I’ve been self-studying Japanese for a while now, and can comprehend a little bit of it. I have the two kana syllabaries down pat, and know a few kanji just from seeing them over and over.
I’d like to begin some form of structured study to learn to read and write the kanji. Some sites have them organized by the grades in which they are taught in school, and I’ve thought about going about it that way, but some others say you should learn the radicals first, and then graduate up to kanji.
Anyone here have any advice? I’ve never really been able to make very good progress in this one area, and I feel like it’s holding me back. It just feels like information overload when I get right down to it!
Disclaimer: I have studied kanji in the past, but I have not kept it up and therefore have forgotten most of it (which is something to remember as you study - keep using it, or you will lose it).
If you really want to read and write like a Japanese person, I recommend doing it the way they do it - in graded stages. Most of the radicals are, in fact, the simpler kanji (example off the top of my head - the simple 3-stroke character for grass is the radical for many kinds of plants). Get the writing practice books and practice, practice, practice. Learn about stroke order, it makes writing a lot easier (and the finished product will look more like it should).
When I first learned Japanese, I used this book which explains how the basic 400 characters are formed. Getting the story behind them helped me remember them much easier.
After reading that book, I’d start off with the kanji for the basic elementary grades.
Most people find that learning by writing as well, rather than just learning by reading helps you retain the characters better.
Once you get several hundred down, then work harder on the radicals. Note that there is a phonetic component of the character and the semantic component and learning the phonetic component helps with learning other characters as well.
Not a bad price, so I ordered the book. I’ve got a few Kanji books already, but none of them go into much more detail than “this is how you right the character, and this is what it means,” so I’m looking forward to checking this one out, especially since I had a $10 gift certificate for Amazon.
I always found it easier to learn vocabulary in terms of kanji than the kanji themselves. It gives me more points of mental reference to remember it and its meaning.
It also gets rid of some problems, even if you know 電 and 話, and the word でんわ I think you’re pretty unlikely to guess that the kanji make up that word. You can probably guess the 話, but unless you already know the first morpheme refers to electricity, you’d probably never guess 電. I think the reverse problem kind of applies too with this word, if you don’t know it means “telephone”, it’s a bit of a leap of logic to go from “electric talk” to “telephone”. Not an impossible guess, but there are plenty of other things like radio, IMs, text messages, robots etc that could also fit.
If you already know all your Kanji, I guess you could probably guess by process of elimination that it’s not 伝, but if you don’t know all your common Kanji, if the Kanji used isn’t immediately intuitive in a given word (anything having to do with days containing “ひ” or “にち” is almost always obviously “日” for instance), you’re always going to be left wondering if there’s not another kanji you don’t know that fits there.
I’ve got a dictionary at home which is more academically rigorous, but less fun. It has a lot more characters, though.
Find something which works for you on memorizing the kanji. I did various things such as using flash cards, writing them countless times and other things.
I’ve lived in the Belfast area my entire life, but for a nine-month hiatus out of state a few years ago.
I’ve installed Anki and signed up for the web version, so when the book gets here (should be here next week), I intend to delve right in.
Now if only I could speed up my brain’s processing of spoken Japanese. Give me a complex sentence (with relative clauses and such) in Japanese, and my brain takes a while to decipher it!
Unfortunately, there aren’t any places near me where I could take a formal class, or I’d have enrolled yesterday.
