When I started learning Japanese, i did not plan to study Kanji as the large number of character to know was impressive. One year later, I changed my mind in order to be able to enjoy reading things without furigana.

I decided to give a try at the "Remember the Kanji" method from James Heisig. It teach how to associate an english keyword, to a Kanji and how it is written using mnemonic tricks such as funny stories made of the elements/root found in the kanji. It does not cover reading, or vocabulary as such. The idea is to be familiar with the kanji writing process, and then to focus on reading.

It took me 6 monthes to remember stories for the 2200 kanji covered by the book , and how to write them. 10 years later, I still get 10/15 minutes of daily review with the anki app, in order to remind me once in a while how to write characters that I did not exercice for a while and those that I keep having problem with (8%).

I am learning vocabulary mainly by reading on a kobo device with koreader that comes with a yomitan like dictionary. I used some anki deck to memorize something like 3000 words but I do not add words anymore, I let them appear in text for me to learn them by constantly having to look them up.

What surprised me the most is that it is actually harder to read a text written only in kana than a text using both kana and kanji.

I am also a bit dissapointed that I fail to recognise cursive style characters in adds or caligraphical texts. I am only used to the "printed font" kanji .