Note: this whole website’s text will be rewritten at some point (more details about its future here). After some time cooling off, and after receiving feedback over the past few months, I’ve come to feel that this project should be more of a personal reflection blog rather than a strict, instructional “how-to”. The latter’s tone is putting too much expectation on the reader.
So if you’re here for the first time, do not worry if you can’t get the main gist of this guide even after multiple tries – the onus is on me to find better ways to express the concepts, not on you to decipher harder. Instead, just try your best to ponder the ideas loosely without having to “do” anything, and see if they alter your mindset about kanji during your studying and immersion.
There’s so much that goes on inside my head whenever I try to write about this huge experiment, and I often get frustrated that I can’t say everything every time. So I think it would fit my style better if I wrote many short pages each having a specific theme that will deliberately limit how far I can branch off-topic, as opposed to cramming everything into a few (very!) long pages.
This is what happens when you try to be your own editor. Fool for a client.
Anyway, have fun reading! Or.. try to. 🙂
Welcome to The Kanji Visual Language Project! This in-depth guide, with its comprehensive kanji group designs, will provide you with the best possible tools you need to get started with or improve your Japanese reading skills no matter what level you’re at. You’ll quickly come to see why this project is very different from conventional methods, and you’ll walk away with a lot more confidence in the characters than when you started. This project will also benefit anyone learning to read Chinese.
For too long the journey towards kanji acquisition has appeared immensely difficult on the surface. But hidden amongst the illusion of noise lies an untested, yet simple approach to developing a visual sense of kanji characters which hasn’t been given enough attention.
This project will teach you how to read kanji by developing your observational skills, which will give you the same understanding of the universal visual language that artists acquire whenever they study the patterns of the world. You’ll learn where a kanji goes in a bigger picture with its similar-looking neighbours and be able to intuitively recognise full Japanese words at a natural pace.
No mnemonics are included in this project. The good news for those having a hard time with mnemonics is that the techniques you’ll learn here will make them redundant. There’s no need for a native Japanese reader to slow down by translating multi-step mnemonics into words, and there’s no need for you to do so either.
If you want to get started right away, follow this link to the Quick Start page which should take about ten minutes to read. And if you’re more interested in the full detail of the KVLP, the Main Guide will take between one and two hours to get through in one sitting, but I hope you’ll still gain plenty of insight from it. Three years of work and research have gone into this project so I hope it pays off. Still, you be the judge!
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”
Carl Sagan
The Kanji Visual Language Project 