Methods for remembering kanji?

Question

I study hard, but I can't seem to keep kanji in my long term memory.

Answer 1

Don't just try to memorize kanji; learn the words they make and (this is most important) *use* them. Find people to chat with online who can type in Japanese and get some use out of those kanji.

Answer 2

Practice makes perfect.

As kanji are either the same as Chinese characters or its variation, I can provide you with how we learned to write Chinese characters in elementary schools. It might seem impractical, but I'm serious about it.

Pupils in Taiwan are asked to record the 部首 (I don't know how to say it in English, but it's something like the affix of the characters) of each characters in the textbooks and the workbooks, write the Chinese characters and their pronunciations about 20 times and the vocabularies in the textbooks about 2-4 times in their workbooks, and teachers will grade it by examining the strokes and whether the pupils' handwritings are pretty enough. Sometimes we also copy the texts in our textbooks by writing them down in the workbook or on a piece of paper. That's how we memorize the way to recognize and write Traditional Chinese characters.

Basically a character is written from left to right and from top to bottom (there are some exceptions though). Get yourself a book about kanji/Chinese characters or a dictionary with the strokes of some frequently used Chinese characters and start practicing writing them as many times as possible. Also, doing a lot of reading with kanji in the texts would help a lot, too.

Answer 3

Kanji are not composed of random strokes, but represent pictures. if you learn to recognize the picture within the pictograph, it will be much easier to remember them. There are several books that can get you started on this.