Because it’s a Saturday, and because I just know you need the inspiration, I’ve put together twelve images that will surely inspire you to jump on the kanji train. Choo choo. Kanji train coming in for a landing (yeah, the kanji train flies). Using the absolutely awesome online voluntary sweatshop-wage labor tool Mechanical Turk, I’ve [...]
After telling you the Japanese learning industry was a failure when it comes to kanji learning, it’s only fair to come up with some solutions to this mess and help you out. Learning kanji is no laughing matter (it’s more of a crying matter, really), and there are a number of ways to go about [...]
The Japanese learning industry has, for all intents and purposes, failed you. It’s not your fault that learning kanji is like hitting your face on a curb, it’s the industry as a whole. Sure, there are pockets here and there that are pretty smart about it, but they tend to be small and nobody really [...]
So you’re chillin’ like Bob Dylan, studying some kanji. At first it’s nice and easy. Hey, this totally looks like a tree! 木. Cha-ching! Then, you have to start learning the pronunciation of kanji, and everything gets complicated (don’t worry, I’m here to make it simple). You realize that there are multiple ways to pronounce [...]
To start Shark… er… Kanji Week off, I thought it would be important to tell you a bit about kanji history (i.e. where kanji originally came from). Kanji’s history is a bit muddled and goes back a long ways, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from coming up with some pretty solid theories on how it [...]
I’m sure a lot of you know about Shark Week, but did you know about it’s slightly scarier and far less interesting sibling Kanji Week? Well, it’s happening, and we’ll be spending this next week covering various subjects regarding kanji, the bane of every Japanese learner’s existence. Every day this week there will be 1-2 [...]
One application which I’ve used for a long time is Evernote, though I’ve mostly been collecting and organizing recipes… until now. Just today, as I was scrolling through the Asahi Shinbun, I had an epiphany. I should be saving articles, sentences, vocabulary, and what-have-you in Evernote so that I can easily search for them later [...]
This is just a quick post mostly referencing an article over at NihonHacks (so you can just go over there and read about it too), about a couple cool tools to add furigana over your kanji (furigana = hiragana that’s on top of kanji to show you how to pronounce it). There are two tools [...]
I’ve been really surprised lately. I’ve gotten a few emails from people that ask me why kanji is necessary. “Kanji is sooo hard” they say. “Why do Japanese bother learning kanji when they could just use a phonetic alphabet? I mean, they have hiragana already, why would you need kanji when hiragana does the same [...]
I know this was in our news post, but I think this sort of thing deserves its own article as well. The other day I put together a new kanji memorization worksheet. I think it’s completely different from anything I’ve ever seen or used before. Most kanji worksheets make you write the same bloody kanji [...]
