(Edit: whoops, didn't notice this was page 2 of a topic :-) I thought zwarte_kat was responding just to the referenced blog post, so this reply's perhaps a bit misaimed. Anyway.)

zwarte_kat Wrote:For me this whole "learning the Kanji/vocabulary before reading" seems to be the opposite of what I want. I don't want to learn lists with no connection to a story, image or sentence. Isn't the idea that many of us pursue here (and maybe more on ajatt) that we learn FROM the material, not FOR. If you already went to the trouble of drilling those kanji/vocab, then is the reading of the manga really so valuable?

I didn't see anything in the original article about using the produced list for drilling. My reading of it was just that it's a handy technique for doing kanji meaning lookups in a completely automated way. Then as you're reading presumably you can easily find what you want in the list rather than having to look it up by hand every time.

My personal opinion is that I wouldn't do this kind of thing because I don't find much point in looking up meanings of kanji when what you actually want is meanings of words. Words are much harder to automatically pick out of running text, but looking up kanji meanings because that's easier to do is like the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost :-)

@ ISORON
Well yeah that's a good point. If it's just for the mere enjoyment of reading Japanese manga, books and newspapers, then it would definitely work. I thought we were talking about a way to learn kanji/vocab, rather then a way to enjoy a particular book. Ofcourse understanding Japanese media is one of my main FINAL goals, but I thought this was being discussed as a learning technique to get to this point.

In any case I wouldn't enjoy learning a long list of vocab or kanji before each book that I read. That is not my FINAL goal. Not to mention that I already enjoy manga in which I don't understand many of the words. I rather learn by experiencing the information, both for effectiveness and enjoyment, and as a means to reach my FINAL goal of Japanese fluency.

If you read stuff that is slightly above your level, then you can already enjoy it I think.

pm215 Wrote:(Edit: whoops, didn't notice this was page 2 of a topic :-) I thought zwarte_kat was responding just to the referenced blog post, so this reply's perhaps a bit misaimed. Anyway.)

haha you just beat me to quoting page one, anyway, I agree that it would make a handy lookup list.

iSoron Wrote:

zwarte_kat Wrote:If you already went to the trouble of drilling those kanji/vocab, then is the reading of the manga really so valuable?

Now that's backward. I'm learning Japanese so that I can read Japanese manga, books, newspapers etc. Not the other way round.

I agree. I think this is all about goals. I'm also learning Japanese so that I can use it, not using Japanese so I can learn it.

Some of my 'study time' involves reading things I can't quite read yet, but I find things are a LOT more fun if I put in some time beforehand and learn some vocab, and then I can just read through easily. Instead of associating the text with the agony of looking up every word, I associate it with fun and I think I remember it better for it.

For instance, when I started reading the Yotsuba& manga, I couldn't read but a few words in each chapter. I had to look up everything. I made it through the entire first volume that way and hated most of it and merely disliked the rest. I took a break, did a lot of vocab training, and started reading it again. It was fun this time... And now I've read volumes 2 and 3 and most of 4 with no additional training. They were fun, too. I understand about 2/3 of it and that's enough to have fun.

If there were iKnow lists for specific manga volumes or chapters, I'd gladly do them first and save myself the headache. The closest thing I've seen so far is a 'One Piece' vocab list that lists a lot of the commonly used words from it.