Kanji question

[totakeke]

I'm starting to learn kanji and I was just wondering how much time should I devote to learning specific strokes and radicals? Thanks for the information.

[Ryouka]

I don't have a huge knowledge of Kanji... about 300 or so, but I would say that you definitely should put a good amount of time to learning stroke orders. As for radicals, I honestly didn't actually begin to look at individual radicals until recently, and I have to say, I should have started learning them earlier. A lot of times they can help you get a general idea of the meaning of a Kanji you don't know, so put some time in studying individual radicals too.

[totakeke]

Thanks. (And when I said specific strokes I meant the actual individual strokes, like their names. I definitely plan on learning the proper stroke order. )

[Ryouka]

Stroke names？ Learn the names of the radicals... I honestly didn't know that indivual strokes had names.

[astaroth]

Thanks. (And when I said specific strokes I meant the actual individual strokes, like their names. I definitely plan on learning the proper stroke order. )

Unless you want to do shodou I don't think learning the stroke names will be very helpful, besides many strokes are almost identical unless written using a brush.
As for your initial question. Personally I started learning kanji following the Basic Kanji Book which presents some radicals only very late. I don't think learning individual radicals will be very useful though, as there are 214 radicals and to know the name of most of them is not very helpful ... though it's important to recognize them ...

[totakeke]

Thanks for all the help. I have another question. Should I be memorizing the on and kun for each kanji? Will I need to know specific readings if I ever take the JLPT?

[AJBryant]

What would probably be more beneficial than studying kanji in isolation would be learning how to properly spell the words you already know.


Tony

[flammable hippo]

After a while you just get so used to the rules of stroke order that when you come across a new kanji you can usually figure out the stroke order just by looking at it. So spend a lot of time learning the stroke order of kanji in the beginning (learning the names of them however seems a bit useless. I don't even think most native Japanese speakers know the stroke names) and after a while you can stop focusing on stroke order as much.