Comments on: 10 Things I Wish I Knew About Japanese Learning When I Was First Starting Out

By: Dewi Wahyudi

Dewi Wahyudi — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 11:06:00 +0000

articles of interest let alone write it from 10-1. thanks for sharing

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 24 May 2013 00:27:00 +0000

Hi – thanks for writing this article. I’ve been learning Japanese for about ten years or so, and I think that pretty much all of your points are spot on, particularly the one about learning kanji early and the one about the ‘other’ kanji radicals. Early on in my Japanese study I got very excited about the Heisig method for learning kanji, which advocates that you should learn the meanings and writings of all jouyou kanji separately from their readings, by breaking them down into radicals and inventing mnemonics. However, I think that Heisig’s method as stated suffers from a big problem in that it separates off your kanji learning from the rest of your Japanese learning – ultimately that didn’t work for me. A method that I’ve found to be much more effective is to learn kanji as they appear in any vocabulary and new words that I want to learn – I find that if I see how kanji are used in real words along with readings it makes them much easier to remember in the long term. However, I still use Heisig’s book as a reference: when I want to learn a kanji, I need to find its breakdown into those ‘other’ radicals you mentioned: I look the kanji up in the online dictionary WWWJDIC, click ‘examine’ and then ‘show details’ – this will give me the Heisig frame number – then I can look up the frame in Heisig’s book and see the breakdown into radicals. I definitely think that Heisig’s book it brilliant, but I guess the thing that I learned is this: find your own way of using it effectively, which need not be the same as that described in the introduction to the book.

By: Alex TN

Alex TN — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:44:00 +0000

Thank you, it seems year after year it becomes obvious schools are not teaching how to learn, recall, memorize and just follow tradition. Thank you for your post. (I am on a mobile and clicked on the star above this comment before submiting it and kept going higher when sometimes it went lower.It’s at -12 w/e that means.

By: jogu

jogu — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:30:00 +0000

Thanks a lot for this post.

By: Peter Payne

Peter Payne — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 02:00:00 +0000

Damn straight on learning how to write. I am thinking a new approach that basically teaches reading of kanji but never asks you to learn to write it is called for. To think that I wooed my wife by amazing her with my ability to write 薔薇 on a napkin…then thanks to 15 years of computers and the Internet, most of that is gone now. (Can still read, thankfully.) The same thing happens to Japanese people too.

By: Akemi Mokoto

Akemi Mokoto — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 22:10:00 +0000

Very great article. And very funny picture at the end. lol xD