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Linguaholic

What is the correct order for learning Japanese characters?


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Yes, that's the right order for most people.
However, memorising a chart is rather a bad idea, that's rote memorisation and rote memorisation is like working against your brain.
You should work WITH your brain, not AGAINST it.

For hiragana and katakana, I made my own learning tool: http://076.wtf/index.php?mode=post&id=9
For kanji, I highly recommend this one: http://www.wanikani.com

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hiragana -> Katakan -> Kanji is usually the order most people go with. 

However, there is no "correct" order. You can learn whichever first and still become excellent in Japanese. You just need to make sure you have a good grasp of all three at the end of the day. 

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  • 1 month later...

To suggest another way of learning...don't use the charts for 'memorizing.'  Keep them handy in case you need to quickly reference where something is but don't rely on them.  Don't endlessly repeat writing them in any set order.  The way I was introduced to learning hiragana was to take a bunch of words written in hiragana, write them down, sound them out, and then look up any characters I didn't get.  I never memorized the charts.  Flash cards were my thing.  As for katakana, it was the same.  

Kanji was a simultaneous endeavor as I learned hiragana, since I wanted to learn the rudimentary ones to replace hiragana.  But as everyone else is saying, learning kanji should be the last on the list. 

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  • 4 months later...

We started out with the hiragana alphabet first, followed by the katakana.  As for the kanji, there is no particular order, but we started out with the basic ones.such as the numbers (一, 二, 三, and so on), days of the week, and certain words such as 川 (kawa) and 山 (yama). However, we always make sure that we understand the two readings of the kanji as the position of the kanji to the left or the right may have different meanings.  We also grasp the hiragana equivalent of the particular kanji so as for us not to get lost along the way.

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@AExAVF

Except that I would rather recommend to follow an order based on radicals when learning Kanji, rather than the simplicity of the Kanji.
Becomes sometimes, simple Kanji tend to have way more readings and more complex meanings than their difficult counterparts.

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