Kanji frightens beginners more than any other part of Japanese, and a large share of that fear is caused by studying it the wrong way.
For exam purposes — JFT-Basic and the JLPT alike — the job is smaller than it looks.
Recognition, not production
Both JFT-Basic and the JLPT are multiple choice. You never write a character.
This changes the scope enormously. Learning to write kanji from memory — stroke order, proportion, recall from nothing — is several times more expensive than learning to recognise it. For these exams, that expense buys nothing.
Writing by hand while learning is still useful as a memory aid. Drilling handwriting as a skill in its own right is not, unless you want it for its own sake.
Learn words, not characters
The single most common beginner mistake is studying characters in isolation.
生 alone is an abstraction with many readings and no fixed meaning you can use. But 先生, 学生, 生まれる and 生ビール are words you will actually meet, and learning them teaches you the character, the vocabulary and the readings in one pass.
Always learn a kanji inside at least one word you will use. Characters learned alone decay; characters learned in words stick, because they have somewhere to live.
Readings are the real work
Most kanji have several readings — broadly, a Japanese reading and one or more Chinese-derived readings — and which one applies depends on the word.
Do not try to memorise reading tables. Learn the words, and the readings arrive attached. This is why “2,000 kanji” and “can read Japanese” are different milestones, and why the character count understates the job.
What to learn first
Frequency, not level lists:
- Numbers — 一二三四五六七八九十百千万
- Dates and times — 年月日, 時分, 曜日, 今, 前, 後
- Money — 円
- Places — 駅, 店, 会社, 病院, 学校, 部屋
- Direction and position — 上下中外, 右左, 東西南北
- Common verbs — 行, 来, 見, 聞, 食, 飲, 買, 使, 休
- Signs — 入口, 出口, 休, 中止, 故障, 注意, 禁止
If you learned only that list, you would handle a large share of the practical reading both exams are built from.
Learn confusable pairs together
The exams build their wrong answers from near-misses, so learn the near-misses as pairs:
- 病院 (hospital) / 美容院 (hair salon)
- 電車 (train) / 電話 (telephone)
- 待つ (wait) / 持つ (hold)
- 未 (not yet) / 末 (end)
A character learned alone is not protected against the character it will be confused with.
How much do you need?
JFT-Basic: a few hundred characters, recognition only, weighted to dates, times, signs and workplace vocabulary. There is no official list. See how much kanji you need for JFT-Basic.
JLPT: roughly 100 at N5 rising to around 2,000 at N1, on the commonly cited estimates. Also unofficial — no lists have been published since 2010. See kanji by JLPT level.
The method
Spaced repetition, daily, in words. Twenty to thirty items a day depending on level, reviewed indefinitely.
Reading, constantly. Spaced repetition builds the inventory; reading makes it automatic. Neither works alone, and reading is the half people skip.
Do not front-load. Kanji learned before you have the vocabulary to use it does not stay. Let it arrive with the words.