/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>39317364
Focusing on the radicals is an alright place to start. I would use a chart like this and really get to know some of the important ones first, so that you can pick them out and get to grips with their common uses and meanings. There are a lot of radicals that almost always appear in words with specific connotations, like how the character for water 水 is only one line away from ice 氷 and usually appears in some form or another in words related to water, such as the three lines on the left in 湖 for lake. Or how fire 火 is used as four vertical lines like a flame cooking something above it in things like 熱い. There are other radicals that, when you see them, mean that the character is often pronounced a certain way. 剣 and 験 are both けん, for instance, and you can see what shape they share that you can use as a marker. If you want an in-depth dissection of where some of these shapes originated and the underlying logic behind them, A Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji is a pretty good reference book.