When people ask me if learning Japanese is difficult, my response is, “Not if you’re willing to study until your eyes bleed.”

The writing system adopted from the Chinese, called kanji, is perhaps the biggest problem for non-Japanese to learn. You really can’t get good at the spoken language without also being good at the written language, and vice versa of course. But you need to learn about 2000 kanji, most of which have multiple ways of pronouncing them, to be about the level of a high school graduate. Obviously, it is a bit of work.

The best thing I have found to learn them is a series of two books by James Heisig caller “Remembering the Kanji.”

But there is a catch. You must be committed to learning all the kanji, nearly 2000. If you don’t have that commitment, don’t bother.

Children learn differently from adults. They have the ability to pick up things more quickly. Mutter a swear word around them and they’ll pick up on it immediately and tell the world where they learned it from.

But they don’t have the strengths an adult has in making stories.

Kanji courses in Japanese lessons tend to follow what the kids in Japan learn, and this is a problem. You learn some of the most common kanji, and how they are pronounced and then move on to more and more advanced ones. If you drop out along the way, and most do, you still have the ability to read the kanji you learned up until then.

Again, it is all or nothing with Heisig. Book number one teaches you how to remember the meaning of the kanji by means of stories. Early stories build up to more complex ones.

As an example, 口 is mouth. You can kind of see how a square could be a representative of a mouth. Now lets imagine that someone drives a needle right down the center of your mouth, not to either side, but right in the middle. You get the kanji of 中, which means center.

This is how you build up to more complex kanji, by means of stories. It also illustrates a pitfall that Heisig warns against and I can confirm. You may be tempted to just think that a line through the center of a mouth is enough to remember the meaning. That would be a mistake. To really get in lodged in your memory, the story has to be a vivid and active as possible. Seeing in your minds eye a needle being driven through someone’s mouth will make it able to be remembered.

Heisig differs from typical courses in that he goes with the most simple parts of kanji rather than the most common first. Some of the bits that the most common kanji are built on are actually pretty obscure. You will learn them first before more common kanji.

And it is really a moot point since it isn’t until book two that you learn the pronunciation of the kanji.

In that book, various short cuts are given to make it easier to remember how the onyomi (kind of like how we use latin bases for some of our words used in combination- example centipede for ‘hundred legs’) are pronounced. There is nothing on how to remember the kunyomi (most often how a word is pronounced on its own and not in combination with another.)

Once you finish the last lesson of the second book, only then will you be able to use the knowledge. But once you do, you will read at about the level of a high school graduate. You might not know the meaning of the words you read, but you can pronounce them and thus be able to look them up.

If you are really stubborn about learning Japanese, then Heisig is the book for you. If you are just dipping your toe into the language to see what it is like, you might want to try other systems as I said.

One thing about learning this stuff that helps. As soon as you learn a kanji, make a flash card to review it. After you learn your day’s lesson, review the cards right then and there. Take the cards along and review them no more than an hour later. Then a few hours later. Before going to bed and in the morning. Mix in the cards from previous lessons, a few days at least. Go back and review all the hundreds of cards you have learned at least once a week. Reviewing stuff soon after you learn it and then spacing it out is key to keeping it inside your head. If you learn a kanji and only come back to it a week later, you might as well start over.

Also, be prepared to get some real sleep. The intense images you make up seems to cause me at least to dream pretty intensely and I need the part after REM sleep to be rested by morning. The closer you study to your regular sleep time, the more intense the dreams will be.

Everyone learns and can learn a bit differently. In my experience, an average of 20 kanji a day is damn good progress. But do the math for just learning the meaning and you see you are committed for over half a year. Then you learn the way to pronounce. At a bare minimum, I’d say you are looking at a year of study before you are able to use any of this stuff. Do you have the patience and time to do so? Be honest before you pick up the books.

Oh, and there is a third book by Heisig. Don’t worry about it now. The third book takes you to 3000 kanji and teaches both the meaning and pronunciation. Once you have a few years of reading with the system of the first two books, you might want to pick it up and learn them. But a few years of getting used to 2000 kanji is probably best before you move on. Some of the kanji in the third book are pretty rare and not much use anyways.

Japanese isn’t easy, but it isn’t impossible. If you learn to read Kanji, all of a sudden your ability in the language as a whole makes great strides. If you are serious about mastering Japanese, you need to learn kanji, all of them in common use.