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75 days for kanjis! - vitaum88 - 2014-09-16
Konnichi ha minna san!
So hey guys, I am 26 currently living in Japan as an expat and I will just put it out: I'm pretty good at languages... I`m fluent in 4, pretty good in 2 more. I can learn stuff really fast and I have not a lot a problems with study discipline.
I just want to ask you something here: I started to follow a strategy based on studying Kanji first and I`ve gone through 150 kanjis thoroughly in the past 5 days using ANKI and Heisig's ANKI complete deck (let me tell you, I`ve been here for 4 months already so I know about 600 kanjis - meanings and maybe 20% of them complete readings). My grammar is basic and vocabulary is catching up as well. Today I realize I "wasn't supposed" to study the readings with the Kanjis. Indeed, it takes a bit longer for me to catch up on reviewing and wrapping up the day due to readings, but in terms of meaning and writing the Kanji it would be much faster and perhaps I could go with more than 30 per day (I studied them a lot by myself before ANKI so stroke ordering feels natural to me and I pay attention to small stroke differences and peculiarities).
The method I am following here should give me complete understanding of the Kanji meanings and readings will follow up with vocab and other mnemonics, etc, etc, therfore being easier to get readings instead of having this information reviewed by ANKI presently. Even vocabulary exercises should have Kanji mixed up so at least the Kanji itself won`t be a hurdle. Therefore I ask you guys:
Is it worthy to study the Kanji with readings, taking longer to review, memorize, etc, via BRUTE FORCE (more or less) and once I am done with the Joyo Kanji I will have a great deal of Vocabulary and happily read Kanjis around me OR to stop the readings for now and go on with the method which then I might have to go back on the Kanjis later to attach readings to them and also give up the gratifying moment of reading 消火器 - しょうかき at work or 自転車 歩行者 専用(じてんしゃ ほこうしゃ せんよう) in a crossing?
75 days for kanjis! - buonaparte - 2014-09-16
vitaum88 Wrote:Konnichi ha minna san!I'm no good at languages, so I don't know what you should do to learn kanji and in what way,
[/b]
but my granny says it should be mina-san.
75 days for kanjis! - Stansfield123 - 2014-09-16
So you figure that since you needed 5 days for the first 150 cards, you'll need 75 for 2000? Not how it works. Your workload will increase the more cards you add. Given your background with Kanji, you could have easily gone through 4-500 of them in the first 5 days, if it wasn't for trying to memorize arbitrary, meaningless sounds alongside them.
I think you should get Heisig's book, and read his advice and arguments. Then either follow his suggestions, or, if you have a good reason not to, don't.
Personally, I don't study readings at all (hardly ever pay attention to them, in fact), but if I ever did, it would be with vocabulary, not with Kanji reviews. Entire words are much easier to remember than random sounds, and it's much more helpful to know them as well.
75 days for kanjis! - cophnia61 - 2014-09-16
Quote:Personally, I don't study readings at all (hardly ever pay attention to them, in fact), but if I ever did, it would be with vocabulary, not with Kanji reviews. Entire words are much easier to remember than random sounds, and it's much more helpful to know them as well.Stanfield123, what do you mean with that? That you simply memorize the word as a whole, both its written and spoken form, but you don't pay attention to what part of the sound is of the first kanji and what is of the second kanji?
75 days for kanjis! - yogert909 - 2014-09-16
cophnia61 Wrote:I think it would be impossible not to notice which kanji is contributing the first sound and which the second. But that's not saying you have to study the readings. I just look at readings as a handy ad-hoc mnemonic, but don't explicitly study them.Quote:Personally, I don't study readings at all (hardly ever pay attention to them, in fact), but if I ever did, it would be with vocabulary, not with Kanji reviews. Entire words are much easier to remember than random sounds, and it's much more helpful to know them as well.Stanfield123, what do you mean with that? That you simply memorize the word as a whole, both its written and spoken form, but you don't pay attention to what part of the sound is of the first kanji and what is of the second kanji?
Tae Kim says it well: "To put it bluntly, learning all the readings of a Kanji is a complete waste of time."
75 days for kanjis! - vitaum88 - 2014-09-16
Hey everybody thanks for the replies.
@buonaparte:
I didn't know that. Thanks for the tip (and the small amount of sarcasm
)@stansfield123, cophnia61 and yogert909:
I see where you are all trying to get here. However, this seems like I will eventually have to drill through vocabulary lists and, even more, correlate the kanjis to the words themselves, paying attention to the existance (or lack of) Okurigana in words like, for instance, TABEMONO (kanji TA - hiragana BE - kanji MONO).
Also, what about the results going through the meanings without the readings? I never said I'd go for all the readings: I'd go and check the Kanji itself on KANJIDAMAGE, which does a very good job at saying which readings (kun/on) are actually used in everyday japanese, and cross reference with JEDICT iPhone app, which gives a nice list of entries and from there I can tell which readings are worth taking or not (as an example 品 can be SHINA (kun) and HIN/HON (on) but it is 99.9% of the time appended to other kanjis taking the HIN reading, so why bother memorizing the rest?). But then again, it is time consumming: getting the kanji meaning and shape, getting the readings, checking up on kanjidamage and jedict to sort out which readings are worth taking, drilling the SRS (ANKI) and go on till wrapping up the day...
75 days for kanjis! - Stansfield123 - 2014-09-16
cophnia61 Wrote:I pay attention sometimes (if a Kanji shows up a lot), but I never try to memorize them. If it happens anyway, fine, if it doesn't, that's fine too.Quote:Personally, I don't study readings at all (hardly ever pay attention to them, in fact), but if I ever did, it would be with vocabulary, not with Kanji reviews. Entire words are much easier to remember than random sounds, and it's much more helpful to know them as well.Stanfield123, what do you mean with that? That you simply memorize the word as a whole, both its written and spoken form, but you don't pay attention to what part of the sound is of the first kanji and what is of the second kanji?
In fact I never try to memorize anything. I don't use Anki to memorize words, I use it to learn the meaning and reading of words I'm familiar with. I realize it's not obvious what I mean, so I'll elaborate: I listen to a lot of music, I listen to Japanese radio and podcasts when I play video games or just hang out (a radio show is on right now), I spend hours every day watching movies, anime, funny videos, reading manga (with furigana). That means that I inevitably keep hearing words, or reading them with furigana, without knowing what they mean, or at least without knowing exactly what they mean (just having a vague idea, based on the context I hear them in, or on the subs or translation if available).
These are words I technically "know" (they sound familiar, sometimes I can even place them into a specific song or conversation I heard). I don't need to memorize them, I know the words. If someone comes up to you and speaks a foreign sentence in an angry voice to you every day for 20 days, you'll know the words, you'll even have an idea what kind of words they are, you just won't know exactly what they each mean or how they're written. That's what I use Anki for: learn more about words I already know a little bit about. I always suspend vocab items that I would need to actually memorize.
There are also vocab items I never heard before, that I don't need to memorize, because I know how to read them (once you know 階段 - a very common word, you also know 段階 - a slightly less common, more abstract word, which normally would be harder to learn - thanks to the Kanji, no special memorization effort needed). But not because I tried to memorize the readings of their Kanji. It just happened. Like I've said in another thread, the kind of connections worth making, in language learning, are the ones that are obvious enough to be made without trying too hard. Anything else is a waste of time: if you have to spend 10 seconds or more thinking about it, you won't be able to use it to understand or speak the language anyway.
75 days for kanjis! - yogert909 - 2014-09-16
@ Stansfield123
That seems like a sensible way to learn new vocabulary once you are at a level where you can reasonably understand your inputs. Presumably, you didn't follow this technique in the beginner stages....or did you?
75 days for kanjis! - Stansfield123 - 2014-09-16
vitaum88 Wrote:Hey everybody thanks for the replies."word" is a tricky concept in Japanese. For all intents and purposes, you can treat 食べ物, 送り仮名 (read "okurigana"), etc., as two separate words that form a compound with a specific but immediately obvious meaning, thus requiring no special attention beyond learning the two component words (the way it works in German, or any other agglutinative language, except the concept "word" has even less significance).
@buonaparte:
I didn't know that. Thanks for the tip (and the small amount of sarcasm
@stansfield123, cophnia61 and yogert909:
I see where you are all trying to get here. However, this seems like I will eventually have to drill through vocabulary lists and, even more, correlate the kanjis to the words themselves, paying attention to the existance (or lack of) Okurigana in words like, for instance, TABEMONO (kanji TA - hiragana BE - kanji MONO).
This is different from how Kango (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary) are formed in Japanese. It's Kango which can get somewhat tedious, not these longer compounds made up by putting common words together. These are just as easy as they are in any agglutinative language, and have nothing to do with Kanji. They are learned by learning the component words. They would be just as easy to make sense of if Japanese was written in romaji. The Kanji only come into play when you're learning the Kango and the Wago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_kotoba).
vitaum88 Wrote:Also, what about the results going through the meanings without the readings? I never said I'd go for all the readings: I'd go and check the Kanji itself on KANJIDAMAGE, which does a very good job at saying which readings (kun/on) are actually used in everyday japanese, and cross reference with JEDICT iPhone app, which gives a nice list of entries and from there I can tell which readings are worth taking or not (as an example 品 can be SHINA (kun) and HIN/HON (on) but it is 99.9% of the time appended to other kanjis taking the HIN reading, so why bother memorizing the rest?). But then again, it is time consumming: getting the kanji meaning and shape, getting the readings, checking up on kanjidamage and jedict to sort out which readings are worth taking, drilling the SRS (ANKI) and go on till wrapping up the day...Yes, if you plan on relying on study all the way, rather than immersion with a little bit of study added in, you will have to memorize a lot of words. But it's much easier to remember words than individual readings. And, of course, the amount of content you're memorizing is the same, just organized differently (in a way that's easier to remember). To the extent that there are more words than Kanji, those extra words are made up of Kanji that appear in words you've already learned. So no further memorization is needed, at that point you will already know the reading of the Kanji. (and the optimized version of Core6k is "optimized" precisely by putting words which share a Kanji close to each other, to make them especially easy to remember).
And, in the end, if you really think about it, even if you do learn all the readings, you're gonna have to pretty much learn the words all over again. You might be able to read to some extent, but it's not like you can develop any kind of listening comprehension based on your knowledge of individual Kanji readings. You need words - instantly accessible words - for that, which you'll have to learn by drilling or immersion anyway. Might as well skip the tedium of learning the Kanji readings.
P.S. A third alternative, imho better than your plan and worse than mine (of never bothering with individual readings) is doing RtK2 after you finish RtK1. It uses signal primitives to help you learn the readings. You'll have to look up exactly how yourself, because it's a bit of a long story (the introductory chapters of RtK2 have been made available for free online, legally, just google for them). But, again, I don't recommend that either, unless there's no way to talk you out of bothering with readings. Rtk2 will at least help make them easier to learn.
P.S.2 I keep referring to this advice of never bothering with readings as "mine", but it's really not. It's a near-consensus on this site, and has been for a long time (long before I got here). All I did was validate it, by trying both to follow it and go against it, and figuring out that following it is better.
75 days for kanjis! - cophnia61 - 2014-09-17
Stansfield123 Wrote:I think the same... studying words you never encountered before feels like memorizing random and meaningless informations. It's like if I say "asgilytrudzalef" that means "barely" in a language I just invented xD go memorize this lolcophnia61 Wrote:I pay attention sometimes (if a Kanji shows up a lot), but I never try to memorize them. If it happens anyway, fine, if it doesn't, that's fine too.Quote:Personally, I don't study readings at all (hardly ever pay attention to them, in fact), but if I ever did, it would be with vocabulary, not with Kanji reviews. Entire words are much easier to remember than random sounds, and it's much more helpful to know them as well.Stanfield123, what do you mean with that? That you simply memorize the word as a whole, both its written and spoken form, but you don't pay attention to what part of the sound is of the first kanji and what is of the second kanji?
In fact I never try to memorize anything. I don't use Anki to memorize words, I use it to learn the meaning and reading of words I'm familiar with. I realize it's not obvious what I mean, so I'll elaborate: I listen to a lot of music, I listen to Japanese radio and podcasts when I play video games or just hang out (a radio show is on right now), I spend hours every day watching movies, anime, funny videos, reading manga (with furigana). That means that I inevitably keep hearing words, or reading them with furigana, without knowing what they mean, or at least without knowing exactly what they mean (just having a vague idea, based on the context I hear them in, or on the subs or translation if available).
These are words I technically "know" (they sound familiar, sometimes I can even place them into a specific song or conversation I heard). I don't need to memorize them, I know the words. If someone comes up to you and speaks a foreign sentence in an angry voice to you every day for 20 days, you'll know the words, you'll even have an idea what kind of words they are, you just won't know exactly what they each mean or how they're written. That's what I use Anki for: learn more about words I already know a little bit about. I always suspend vocab items that I would need to actually memorize.
There are also vocab items I never heard before, that I don't need to memorize, because I know how to read them (once you know 階段 - a very common word, you also know 段階 - a slightly less common, more abstract word, which normally would be harder to learn - thanks to the Kanji, no special memorization effort needed). But not because I tried to memorize the readings of their Kanji. It just happened. Like I've said in another thread, the kind of connections worth making, in language learning, are the ones that are obvious enough to be made without trying too hard. Anything else is a waste of time: if you have to spend 10 seconds or more thinking about it, you won't be able to use it to understand or speak the language anyway.
Obviously audio plays an important role because you hear the reading, but on the other hand it's difficult to catch the word without text. The best is to have both audio and text, and then on core unsuspend just the words you already sort of know. Many words we learned this way without even putting a little effort on memorization. After nihon, the second compound I learned was that for kawaii, followed by another bunch of words i already knew from anime, songs etc..
So Stanfield123, also for you written-only immersion works less than audio immersion?
75 days for kanjis! - vitaum88 - 2014-09-17
Thanks for the replies and the discussion above.
Well I AM in Japan aahhah so I believe immersion will not be a big issue. I`ll just go with ignoring the readings for now and relying on words (not readings) later on. I guess what you are trying to say is getting the actual words out of the FURIGANA (like, realize that kanji A has reading XXX because the words AB, AC, AD, etc, have XXXYYY, XXXZZZ, XXXWWW as their furigana, respectively).
Which then brings me to another question: what is this Core6k you`re talking about? Also, is there any recommendation as to get both vocabulary+grammar at once? 一石二鳥 ahaha... I already know some grammar, all the way to a few compounds phrases (but, even though, or, and, etc) and basic particle usage (ni, no, de, ha, he, ga, etc).
75 days for kanjis! - Aikynaro - 2014-09-17
You have made a good decision.
Core6k is a premade Anki deck/wordlist of 6000 words taken from a newspaper frequency list.
Quote:Also, is there any recommendation as to get both vocabulary+grammar at once?Study from sentences, not isolated words. If you go with Core, it should have you covered. Or personally, I'm a fan of subs2srs, but it's more effort.
75 days for kanjis! - yudantaiteki - 2014-09-17
I don't think people are saying that you should literally avoid learning readings and never look at what the reading of a kanji is. Just that your actual study/review focus should be on words, not individual kanji readings.
75 days for kanjis! - yogert909 - 2014-09-17
vitaum88 Wrote:Which then brings me to another question: what is this Core6k you`re talking about? Also, is there any recommendation as to get both vocabulary+grammar at once?You might want to check out this thread. It's the basic curriculum that many people on this forum are following. Of course you can do it any way you please, but it lists some good resources and you might as well know they exist.
Regarding vocabulary and grammar at once - if you decide to do the core deck, you'll be learning vocabulary in sentences, so you'll be absorbing grammar along the way. Doing a little tae kim grammar alongside core is a great way to go.
75 days for kanjis! - Stansfield123 - 2014-09-17
cophnia61 Wrote:I think the same... studying words you never encountered before feels like memorizing random and meaningless informations. It's like if I say "asgilytrudzalef" that means "barely" in a language I just invented xD go memorize this lolIf by "written-only" you mean reading, I don't think reading works less than audio immersion.
Obviously audio plays an important role because you hear the reading, but on the other hand it's difficult to catch the word without text. The best is to have both audio and text, and then on core unsuspend just the words you already sort of know. Many words we learned this way without even putting a little effort on memorization. After nihon, the second compound I learned was that for kawaii, followed by another bunch of words i already knew from anime, songs etc..
So Stanfield123, also for you written-only immersion works less than audio immersion?
Currently, my main method of learning Japanese is audio/video, but if I had the patience and energy to spend as much time as I do on that on reading (actual novels, with the help of Rikaisama), I think that would be even more effective (I learned other languages primarily by reading, with dictionary in hand, in the past, and it's a very effective method).
The reason why I don't read as much in Japanese is because I work more than I used to back in my school/slacking off days, so I don't have any patience and energy left for it. All I can do on a regular basis is the less demanding, more relaxing audio/video approach, and some light reading of manga and stuff online.
75 days for kanjis! - vitaum88 - 2014-09-18
Thanks everybody.
And yes, the ones I already know, good for me. The new kanjis, I am completely botching the readings. However, I like to see the "application" of the kanji (still go and read a few examples of words in JEDICT so I can get the feeling of exactly what the kanji is trying to represent). Thus, I get a very brief contact with the reading and a couple of words related to it. Of course, not enough for memorization, but just so I don't go completely blind at it.
ganbatte ne! =)
75 days for kanjis! - cophnia61 - 2014-09-18
Stansfield123 Wrote:Thank you Stanfield123 for your reply, useful as alwayscophnia61 Wrote:I think the same... studying words you never encountered before feels like memorizing random and meaningless informations. It's like if I say "asgilytrudzalef" that means "barely" in a language I just invented xD go memorize this lolIf by "written-only" you mean reading, I don't think reading works less than audio immersion.
Obviously audio plays an important role because you hear the reading, but on the other hand it's difficult to catch the word without text. The best is to have both audio and text, and then on core unsuspend just the words you already sort of know. Many words we learned this way without even putting a little effort on memorization. After nihon, the second compound I learned was that for kawaii, followed by another bunch of words i already knew from anime, songs etc..
So Stanfield123, also for you written-only immersion works less than audio immersion?
Currently, my main method of learning Japanese is audio/video, but if I had the patience and energy to spend as much time as I do on that on reading (actual novels, with the help of Rikaisama), I think that would be even more effective (I learned other languages primarily by reading, with dictionary in hand, in the past, and it's a very effective method).
The reason why I don't read as much in Japanese is because I work more than I used to back in my school/slacking off days, so I don't have any patience and energy left for it. All I can do on a regular basis is the less demanding, more relaxing audio/video approach, and some light reading of manga and stuff online.
I too learned to read english simply by reading, with the help of a dictionary (good bless babylon translator, I wonder if it still exists) but in english the pronounciation is more obvious from the written word, while in japanese it's not so straightforward... especially in the beginning... but maybe after 'x' words in your bag it become simpler to remember the pronounciation of new words you encounter. Yes, I know furigana sorts of resolv this problem, but still you must make a connection between furigana and the kanji compound to be able to read it in the future when you encounter the same word without furigana. So not as straightforward as with english and other purely phonetic languages imho but yes, I think your approach is still the best
75 days for kanjis! - vitaum88 - 2014-09-18
So I am increasing my Kanji daily count... 30 was too low.. Hitting 40 a day now ahahah