Finished Remembering the Kanji

By Mike Lin

W00t! I’m now the proud owner of a brain containing the 2000 most common kanji. I can’t believe I’m done! It only took 9 months. I could have had a baby in that time. I kind of feel like I did have a baby, a kanji baby! I can’t wait to get on to sentence mining now, ala AJATT. I’m tired of telling people I’m working on my Japanese and not having any improvement to show for it conversationally.

It’s an amazing feeling, this literacy. I got some manga in Japanese off ebay and sometimes I can go pages without missing a kanji and my handwriting has improved a million times! People now say “it’s good… for a boy” instead of “it’s good… for a North American” !!!