Mastering 漢字 (Kanji and Traditional Chinese Characters)

[WilliamSmith]

I decided to try an experiment in my polyglot language learning by front-loading memorization of traditional Chinese characters 漢字 (which are mostly the same as the Japanese Kanji 漢字, since they're ideograms that carry a shared meaning in both languages).

I've reached a point where I am comfortable in Japanese with most grammar points, conjugations, etc, and most of the problem in advancing faster in written material comes down to Kanji recognition.

In theory you could pick up Kanji gradually on an as-you-go basis while engaging with translating or studying other materials, but since there's no real way I know of to make them stick quickly that way, seems to me tackling them head-on as a special memorization project is worth the effort. This is probably even truer in learning Chinese languages, because if you know kana you can get further with that in Japanese (and the input methods I've used in computers have pop-up Kanji), but in Chinese you pretty much either must know the characters or you're just SOL and can only look them up or else guess the meaning from surrounding context from the ones you do know.

Anyone else ever done this, front-loading your memorization of the kanji/漢字 up front?
Do you have a favored method that worked for you?
If so, how fast were you able to memorize the 漢字?
How many of them did you memorize?
Are you fully fluent (e.g. can pick up almost any book in Japanese or written Chinese and understand all or almost all of it)?

Here's my plan:

Step #1 = Memorize all the radical elements (sometimes called "primitive elements") that have a meaning of their own as ideograms in many cases, but which are used as "building blocks" of other 漢字. Sometimes they go together with clear symbolic picture meanings (森 with its three 木 ideograms combined to mean "forest," for example), other times there's no obvious reason why certain radicals were used (sometimes just for phonetic resemblance), but even for the puzzling ones it still really helps to know the individual meanings of all radical elements, I think.

Step #2 = Put together a list of related characters and learn them in sequence, coming up with some mnemonic to try to aid speedy memorization and retention.

@Lucas88 recommended the Basic Kanji Book and Intermediate Kanji Book series in a nice post here: viewtopic.php?p=371768#p371768
Those seem pretty great too. (I just got them and will check them out in more detail soon.)

The main I'm trying out first though:
The "Remembering the Kanji" book series that's been out in various editions since at least the 1980s teaches the most common 3,000 kanji in a clever way, by building a sequence of related kanji that share radicals and other components with each other, and makes them more memorable using mnemonics that anchor some type of imagery in the mind.
You don't have to use the author's specific suggested mnemonic ideas, but I think it's a good concept that works better than learning them at random, and he seems to have been quite smart about his choice of the sequence.

For example, some of the first ones he links together after the Kanji for the #s 1-10 (一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九 十) are: 口 日 月 田 目
So we start with the mouth/cave radical, then the sun/day, rice field, eye, and then get to ones like 古 吾 冒 朋 明 that are composed from combinations of what we've already learned. So he has a short paragraph featuring each one of these and explains what radicals and shared elements they use, and gives some suggestions on mnemonics.
(I'm partial to the idea of learning the 214 radical elements up front, but otherwise I like this concept.)

One very different thing about this program is that "Remembering the Kanji" actually doesn't teach you the sound readings, just the ideograms and their meaning and elements!

I sort of see the point of that (especially in Japanese since they have both an onyomi Chinese reading, and kunyomi Japanese reading), but I personally think it helps engage the maximum number of senses to create really memorable mnemonics, so I'm probably going to add the sounds to my own study.
In accord with polyglots making a mess of things (but hopefully with method to the madness), I might actually learn the Cantonese readings of them all first (which are actually a lot closer to the onyomi because of Cantonese being more similar to the Middle Chinese spoken when Japan introduced these than the more modern Mandarin). And see how much "automatic" Cantonese I end up understanding by learning all the characters, since almost all Cantonese and written Chinese grammar is much easier than Japanese grammar... and then I'll get the onyomi vs kunyomi Kanji readings figured out when I'm tackling Japanese translating again after learning 2-3,000 kanji/漢字 first...

Interesting question on this note, for polyglots:
I wonder if it's a good idea to learn both the Japanese and Cantonese sound readings (or other Chinese language sound readings if you were learning Mandarin or a different one) at the same time. ?
I know many people who think you should learn one language at a time would advise against that... but I'm considering doing that.
To some extent I've already done this, and when I see the kanji for numbers for example I'm immediately hearing Cantonese:
一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九 十
=
"jat1 ji6 saam1 sei3 ng5 luk6 cat1 baat3 gau2 sap6"
and if reading/writing in Japanese I consciously mentally switch to "ichi" "ni" "san" etc in Japanese.

I wonder how many it's possible to learn each day if you take a focused approach?

This site here suggests learning the radicals, then breaks it down to 11 characters learned per day to get you through the 1,000 most common in about 3 months:
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/chinese/le ... ee-months/

I wonder if you'd come out stronger trying to overdo it and memorize even more, then go back and re-study the ones that slipped your mind, or if it's more beneficial to limit the # of characters you try to take on per day?

Opinions are welcome if you have one, but I'll experiment to find out myself too.

Here's a few sites that list out the radical elements:

In Japanese:
https://kanjialive.com/214-traditional-kanji-radicals/

This doesn't have all 214 yet but here is a site that lists most of them (163) in Cantonese jyutping as well as pinyin:
http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/radicals/

(For Mandarin Chinese learners it's probably easy to find a complete list in pinyin.)

Check this out: This awesome old Qing Dynasty relic was compiled at the orders of the Qing Emperor, and was apparently the fist official orderly compilation of all the radical elements, as well as over 40,000 characters.

It's usually called the "Kangxi Dictionary" in English (using the pinyin romanized Mandarin), but in Cantonese and Japanese:

Cantonese:
康熙字典
hong1 hei1 zi6 din2

Japanese:
康熙字典
こうきじてん
koukijiten





Traditional Chinese characters have an amazing history going way back to the days of oracle bone inscriptions found in caves (where they were used in some kind of pyromantic divination magic) in pre-historic periods that are still very mysterious, and myth and legend mingle with ancient Chinese history.
Is that awesome or what?
(Answer = Yes, LOL.)

[Lucas88]

In theory you could pick up Kanji gradually on an as-you-go basis while engaging with translating or studying other materials, but since there's no real way I know of to make them stick quickly that way, seems to me tackling them head-on as a special memorization project is worth the effort. This is probably even truer in learning Chinese languages, because if you know kana you can get further with that in Japanese (and the input methods I've used in computers have pop-up Kanji), but in Chinese you pretty much either must know the characters or you're just SOL and can only look them up or else guess the meaning from surrounding context from the ones you do know.

Anyone else ever done this, front-loading your memorization of the kanji/漢字 up front?
Do you have a favored method that worked for you?
If so, how fast were you able to memorize the 漢字?
How many of them did you memorize?
Are you fully fluent (e.g. can pick up almost any book in Japanese or written Chinese and understand all or almost all of it)?

I know a few people who swear by Heisig's method of memorization. They front-loaded all of the essential Kanji even before they began to learn the pronunciation and the language itself.

I've never used Heisig's method though. I checked out his book when I was just starting out with Japanese and soon decided that it wasn't for me. Instead I bought the Basic Kanji Book and made it my goal to advance through two lessons per week learning both the Kanji and their pronunciation and also some basic vocabulary related to each one. I used to do this during my breaks at work or would otherwise hide in some quiet part of the warehouse and revise the lessons obsessively while no supervisors were around.

I don't remember how quickly I was able to learn the Kanji in exact terms. That period of my life now just seems like a blur in my memory. In rough terms I was able to learn about 700 or so in the first year with BKB vol. 1, BKB vol. 2 and IKB vol.1 since the more I advanced the more intensely I would study. Note that here I mean "learn" in the sense of knowing how to write each Kanji, its meaning, its readings and some basic vocabulary, not just memorization of form. Then in the second year I managed to get my number of Kanji up to about 1600 or higher. I exhausted the last IKB and then just learned the rest by myself using jisho.com and other online resources. About 1600 Kanji in two years! Remember that back then learning Japanese was my autistic obsession!

At around the 1600-1700 mark I was able to read most texts pretty fluently. I would read online articles about a variety of topics and buy a new book each week from the bookstore in Kobe and could read most signs and public announcements without problems. I'd still have to look up an obscure Kanji from time to time, but this is Japanese! Even natives have to consult a dictionary once in a while to be able to read their own language!

I've not used Japanese in over a decade. I fell out with the culture in the early 2010s and now avoid Japanese people like the plague. As a result my Japanese has suffered significant language attrition and I don't even give a shit. Spanish is my true love and I'll defend her as my beloved wife right until the end! But still, I can read a lot of Kanji. When I open one of my Japanese books I can still read a large part of them out loud even without furigana. Besides, once you learn Kanji even if you forget them it's still quite easy to relearn them. Relearning that which is forgotten is always easier than to learn something from scratch.

[WilliamSmith]

Thanks a lot @Lucas88, appreciate you sharing your knowledge even though you ended up moving away from your interest in Japanese and Japan (though toward brighter horizons for you, since your interest in Spanish and big butt Latinas is obviously more than just a fleeting interest, heheh).

After experimenting a bit more, I definitely think I'm not only going to try out the Heisig / "Remembering the Kanji" approach, but also give the polyglot experiment a try by actually learning the Cantonese readings first.

After I'm done with that, I'll try the Japanese and kanji learning resources you suggested too, but since there's always (or almost always) at least one onyomi and kunyomi reading to each kanji anyway, I think coming back to a systematic study of them in Japanese after I already know the ideograms by heart in Cantonese (since I also want to learn that) might make more sense.

To anyone interested in this subject:

Cantonese is more similar to the old Middle Chinese that was spoken when Japan adopted Chinese characters (mostly during the Tang dynasty if I'm not mistaken), and is often closer to the onyomi Chinese reading of the kanji than the younger Mandarin language is (since Mandarin evolved out of the non-Chinese Mongol Yuan period more recently than the older Cantonese). Cantonese sometimes point this out when being picked on by Mandarin speakers, pointing out that Cantonese is actually "more Chinese" than the Mandarin originally created by non-Chinese Mongoloid horse barbarians, LOL.

Even if the Cantonese does not always sound like the onyomi reading, some of the linked sequences in the Heisig book come up with some interesting phonetic similarities in Cantonese that might even help me memorize them in sequences more easily:

This is a rather dark selection in terms of the meanings of the ideograms, but here's an example of what I mean about the sounds of Cantonese, in the order given from one of the chapters of Remembering the Kanji:
亡 [mong4]
盲 [maang4]
妄 [mong5]
荒 [fong1]
望 [mong6]
方 [fong1]

The onyomi isn't always similar to the Cantonese, but I think I like learning this way, because you only normally need to learn one Cantonese reading.

There's actually a fairly large number of Chinese in the Caribbean, as it happens, originally from the diaspora in the late 1800s if I'm not mistaken. So who knows, I might end up speaking with Cantonese Caribbeans if I move there, or at least during my travels there. In fact, there's also a growing very large presence of Chinese in Africa too, though most likely Mandarin speaking mainlanders there I think (though I suppose many could also be from South China's Cantonese speaking provinces)...

Anyway, on trying to frontload maximum 漢字: I'll have to find out how many of these I can learn daily and actually have them stick. I think I'll try at least doubling the recommended amount and find out how many actually stick in practice.

[Lucas88]

Thanks a lot @Lucas88, appreciate you sharing your knowledge even though you ended up moving away from your interest in Japanese and Japan (though toward brighter horizons for you, since your interest in Spanish and big butt Latinas is obviously more than just a fleeting interest, heheh).

Yeah, when I was in Japan the women didn't really do anything for me. Most of them were just too skinny and didn't have enough booty. Moreover, many of them just struck me as being emotionally immature, even somewhat infantalized. Oh, and don't even get me started on that annoying cutesy-ass "kawaii" shit. Skinny little cutesy Asian chicks might be okay for the anime nerds but we as high-test macho men love us some thick, curvaceous, big-bootied Latinas and Black ladies including smoking hot gordibuenas (las cuales son las mejores)!!!

I dated a Chinese girl for a while during my stay in Japan but she had wide hips and was actually built like a woman.

[WilliamSmith]

Thanks a lot @Lucas88, appreciate you sharing your knowledge even though you ended up moving away from your interest in Japanese and Japan (though toward brighter horizons for you, since your interest in Spanish and big butt Latinas is obviously more than just a fleeting interest, heheh).

Yeah, when I was in Japan the women didn't really do anything for me. Most of them were just too skinny and didn't have enough booty. Moreover, many of them just struck me as being emotionally immature, even somewhat infantalized. Oh, and don't even get me started on that annoying cutesy-ass "kawaii" shit. Skinny little cutesy Asian chicks might be okay for the anime nerds but we as high-test macho men love us some thick, curvaceous, big-bootied Latinas and Black ladies including smoking hot gordibuenas (las cuales son las mejores)!!!

I dated a Chinese girl for a while during my stay in Japan but she had wide hips and was actually built like a woman.

Black women are who I love most at this time for sure, and I agree about the high testosterone craving to get my hands on curvy women being essential, but I do like Japanese women quite a lot, personally. Many of them are IMO very mentally interesting with unusual personalities (meant as a compliment) sometimes, as well as pretty.

Some of the most interesting and funny things I've heard women say were said by intelligent Japanese women, LOL.

Personally I thought many Japanese personalities are surprisingly "out of the box" considering the level of rules and social conditioning many of them have, though they do tend to be quite a lot more circumspect for some time before opening up a bit.

I never dated any young girls like you described though, even when I was young (eg in college) and around more Asians regularly. Possibly part of the reason was that some of the Chinese girls were comparatively more forward in going after the men vs the quieter Japanese girls who sort of faded into the background a bit, LOL.

I probably shouldn't have posted that in a thread dedicated to my study and reverence for both traditional Chinese and Japanese culture and 漢字... but hey, this is the Happier Abroad forum.

[WilliamSmith]

Now then, back to the subject of what I mentioned about Cantonese and middle Chinese, and the influences of those on Japanese onyomi readings and 漢字:

I noticed some people asking about this subjet on Quora, and amidst various white or Asian American know-it-alls giving "no" answers to questions about whether there's linkages between Cantonese and Japanese, several Quorans who were both native Cantonese speakers and also fluent in Japanese had some cool lists showing how there are in fact many linkages between Cantonese words and Japanese onyomi (including their 漢字):

The #s listed are tonal markers for Cantonese, but even if you aren't studying those, I think the imperfect romanization gives you the idea of the familial relation between the onyomi (listed first) and Cantonese (listed second).
This is also true of many traditional names and place names in Vietnam, by the way, even though they stopped using traditional Chinese characters in their modern written language.

Here's a few where I pulled the meaning from Takoboto and added it:

陰謀
in-bou
jam1 mau4
plot, intrigue, scheme

合格
gou-kaku
hap6 gaak3
success, passing (e.g. exam), eligibility

曖昧
ai-mai
oi2 mui6
vague, ambiguous, unclear

瞬殺
shun-satsu
seon3 saat3
instant killing

椎骨
tsui-kotsu
zeoi1 gwat1
vertebra, vertebrae

動脈
dou-myaku
dung6 mak6
artery

杞憂
ki-yuu,
gei2 jau1
absurd fear, needless anxiety

Here's a great list quoted from a fellow going by the handle of Jin Jang, who (from reading his other Quora answers) is apparently an MMA fighter too, and also seems to share my/our views on the ZOG bankers as well, LOL :
He was not using the same romanization system I'm used to (jyutping), but it's a great list:

Nippon - 日本 - Yep Pun = essence of the sun but in common usage “ Japan”

Jikan - 時間 - Si Kan = Time

Denwa - 電話 - Dien Wa - Phone

Shogun - 将軍 - Chieung Kwun - General, military leader, warrior chief etc

Bushido - 武士道 - Mo Si Do - the warrior’s way

Shinto - 神道 - Shen Doa - the way of God

Kajin - 家人- Ka Yen - Family Members

Ken - 剣 / 劍 - Keem - Sword

Mon - 門 - Moun - door

Muji - 文字 - Mun Tzi - Characters

Ai - 愛 - Oai - Love

Kin - 金 - Kum - Gold

Gin - 銀 - Ngan - Silver

Shin - 心 - Sum - Heart

Kanji - 漢字 - Han Tzi - Traditional Characters

San - 山 - San - Mountain

[Lucas88]

Black women are who I love most at this time for sure, and I agree about the high testosterone craving to get my hands on curvy women being essential, but I do like Japanese women quite a lot, personally. Many of them are IMO very mentally interesting with unusual personalities (meant as a compliment) sometimes, as well as pretty.

I like some of the Brown kinds of Asians such as Filipinas. They have very cute faces and tend to be a bit curvier and more compact than NE Asians. They are also affectionate and have a lot of personality and know how to treat their man. I understand why many guys on the forum love them. However, I've been spoiled by so many huge booties in Latin America and now that is what I expect from a woman. It is now hard for me to be satisfied by a Filipina after being with Latin American and Mulata booty queens. I've just gotten too used to those perfect thick basketball butts!

I subscribe to Winston's theory of different national oversouls or "national egregores" as I conceptualize them and I'm just not too energetically compatible with Japan or Japanese people. I wrote about this in some of my previous posts. For some reason my soul just doesn't jive well with the Japanese. Few of them seem to like me or welcome me into their social circles and that is despite my ability to speak and read their language and my knowledge of their culture. I know that this is not just a case of xenophobia against the "gaijin". I've seen other Caucasian foreigners mingle with Japanese people and they did fine. It is just me who didn't fit in with them. I'm probably as much of a social misfit in Japan as in the UK. I feel socially inept in both of these countries. Most Japanese are just a different soul type. I mainly seem to jive well on an energetic level with Latinos, Mediterraneans and Black people.

It's true. Japanese people tend to dislike me and see me as just a "変な外人". And I'm not even a nerd nor do I like anime or any of Japanese society's underbelly's weird shit. Rather I've always admired Japan's bushido tradition and traditional culture. But Japanese girls don't like my way of being or my conversations which tend towards frankness and are characterized by more gravitas than the typical airheaded nonsense about which Japanese people tend to talk. Whenever I've tried to speak Japanese with Japanese people in the West (where it is they who are the "gaijin") they've almost invariably been dismissive of my efforts or acted hostile towards me. Many of them have the attitude that Japanese is only for the Japanese, not for outsiders. Again not all Western Japanophiles receive this treatment although I know that I'm not alone. Some are better received than I am, which again leads me to believe that my soul is just not compatible with the Japanese national egregore. The Japanese sense that and usually reject me because of it. So after about four years of study I abandoned Japanese. I fell out with the culture and haven't sought out opportunities to speak the language since.

I don't wanna be a killjoy but I personally think that Japanese as a language is overrated. Once you learn the kana and a decent number of kanji the language becomes largely demystified and its exoticness or uniqueness begins to disappear. Japanese grammar isn't particularly complex or interesting. In fact it's simpler than that of many European languages. There's no personal conjugations, no grammatical gender, no noun cases, just simple agglutinative suffixes and a simple set of particles which function like postpositions. I personally find Spanish grammar considerably more interesting with its personal conjugations (amo, amas, ama, amamos, amáis, aman), its many precise verb tenses, its three subjunctive moods (four if you include the archaic and rarely used future subjunctive), and its inbuilt sexual dimorphism! I also find Russian and Serbo-Croatian more interesting with their noun cases and Slavic vocabulary with a great plasticity for compounding. So yeah, I'm now well over Japanese. She's like an ex wife who I kicked to the curb long ago.

But I still wish you well in your studying of the language. I sincerely hope that you achieve your language goals and enjoy a fruitful relationship with the culture!

[WilliamSmith]

@Lucas88 thanks for all the interesting contributions!
Too bad you didn't have a better experience there, but no worries about being a killjoy: I have been into Chinese and Japanese stuff for many years so won't get discouraged, but your perspectives are very interesting.
That's very true that a lot of people have trouble relating to the Japanese because they have their own strong systems of cultural conditioning and often of formality even though they are very often genuinely kind and thoughtful people (and I also don't blame the ones who want to keep out foreigners as well, though they seem to be in the minority, unfortunately for a nationalist Japan!).
But I actually like the formality in a lot of ways and even prefer it, because it works well with an exterior gentlemanly masculinity that frankly isn't really seeking any close connection with anyone (even if a certain amount of 'warmth' is sincere). That works for me because I'm very "Germanic" and "too white" to the core, like external formality, and only want to really have strong emotional connections with women (though I do also care about my !@#$ed up "bros" I've known since childhood, heheh`).

I think @Outcast9428 is right in what he said in his thread about "Asian girls" (LOL) responding really well to gentlemanly masculinity, but I personally have found both white, Latina, and black American women responding to it as well, despite frequent MGTOW beta male claims that "American women" supposedly all drink blood, howl at the full moon, and will supposedly only date 9 foot tall multi-millionaires with lambos or whatever.

[WilliamSmith]

Back to our interest in curvy chicks and working that into my theme of traditional 漢字:
I updated the curvy women thread again this afternoon, and noticed that little babe from Trinidad who pissed off the vax mandate crowd awhile ago has a pretty traditional 漢字 tattoo:



Here it is in Cantonese:

上帝與你常在

上[soeng6]帝[dai3] 與[jyu5] 你[nei5] 常[soeng4] 在[zoi6]


"God is with you always!:

上[soeng6] 帝[dai3]
God

與[jyu5]
你[nei5]
with
you

常[soeng4] 在[zoi6]
Always
(can mean "often" too)

I think it looks great, but unfortunately she said it was one of those stories where she regretted getting her tattoo (her very first apparently!), and she said her Mom threatened to disown her over it.

I've always accepted chicks who have tattoos (even though it's one of those things I always wonder if they'll regret later, like making sex tapes with their boyfriends, LOL).
One of my favorite babes from days of yore was a hot white girl proportioned a lot like this little babe here but with an even bigger pair, and she was into the whole rock-a-billy cosplaying fashion thing and had tons of tattoos, and she was the first girl to make me realize how amazingly hot girls can make themselves look by being skilled makeup artists.

There's a great scene in an ancient Chinese adult novel where a chick wearing bright red lipstick... ah, actually nevermind for now, I'll come back to the subject later when I can actually put in the associated 漢字 to back this up, LOL.

[WilliamSmith]

While I don't own any firearms, I have a decent collection of swords and other oriental weapons, some of which I have stored close to my bed just for in case. My most beloved sword from my collection is a Chinese Da Dao 大刀 broadsword (I put the hanzi for @WilliamSmith ) which I purchased from an online weapons store when I was 15.



This is the exact same model as the one I have. The Da Dao is weighted towards the point, is two-handed and is sturdy and durable. The amount of force I can generate with the sword is amazing. It strikes more like an ax and I've cut down trees with it.

Thanks for the Kanji in your "Weapons of Killing" thread, LOL:
That was awesome info you posted about that sword, but on the 漢字 side of the subject:

Yeah, 刀[dou1] is the Cantonese jyutping romanization of the blade.

You can see how close it is to the "Chinese reading" Onyomi
刀 = とう tou
vs
Japanese reading かたな (katana)

There's a violent Hong Kong Tsui Hark film named that (刀), in fact:
The earlier 80s-90s Hong Kong films were a lot better IMO, since that one was a bit newer and leaning more arthouse and bleak with less humor, if memory serves, but it certainly had a lot of violent Chinese knife/blade fighting!

I think the English title of the import was "The Blade," not to be confused with the Wesley Snipes "Blade" that I also thought was a great one, before US macho action films went down the drain 2000+ era to where I stopped bothering to try new ones...

[WilliamSmith]

Another fun topic, the cool links between the old Cantonese / Southern Chinese and Vietnamese:

Let's take some Vietnamese and see how closely they correlate:

越南
越[yut6]南[naam4]
Việt Nam

南越
南[naam4]越[yut6]
Nam Việt

海[hoi2]安[on1]
Hội An

湖[wu4]還[waan4]劍[gim3]
Hồ Hoàn Kiếm

下龍灣
Vịnh Hạ Long
下[haa6]
龍[lung4]
灣[waan1]
Ha Long Bay
"Descending Dragon Bay"



Động Thiên Cung
天[tin1]
宮[gung1]
洞[dung6]
Thien Cong Grotto aka Heavenly Cave

[galii]

Interesting way of talking about learning Japanese. I am not shure if I am able to get to learning Japanese in this life but maybe in the next life then. I had not much connection to Japan culturally except they produced the Anime Captain Future. Though my feeling is that it is not real anime because I do not like anime actually.

When I did my adventure to the Philippines I did not even like female Asian facial features. They reminded me too much to Chong Li from Bloodsport with Van Damme. Anyways thanks to the Filippinas I got used to it.

It is fitting to HA when I say I found then my favorite Japanese Pornstar Miki Sato. In Japan the porn is taken seriously as a story. This just a side note to the side note.

Anyway so why am I telling this? I try to find more connections to NE Asia. I am shure there are things that might capture my interest if I find the time to invest looking for them.

For now I have only one song from long ago that I saw in a video. It is South Korean but well at least it is from NEA.

[peregrino]

I never used RTK. For Mandarin I use a flash card app called Skritter that drills you on characters and stroke order. It costs $100 a year, so it's not discussed much on language learning forums where people absolutely hate the idea of paying for anything.

After you've memorized 2,000 characters, you're pretty much jacked into the matrix and you'll have the mental system in place to memorize new characters when you need to. I think that's the reason Japan pushes the idea of 2,000 characters for basic literacy.

[Yohan]

If you want to learn how to read and write Japanese, you have to start with the Kyoiku Kanji 教育漢字, also called 小学漢字 Elementary School Kanji. These are the most important characters for daily use and taught in elementary school (children 6 to 12 years old)

If you have any contact with Japanese children, you will notice that all children are starting to read and write quite a lot when they are about 10 years old - after being able to recognize around 600 to 700 characters and able to use the Kana system of 51 Hiragana and 51 Katakana syllabaries and its combinations.

A list for English speakers can be found here, a fairly good site for the beginner.

https://www.kanshudo.com/collections/kyoiku_kanji

[Yohan]

I've not used Japanese in over a decade. I fell out with the culture in the early 2010s and now avoid Japanese people like the plague. As a result my Japanese has suffered significant language attrition...

But still, I can read a lot of Kanji. When I open one of my Japanese books I can still read a large part of them out loud even without furigana. Besides, once you learn Kanji even if you forget them it's still quite easy to relearn them. Relearning that which is forgotten is always easier than to learn something from scratch.

Japanese people living outside of Japan for a few years have the same issue. Many of them can still read, but often need a dictionary for writing by hand, just able to recognize the character, but not really able to write some of them correctly.
Now it is easier to use a computer for writing Japanese....characters are coming out by themselves (well, sometimes the wrong ones....)

I remember a test, asking Japanese and Chinese living overseas to write by hand some not so difficult words in their own native language and 9 out of 10 people failed the test....many said, they are just using an office computer or their mobile phone for writing business or private correspondence.
However reading was still OK, it is a big difference to recognize a character or to write it ....

If you are living in Japan or Taiwan or mainland China you see characters all the time....but if you leave that region you are starting more and more to forget about them.