mate.
And it just works.