Yes, you can learn Japanese without kanji if your goal is just to speak the language. In fact, there are lots of foreigners in Japan that can speak Japanese fluently but don’t know kanji. However, if you want to be able to read and write in the Japanese language, you just have to start learning kanji.
In general, kanji is one of the three writing scripts of the Japanese language. Hiragana and katakana are the other two common writing systems. Kanji is often used to help readers and writers to differentiate between various Japanese words. Furthermore, kanji plays a key role in communicating certain names, grammar, and concepts in the Japanese language.
In addition, kanji assists you to tell where a word ends and where another starts. This is because Japanese people don’t add spaces to their writings and also use a few punctuation marks. Only children’s books have spaces and furigana that can help you to read without kanji.
Without kanji, the words in a sentence will appear as if they are lumped together. Therefore, if you don’t know kanji, you will struggle to read or write anything in the Japanese language.
Conclusively, you can learn to speak Japanese without kanji. However, when it comes to writing and reading the language, you cannot avoid learning kanji.
How important is kanji stroke order?
Simply put, every Japanese character is made of one or more strokes. Notably, there is a particular way that a writer must follow to write the strokes in a Japanese character, and this is what is called the stroke order. Typically, kanji stroke order involves writing from the top to the bottom, left to right, and so on.
If you want your writing to be legible, it is vital to learn kanji stroke order. Generally, the stroke order assists you to intuitively understand the way of writing new characters and also determines how the characters will look. Hence, if you don’t follow the kanji stroke order, your kanji character may not appear in the right form. So, other people will have a hard time knowing what you have written. This means that it will be difficult for you to communicate with others in a written form.
Additionally, using the wrong stroke order can affect how you understand or remember kanji characters. In other words, you may struggle to know what other people have written. Similarly, if you can master kanji stroke order, you will be able to write faster.
So, as you start learning the Japanese kanji, you should also master its stroke order.
How many kanji do you need to know?
There are tens of thousands of kanji characters in the Japanese language. So, this often poses a serious threat to new learners as they try to master these characters. But you don’t need to learn all the kanji characters. Basically, the number of kanjis you need to know depends on what you want to do with Japanese.
If you just want to speak Japanese without writing or reading it, you don’t need to learn any kanji. However, your understanding of Japanese will be greatly limited. To read around 95% of things written in Japanese, you should learn around 1,000 commonly used kanjis. To learn Japanese to a literate level, you need to master the 2,136 joyo kanji mandated by the Japanese government for determining literacy. With joyo kanji, you will be able to ready almost 99% of everything written in Japanese. This means you can read most Japanese novels, newspapers, manuals, etc.
To read, write and comprehend Japanese like a university-educated individual, you must learn about 3,000 kanji characters. However, an excellently educated and technical person will need as many as 5,000 kanji characters. You will need around 6,355 kanjis if you would like to pass the Kanji Kentei, which is the most difficult kanji test.
Therefore, consider what you want to achieve with your Japanese to determine how many kanji characters you have to know.
