One of the biggest worries students tend to have when they start studying Japanese is how to fit all those complicated characters into their heads. While it is a mighty task, it certainly can be done by anyone with some determination and guidance in the right direction. I find that one of the quickest ways to memorize kanji is to separate them by category. It helps to start with some that are easy to write because many of the more complicated characters will utilize these. After these you can move on to single kanji words that you find yourself using the most. After a while you’ll be ready to move on to kanji compounds and the multiple pronunciations of characters. We’ll start with something extremely basic; numbers.

１ 一 ichi
２ 二 ni
３ 三 san
４ 四 shi
５ 五 go
６ 六 roku
７ 七 shichi
８ 八 hachi
９ 九 kyuu
１０ 十 juu
１００ 百 hyaku

For learning simple numbers, maybe try a song like this

One, two and three you should be able to memorize for life in less than a minute. The others are relatively easy to remember, especially when you use a few tricks to do so. Imagine that 四 is a little puppet show with the curtains hanging down from the right and left sides. 六　looks like a little man; the small dot on the top is the head, the horizontal line makes the arms and the other two lines are legs. 八　looks very similar to the katakana for “ha” （ハ）。　十　looks just like a cross, easy enough. 五　and 九 both have interesting shapes that will stick in your head relatively easily. That leaves us with boring old 七 which shouldn’t be all that hard.

Other Related Numbers

Making bigger numbers is relatively easy. The number in the 10′s place is before the number 10 and the number in the ones place comes after. 四十八 is 48. 六十九　is 69. 100 works the same way 四百七十二　is 472. If this sounds difficult, don’t worry. Numbers above 20 are rarely written in kanji.

Dates

While the ways to use these are practically limitless, lets think of the most common and practical ways. The first is the date. In Japanese, the month is expressed with numbers, rather than names. That means January is literally called “one-month” and February “two-month”. Month is 月　(getsu) and day is 日　(nichi)

三月　　　 March
十月　 October

Time
We express o’clock with the kanji 時　(ji) and minutes with 分　（pun though pronunciation varies). 半　(han) means a half and comes at the end.

七時 7 o’clock
九時半 9:30

Year
The year is often expressed in kanji but in a relatively simple way. Rather than 千九百九十九年　（年 or “nen” means year), 1999 is written as 一九九九年。

Money
Another very useful way to make use of these characters is with money. Although prices are rarely written in kanji, you will find them written this way in some Japanese restaurants or in some stores that sell traditional Japanese goods and pastries. Yen is pronounced “en” in Japanese with the character 円。
五十円　

Kanji. Japanese language’s fourth alphabet. The most intimidating of all – a baffling arrangement of figures wherein one shape may make two, or three or four, distinct sounds. Purely overwhelming in number. That unconquerable beast we have read about in the lore, seen in foreign picture books – a dragon against which we must train for years, on simpler beasts, before we’ve a chance of tackling it and learning Japanese to any successful degree.

Stop studying in fear. Let me help.

Do you remember those charts your teachers gave you, back when you were learning hiragana and katakana? Mnemonic charts, I think they were called.

For anyone drawing a blank, there are a series of pictures that take something like the hiragana letter く (ku) and represent it as something like this:

“This is a cuckoo! It goes koo! koo!”

What I’d like to know is, why did these extraordinarily helpful devices—however inane and sometimes not-so-intuitive—have to stop at ん (nn)?

(Which is, by the way, this:

“The end!”

Kanji is exponentially more difficult to master than are its linguistic precursors: because there are exponentially more strokes, more ways to read them, more of them, and the regularity of their appearance in every day life, necessary for purposes of memorization, is nil.

And so, I bring you 漢字-gations, or Kanjigations.

Here, I will endeavor to represent kanji in memorable ways, providing multiple readings, compounds, and mnemonics in the form of pictures and phrases. My hope is that the conjugation of them all (and I mean that in the scientific sense—to link, connect) will make these letters hard to forget. I apologize to anyone who has not yet grasped the preceding alphabets, but the readings will be provided in kana only, assuming that those who enter here have dealt with it already.

Following what I’ve found to be the most useful language-learning tip—keep it fun!—even though it may be more natural to start basic, I’m going to begin Kanjigations by introducing two of my favorite (and rather simple) letters.

The two above kanji form a natural pair, and so we shall tackle them together. I love these characters because, firstly, they look more like Tetris pieces than kanji; second, their shapes represent their meaning and are thusly very easy to remember; and lastly, they are a complementary compound, by which I mean they appear to have been made for each other—the puzzle-piece compatibility is undeniable—and are, indeed, linguistically harmonious. Here are the vitals:

While these two characters are memorable enough on their own, as promised, here come the mnemonics:
Two tater tots, one of which is decollating the other.

(**Note: For the purpose of precision and personal enjoyment, some of the English vocabulary featured in these segments, e.g. decollating: to behead, may not be the most commonplace; in such instances, definitions will be provided.)

Trace the tots’ shape, and you have 凸.

Oh no! It’s Robocop!

Outline Robocop’s intimidating body, and you’ll see 凹.

There you have the readings for 凸 and 凹 when found in a compound.
Now for 凹’s verb forms, in the form of a comic: the best way to depict verb-ing.

The Action of 凹 (くぼむ ・ へこむ)

A sad story, and hopefully one you will remember. Language learning principles preach that language is better internalized once the target word and its meaning are united in physical movement; so, rather than depress or be depressed, let the sketches substitute for the uneven ground of 凸 and 凹. And refer to the review chart below to remember that kanji and their readings are more than just shapes and sounds.

We’ve looked at a handful of loanwords that came from English already but not all loan words came from English. There are a fair amount that come from German, Portugese, French, Dutch and other languages. The most interesting thing about these loan words is that most Japanese natives think that they’re actually English words. They may be a bit harder to remember than English loan words but anyone studying Japanese should take note of them.

アルバイト　Working your byte (German)
One of the most common non-English loanwords is the word for part time job. The word is Arubaito and comes from German but is often abbreviated to Baito. I cannot count the amount of times I’ve heard Japanese use the word baito and expect an English native to understand.

パン – Pots and Pans (Portuguese)
Another extremely popular word to mistake for English, Pan means bread, not something you cook out of. I’ve met almost native level English speakers in Japan who still mistake this word and it can be really confusing at first if you haven’t studied Spanish or Portuguese.

アンケート – survey (French)
I tried for a long time to figure out which English word this came from but Ankeeto comes from French and means survey. It can be used for casual magazine surveys about your love life or more scientific surverys about how your health and the workings of your brain.

ピエロ – Hey Pierre! (French)
This one always makes me laugh. I imagine a man named Pierre who puts on make up and dresses up as a clown on his days off. There must be someone like that out there who is studying Japanese! If that can’t help you remember the word, I don’t know what can. Piero comes from French and means clown.

ミイラ Looking at the man in the mirror (Portuguese)
It sounds like mirror but if you look into a mirror and see a miira, you’ve been dead for a long, long time. Miira means mummy and apparently comes from Portugese. Once again, if imagining a mummy looking in the mirror isn’t a good memory trick, I don’t know what is.

マロン Those are some small melons (French)
First of all, get your mind out of the gutter. I learned the word “Maron” when I went to a supermarket and asked where the melons were. You could imagine the look on my face when I was shown a bunch of nuts. Maron comes from French and means chestnuts.

コンセント　Getting Consent (???)
Contrary to my initial idea, this word has nothing to do with getting approval from someone. It means electrical outlet and I have not been able to figure out where it comes from. It has been bothering me so if anyone knows, please fill me in.