How To Learn Kanji Effectively Plus Free Kanji Practice Sheets

If you’re a Japanese language learner and find kanji difficult to memorize, welcome to my tips on how to learn Kanji effectively plus free Kanji practice sheets by yours truly. *wink* More Japanese language tips can be found here.

If you asked any Japanese language learners, what is the most difficult thing about learning the Japanese language, I bet most of them would give you the same answer.

Kanji.

Every Japanese language learner’s nightmare, especially for beginners who just started learning the Japanese language. Unless you have learned Mandarin before like the Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese or Malaysian Chinese, you’re going to find Kanji, laborious to learn.

Why?

It’s because to be considered fluent you need to know around 2000 to 3000 kanji characters. Plus, one kanji can have different readings. Like why?

You might also like: Japanese Language Study Starter Pack For Beginners

For example, the Kanji below 下, can be read as shita, oriru, sagaru, kudasaru etc. Just by looking at the photo, you can see that this kanji has 8 different readings. Hence, why it can be tough to learn.

When I first started learning Kanji, I found it very confusing too, but gradually it gets better and now Kanji is one of my favourite parts of learning the language.

How To Learn Kanji Effectively

1. Download the FREE Kanji practise sheets.

I created this free Kanji practise sheets on Canva to make it easier for those who wanted to learn Kanji but didn’t know how to. You can use it for free, but please don’t sell it.

2. Print or upload it to your iPad/tab

3. Or you can just use any notebooks that you owned

If you don’t have an iPad or tab, you can just print it or just mimic the layout I used in your notebooks. For notebooks, it doesn’t have to be any fancy overpriced notebooks, it can be mathematic practise books that we used for school or just A4 paper.

4. Choose any textbook or anime or drama you like

For textbooks, I’d recommend the followings that you can buy on either Shopee or Lazada.

Textbooks recommendation:

• Marugoto p/s: Marugoto also has a free e-learning site in English, Spanish and Easier Japanese for anyone to access here. They offer 3 levels: Starter, Elementary (A1) and Elementary (A2). A perfect website for beginners who want to start from zero.

• Minna No Nihongo
• Genki Elementary Textbook

5. Pick one Kanji to learn

6. Go to Japanese language dictionary apps and look up the word

I’d recommend the Imiwa app for those who have an iPhone. For Imiwa, you can learn the writing stroke and there are also lots of sentence examples provided.

Related: 9 Free Phone Apps To Learn Japanese Language

7. Start writing!

There are a lot of boxes for you to practise the kanji and 2 space to put the sentence examples.

I created the free Kanji practise sheets so that you can not only the Kanji but also how to use it by writing the sentences example.

Also, please remember that in a journey to learn any new things, for example, a new language is going to take time. Everyone progress differently, so it’s important to take in mind to now compare yourself with others.

That’s all from me, and see you guys next time!

p/s: I also share Japanese language tips on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram so you can follow there if you want to learn the tips to learn the language.