Comments on: Question: How Should You Learn Kanji?

By: 345678dfd

345678dfd — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 23:17:00 +0000

This guide is a much better read if you want to know how to read kanji. http://japantown.awardspace.com/howtolearnkanji/

By: boomfantasticbaby

boomfantasticbaby — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 02:40:00 +0000

While I could recognize some basic kanji before, now I want to study it more seriously. I like to have variety so I have a kanji reference book, kanji writing book, Japanese manga & magazine, kanji flashcards, and now Tales of Vesperia Japanese edition. Quite frankly, so far the videogame has most of my attention. TOV has the characters speaking as well as dialogue shown on screen, and it doesn’t move until I press a button.
So, I started out transcribing the text based on what I could read and hear. Since I was working on my laptop, it was right by me the whole time. I had jisho.org open and looked at the kanji I didn’t know, and found them with the radical approach and added them in with the rest of the transcription. This helped a lot. While it was a pain in the butt for some kanji, the system of looking for radicals in kanji got easier. It even helped me with familiarity and just seeing how often a certain character was used. While I foolishly had this transcription on Evernote and somehow accidentally deleted all of it, I got a little ticked, said whatever, and continued to play the game. So it wasn’t a waste of time for me.

By: coffeenmusic

coffeenmusic — Sun, 05 May 2013 19:43:00 +0000

I have been memorizing Kanji for around 6 months now using Heisig’s Remember the Kanji book and the free Anki flash card program and they both work great. I agree with the fact that you must study every day consistently. I like to wake up early and study while drinking coffee. I started with Anki giving me 5 new Kanji every day and am now up to 8 a day. This takes over an hour to run through the deck from front to back and then back to front for writing. It also helps a lot that Anki syncs with smartphones, so you can study any time.

By: Your Questions About Learning To Write Japanese Alphabet | Pre School Learning to Write

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 13:01:47 +0000

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By: belgand

belgand — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 14:42:00 +0000

For me written Japanese breaks down into a couple of parts: kana is pronunciation and thankfully it actually works, reading is, well, reading comprehension it’s the same in any language, writing kanji is spelling. What’s interesting about this is that it’s actually a bit easier than English in some respects, mainly because we generally have to know both spelling AND pronunciation by heart. It also means that typing is a bit easier in Japanese since IMEs do some of the work for you roughly, but not quite, analogous to using English spellcheck.

Now, does this mean that you don’t need to be able to write kanji correctly? Not quite, but what it does mean is that it’s not quite so bad as you think it is, you’re just a terrible speller. A skill we as a society find so daunting that doing it well is a form of competition. High stroke counts got you down? Have you compared it to writing words in English? Take a little time and pay attention to how many strokes you need to make to write that word. “Pronunciation”, to pick at random from something I just typed, is about 17 strokes! Slightly fewer in cursive.

I won’t even start in on all of the awful grammar that many people use, but get away with on a daily basis.

It all came to me when I was working assiduously on getting my hiragana to come out perfectly, getting the balance just right, making the lines clear and well-shaped… and then I glance over at something that I’d written in English. The language I’ve been speaking and reading and writing for my entire life and I noticed just how terrible my penmanship was. How squashed my letters are, how my loops are always dented on one side, the way my ’8′s have the bottom loop so crushed in and the top so oddly slanted that I’ve had people mistake them for ’7′s.

So don’t let it get you down. You can only barely speak, read, write, and err… draw English as it is.

P.S. I personally prefer a version of David’s system. First learning vocabulary as hiragana and then once I know the word moderately well (about a week or so) learning it as kanji. This way I learn something useful that I can put into practice immediately and when I learn the kanji I’m associating it with the Japanese word, not an English translation of a Japanese word. This fits in with my earlier assertions. We all know plenty of words that we can use and speak at a much higher level of functionality than we can easily spell (it’s usually French loanwords for me, like “connoisseur” (which I totally just spelled wrong until the spellcheck caught it)). This is also the way a native would learn language. They already know the vocabulary (at least for common, everyday things), they just need to learn how to write it down… and then learn how to write it all over again in bastardized Chinese.

By: Markmcginty

Markmcginty — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:35:00 +0000

What works for me is reading a kanji’s on and kun yomi with example sentences into a voicerecorder and listening to them every day, writing the readings and their sentences out into a writing pad.

The sentences I use are either adapted from the texbook I get the kanji from (JBP 3) or the White Rabbit flashcards I’m using in conjuction with JBP 3 and/ or my furigana dictionary that has example sentences. This way I can usefully tailor my sentences to practice and reinforce contemporary grammar and vocab from my textbook and flashcards. Reinforces and reviews things really well.

The sentences are all written in basic hiragana and katakana except the kanji to be learnt which is written in its true form or any other part of a sentence I may already know its kanji for.

When I write it’s into my a4 graph paper ‘writing out’ practice pad- the back of the pad being where I write out while the front of the pad has the ‘index’ of each new kanji with their readings and sentences. Eventually the pad meets in the middle and I continue on to a new pad, keeping my old indexes and exercises up on the shelf.

So this way I am able to first read the kanji from the textbook/ flashcards, then speak them into my voicerecorder, then listen to them every day and write them out in full sentences.

As the readings sink in, complement the repetative listening practice with free reading from newpapers, magazines, manga to test yourself (the bilingual Hiragana Times is good).

This method’s very effective for me and I should think it would work with all general study Japanese textbooks eg Genki, Minna etc, from basic to intermediate.