Honestly. It makes it really a whole lot of fun when the copier gives me an error message, and all I can read of it is “______ is ________.”* So much like the 3 year old that I’ve apparently regressed to, I have to go find an adult to help me figure out what the two words mean.
This is after more than a year. I can read the word “toner” and “error.” Anything else and I have to feel like an idiot. Shit, I could read words Dr. Seuss made up when I was 3.
*translated from Japanese
PS The error apparently means I can’t copy things that look like money. Even American money. Because printing up some sheets from a commercial printer are really gonna pass muster. Fuck you Epson.
I like how the website they send you to in your picture is down. Really, what’s the point? It’s going to take some better technology than a color copier to print something that will remotely resemble the real thing.
Get yourself a good dictionary. When you find a kanji you cannot read, look it up, note the definition, readings, and stroke order. Make cards. Scribble in a note pad. Practice. Practice. Practice. Doesn’t take much time and you’ll be able to function as a normal human being in no time.
Anytime I have a spare moment with nothing in particular better to do, I pull some scratch paper out and I scribble kanji.
Grabbing a few kid’s books to read helps, too. Something with tons o’ furigana. Discipline yourself to only read the furigana when you absolutely need to.
Unlike herpes or the common cold, there is a cure for illiteracy.
I actually love studying kanji, it’s just taking a backseat to grammar at this point. To a certain extent I do both, but it’s slow going. I have O’Neill’s 2000 essential kanji that I carry more religiously than I would carry a bible were I religious. Just somewhat depressing to know that 18 months in I’m doing little better than the kindergarten kids.
Although it is somewhat gratifying that after 18 months I’m doing better than a lot of my high schoolers are with English, which they’ve been studying for 3-6 years.
Haha, well, if they were living in an Anglophone country, I’m sure they’d be doing better.
Don’t sweat the illiteracy though, it’s definitely slow going at first and there were a few times in the beginning where I felt like breaking down and crying I was so frustrated. But, eventually, there will come a point where things will just sort of fall into place, then, hopefully, you’ll be able to just soak things up like a sponge. Like so many things it just takes time.
Hang in there. In 2002, in one plane trip, I transformed from a practicing lawyer to a functionally illiterate stay at home mom. It was a bumpy transition, which took a long time to make.
I could speak Dutch well enough, having learned it from Dearly Beloved, but it had never occurred to us that I would need to learn to read and write it. And it had the same alphabet (with one exception, the Dutch have invented one extra letter just to be special).
The more difficult hurdle was not so much the act of reading and writing – though I still spell so badly that I try to avoid writing in Dutch – but cultural references and also specialized vocabulary. Just trying to get through parent teacher conferences the first few years was an exercise in humility.
The single best thing I did was to take a local newspaper (it’s really local, the opening of a new pub runs above the fold, the war in Iraq gets page 8 or so) and read it every day. It’s written at a simpler reading level and they explain all the national political references. The only down side really is that it reinforced the local dialect so I now speak like a Dutch redneck. (At least I think that’s the nearest cognate, possibly **Maastricht **could clear it up for me).
I don’t think any dollar changer made in the past 20 years would be fooled by even the best scanner/software/printer combination if it was printed on normal paper. Certain things on the bill just cannot be copied and printed with home equipment.
And also…how do you look up kanji in a dictionary? I mean…is there a way to do an “alphabetical order” for symbols that are a whole word/phrase?
It’s by number of strokes. There’s also electronic dictionaries that make it a bit easier, but basically it’s one of those complicated things you get used to using.
Most kanji are compounds, the sub sections are called radicals. They are ordered by stroke count. Stroke count is not always obvious. I usually try what I think the stroke count is plus one more or one less: Go to
For an example of kanji lookup. Select several radicals that are in the particular kanji and it will give you all the cases that include that combination.
Once you have a kanji character selected, you can look up multi-kanji compound phrases too.
Jim Breen’s is a great tool if you don’t know the actual radical of the kanji. Unfortunately “real” kanji dictionaries (by real I mean ones sold and used in Japan) aren’t as lenient. Rather than ordered by stroke count, they are ordered by radical. While Jim Breen let’s you use any old grouping of strokes withing the kanji, other dictionaries, such as my own, require that you know the particular kanji’s primary radical which will be only one of the radicals that actually make it up. Sometimes this is obvious, sometimes it isn’t. But with enough experience with them, it becomes just as easy to look them up this way as it would be to look up a word in the OED.
One of my former coworkers is still serving time in the pen for his “dedicatedly stupid” act in the early 90s. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.
My washing machine is in Chinese. It has a bewildering array of buttons and lights. Whenever I press one, it plays a small tune, switches the lights around, and starts doing something. Once I flooded my whole apartment in three inches of water that way. Every load is an adventure.
It was, however, a magical day when I pressed a bunch of buttons on my AC remote and suddenly it started blowing hot air! Turns out I’m not going to completely freeze this winter after all! Well, it will be if I can figure out the sequence of buttons again.
Ordering in restaurants is another fun one. They hand me a menu and a piece of paper to write my order on. I laugh.
I despair at ever learning how to read this language. It’s fun to recognize characters when I’m out and about, but honestly it’s going to be years before I can read anything useful. And all I’ve learned so far is how to read the numbers on mahjong tiles.
