6 Rules for Writing Japanese Kanji CORRECTLY 

If you force the first 100-or-so kanji into your brain in the correct stroke order, these rules develop automatically. You will see that it gets much much easier to memorize kanji after already knowing a few, because your brain generalizes over the individual parts. You suddenly don't have to memorize 20 strokes for a new kanji, but like 3-4 parts you already know. And at that point, every kanji made up of 3 parts is as simple as the kanji for "3". Literally. Then the difficulty becomes not confusing very similar kanji.

West to east strokes hit different when you’re left handed

I know its not about this video topic, but i just wanna say that you are amazing. Those genki lessons are so so helpful, like you don't even need to go to classroom. And the biggest part is that they all are free, thanks andi! Thnx a lot for letting them free ❤❤❤, i wish future people would also learn from them

Ahhhhhh this is GOLD! GOLD I TELL YOU!

I can't imagine being a left-handed Japanese student.

I was making amazing progress learning Japanese. The moment I realized how fundamentally important learning Kanji was- and how much additional time learning this language would take me- it messed with my head enough I lost my study flow... I need to wrap up Lesson 4 Genki & start lesson 5 😭

really looking forward to the future kanji videos! Thanks for your dedication to making them! 😁

This Kanji videos are crazy good, keep it up man

This video came at the perfect time! I've been learning kanji for a little while now, but want to be sure to practice writing. Great video as always, thank you!

The worst part about writing kanji as a lefty is that west to east lines feel so unnatural

This was a great video. I am looking forward to more videos on the kanji series. Thank you for the great explanation.

The calligraphy on the video is beautiful. I've done a bit of western calligraphy, but not Chinese/Japanese.

Kanji series?! Awesome, dude. Your kanji with brush and ink look really nice! 👍

I'm halfway through remembering the kanji but this serves as a good reminder since i had forgotten most of the rules. If anyone is stuggling at first it is normal but keep up the effort and you'll do these automatically (and Heisig even starts not including the stroke order around the 500th kanji)

Kanji, Chinese characters and even Korean syllabic blocks should always be written in either these way(s): Top to bottom Left to right Outer to inner And it's not just a rule, this is how we just naturally write it, this even applies in the Latin alphabet, just try to write these letters yourself, L, H, P, R, T, and pay attention to how your hands write them.

Easily the best channel to lean Japanese. So simple and logical explanations.

I’m still so up in the air on kanji memorization. Having studied Japanese for less than a year it’s extremely difficult to not feel overwhelmed by kanji alone much less kanji along with everything else I have to learn.

Even though I held off learning the language until I can do it in an extraverted way, introverted learnings styles don't work efficiently nor very effectively for me, I plan on learning to write kanji regardless. I was gaven this exquisite Chinese calligraphy set and this video will be everso helpful in this endeavor.

Great video 📹 👍

glad im starting off with kanji here bc i opened up chapter 3 of Genki I and nearly cried because I had no idea how I was supposed to write the ones in the vocab lol the textbook really drops you into it without any bumpers

Oooooh, an Anki deck! Thank you!!!

Amazing

Another W vid!

Awesome thanks

Still prefer the keyboard method but always like to know the rules. Start wit a line and end in depression looking forward to the new series

In the Kanji for "write" (and characters like it) I have always made the big piercing vertical stroke before I write the last horizontal. I do it that way because the vertical does not pierce the last line. The last line becomes the base of that part of the Kanji. When you start writing them faster, you can adjust where the bottom line is if you make that stroke last. If you draw the bottom line before the vertical piercing stroke, you could blow through it by accident with the vertical and spoil the character. Then, I write the final box shape at the bottom. Is that wrong? I want to get the correct stroke order because my last name is Tuttle. Lot's of pressure for me to get it right. The ghost of Great great uncle Charles is watching my every brush stroke. My family has published virtually all of the English language books on Asian languages for the last 170 years. We donated the land to build what became Yale University in the 1600s.

I often felt that the rules apply more consistently when considering where a stroke ends, perhaps taking priority over where it starts. That way, 口, doesn't break the rules anymore :) Not sure if this works consistently though.

i think writing kanji is crucial to memorizing what they look like and associating the meaning with a mental map. Along with that, I translate the sentence that includes the kanji and listen to it + read in hiragana. I think that should work alright. But i think maybe you don't need to write ALL kanji to understand all kanji. You only need to write the ones that are more strokes/looks similar to others/you won't remember what it means later. Idk what to do about the radicals though. It's nice for slicing down a big kanji, but the individual meanings of the radicals are usually lost in the kanji.

Since I have experience on writing Chinese, I won't have a much harder time since Korean and Japanese have the same stroke order system. That's what I noticed from Japanese but it wasn't really shocking since Japanese uses Chinese Characters but Korean also did have the same stroke order system and I was shocked a bit, I wast slightly not shocked a bit since these languages had their Sino era

Hi Andy, I was curious. Why do you linger on the final part of each calligraphy stroke? In the example for ichi you go left to right, then sorta pause on the final piece, you lift then apply pressure again. Is that a technique?

I can’t wait for the next videos! But I don’t want to spend anything of my parent’s money on learning Japanese.

Hi Andy, I have a question. I’ve followed ur method in ur how I’d learn kanji if I could restart video, and I learned all of the kanji in the first phase. Where to find vocab for them, or should I just find a specific amount of vocab for each kanji? Also how do I know I’m not missing out on any important vocab? Should I just review all of the n5 vocab?

Do you have a lifetime membership option?

While learning how to draw kanji, 右 and 左 seem to kinda confusing

Man I got like 100 kanji in and all these rules came naturally after that (i lost like 50 because i took 3 months off but im back at it again and the rules still feel natural!)

This Is prolly the easiest video out there to learn/understand kanji and why am I not getting it ? Will I understand it if I watch it again and again ?

BIG DUB

The kanji for field always bothers me, so hard to do right even though I know. I always want to write the horizontal line inside the box before the vertical line.

0:20 Isn't the remaining 10% of all kanji still a huge number to memorize? TuT

I knew a lot fo these from learning Mandarin X_X but some are still hard to guess like for example: 山

Excuse my french but how the heck will the kanji for 4 as an example look any different if I close the box first? I'm writing it and I don't see it. Actually none of the number kanji look any different depending on my order. (the numbers are the only ones I know so far besides mouth/legs/私は) I can see it helping to make kanji with 500 strokes but I don't see why they'd look any different.

I didn't understand you! Thanks anyways.

You shouldn't guess anything. If you don't know, you should just consult a kanji dictionary. A good kanji dictionary will show the correct stroke order.

If your symbols look different depending on the order of strokes that's just sloppy handwriting. The traditional stroke order is the way the it is solely because most people are right handed. As a lefty, this actually makes it harder for me to write quickly and neatly. Even in English I always write horizontal lines from right to left. This is why I can't concern myself with stroke order. Its biased against left handed people and it makes no difference. If I write 100 kanji "my way" I'd bet money no one could tell the stroke order was wrong 🤷‍♂️ it's just typical traditionalist values in China and Japan that insist things must be done a certain way.

Waste of time in my opinion. Very rarely do you actually need to write Japanese these days unless its your address on a form or doing the kanji kentei test. Most people need to focus on knowing how to read them before knowing the stroke order.

I saw your thumbnail, First of all, you look handsome, second of all, I don't want to be only 90% correct, I want to get 210% correct. 🦦🦦🦦🦦🦦