Master the Art of Learning Kanji

With minimal pain and suffering, by learning the REAL underlying logic of the writing system!

Comprehensive Online Course, just $99!

In this comprehensive online course developed by a PhD, you'll learn how Chinese (漢字 kanji) characters actually work and by the end of this course, you'll be a master at learning kanji!

Curriculum

Unit I: Intro and Foundations

Lesson 0: Intro to the course + Hiragana & Katakana

Lesson 1: Rules of Memory

Lesson 2: Three Attributes of Writing/Three Functions

Lesson 3: Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Stroke Order

Unit II: How Kanji Actually Work

Lesson 4: Form Components

Lesson 5: Meaning Components

Lesson 6: Sound Components

Lesson 7: Sound series (characters with the same sound component)

Lesson 8: Empty Components

Lesson 9: All about kanji meanings

Lesson 10: Japanese orthography

Unit III: Tips Strategies for Learning More Effectively

Lesson 11: The "IME Method"

Lesson 12: Spaced Repetition

Lesson 13: The Pipelining Strategy

Lesson 14: The Minimalist Strategy

About this course

A comprehensive online video course from the kanji experts (over 15,000 people are using our kanji dictionary!), complete with PDF chapters to teach you how to learn kanji more effectively!

Students of Japanese, learn how to learn kanji like a boss! We've adapted our popular course on learning Chinese characters to the specific needs of Japanese learners.

We've been teaching a course at ICLP—one of the world's most prestigious Chinese language schools—for years. We made an online course for Chinese learners, and our students (over 1600 of them!) have been wildly successful! And, now, it's available to you!

You'll get lifetime access to over 25 video lessons on kanji and how to learn them, plus you'll learn:

• 300 kanji, specially curated to teach you how kanji actually work

• all about functional components in kanji

• how to learn new kanji more efficiently

• how to recall kanji you've learned more reliably

• tips for learning vocabulary

This course is aimed at all levels and does not require you to own or use any of our other products—it's entirely self-contained!

We teach stuff here that no one else is teaching, so as a beginner, you're getting started on the right foot. If you're an advanced student, but are still having kanji trouble, you'll get all those kanji questions answered. Understanding is the key to learning!

All students in this course will get a 15% off discount code for use on any of our other products.

Revealing the logic of the Chinese writing system

We'll teach you how these components work and how to use them to recall kanji more effectively

Kanji are composed of functional components—components which express sound and meaning

You'll also learn how to use this knowledge to learn new kanji more efficiently in the future

Demo Lesson

What other students are saying:

*from our Chinese Character Masterclass

"Amazing Course"

"The course is amazing! I was a HSK3 level reader, but could barely write. Using your course has not only helped me to learn to write, but has boosted my reading comprehension. I guessed the meaning and sound of 症 today, having never seen the character before."

Robin O'Connor (France)

"Improved Recall"

"After a month of not reviewing, I was able to write (not just recognize) 283 of the 300 characters in my queue. Before I took the Outlier course, it would have been 0."

Edsko De Vries (Netherlands)

"The characters all stick"

"But now [the characters] really all stick. In less than 3 months with all your tools about learning efficiency, I can say I have memorized 570 Characters and 2100 words, with all the tones... I don't feel saturation, just the need to practice to maintain."

Pascal Morel-Fourrier (Singapore)

Your Instructors

Ash Henson, PhD

Co-founder, Outlier Linguistics

To say that Ash is a language enthusiast is an understatement. He speaks Dutch, Mandarin, Cantonese and German, all in varying states of decay. In addition to these, he has learned to some level or another another 7 languages and is currently working on Japanese and European Portuguese. He sees language learning as a chance to experiment. The goal is to find a better way (either getting the same result in a way that takes less time, or getting a better result). And he’s been at it for 30 years! He got his PhD in Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University in paleography and historical linguistics. He was also in the PhD program for Teaching Chinese as a Second Language for six years. For his qualifying exams in that department, he had to learn functional grammar, cognitive grammar, case grammar, transformational grammar. So, we've definitely got you covered on the grammar front!

John Renfroe

Co-founder, Outlier Linguistics

Before co-founding Outlier, John studied Linguistics and Paleography in the Graduate Institute of Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University. He co-founded and later ran the Taipei Classical Chinese Reading Group, a weekly reading group consisting mostly of graduate Sinology students from western universities. He also taught classical Chinese to members of the group who had no previous instruction in the language. His coursework and research focused on excavated Warring States bamboo texts, historical Chinese character morphology, and the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字 and its commentaries and criticism.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I go at my own pace? Will I still be able to access the course once I've finished it?

Yes! You get lifetime access, so we'll keep everything available online so that you can go through it at your own pace and review it whenever you want to!

Is this course for beginners, intermediates, or advanced learners?

It's for anyone! The point of the course isn't to learn the 300 kanji we'll be covering. The point of the course is to teach you how to be an effective, independent learner of kanji using functional components. So it may be a bit more intensive if you're a beginner, because you'll probably be encountering many or most of these for the first time. If you already know the kanji that the course covers, it will be a bit less intensive and you'll be able to focus on learning how kanji actually work.

How long does the course take to complete?

It depends on you! Some people do about a lesson per week, while others do a lesson per month. There's a lot of information to absorb, so it may be difficult to go faster, but you can if you want!

So feel free to go at your own pace!

How much time will it require per lesson?

That will depend on your level and how deeply you want to dive in. It will probably be more useful for me to describe what kind of material the course will have, and then you can probably estimate how much time you want to devote to it per lesson.

The video lessons will likely all be 5-15 minutes long. There will also be PDF materials covering the same or similar material, often in a bit more depth than the video. And there will be 25 characters per week to learn.

That's actually quite a bit of material, but remember, you can go at a slower pace if you'd like! Or you could decide to just look over the characters rather than memorizing them the first time through, and then come back to memorizing them later. It's up to you! You get lifetime access to the course, so you can always come back to it again later to dive in deeper!