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
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