Comments on: What I Learned About Learning Japanese From Spending 3 Weeks In Taiwan

By: Rinnie

Rinnie — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 10:45:00 +0000

Mind fuck how (at least based on the pinyin) some of the words seems similar to English (e.g. ‘give’ and ‘the’). o.o

By: Maddie

Maddie — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 20:44:00 +0000

I’m completely fluent in Madarin and I’d like to say that those sentences about John’s apple are in traditional Mandarin…

By: missingno15

missingno15 — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 07:11:00 +0000

No I don’t agree with you because you don’t seem to agree with me. That’s fine though, this is just how I learned all of my Japanese because I felt this way made more sense and was more efficient. But for some people, learning Kanji just seems to help them and while it still doesn’t make sense to me, I have come to accept that as long as it helps the person learn Japanese, then it doesn’t matter.

I’m also way past the need for kanji learning materials such as WaniKani or RtK by Heisig but thank you for the recommendation.

And as for what reverse engineering is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering

By: Infernova

Infernova — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 00:36:00 +0000

Learning ‘ad nauseam’ is very ‘in’-efficient simply because of the sheer amount of Kanji that share the same readings (and there are also exceptions, which make it even harder to learn vocab phonetically and ‘reverse engineer’ them [whatever that is]). I swear there’s at least fifty common use kanji that are read こう and another fifty that are read し (IOW plenty of homophones). ‘Reverse engineering’ would be like learning every English word backwards – it’s just wasted effort and completely unnecessary, don’t you agree?

Kanji really is amazing. Like Koichi explained, you can read things that you didn’t even know simply by knowing Kanji. Do you use WaniKani? You should definitely give it a go if you’re not using it already if you’re interested in learning Kanji.

By: missingno15

missingno15 — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 16:17:00 +0000

I just can not agree with Kanji is king point. It’s easier, efficient, more practical to learn new vocabulary Ad nauseam and reverse engineer them to learn everything all at once.

Anyway, one thing I’d like to ask Koichi is how you were able to get the pronunciation right. For me, it’s the only thing thats really holding me back from learning it myself.

By: Sugoida

Sugoida — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 20:32:00 +0000

But not everyone lives in the target country, so they can’t take advantage of going to the market and using that language. :(