How do you learn how to speak the Kanji.

You mean learn the readings?

By praying every night to the kanji gods, and offering sacrificial sushi rolls on their altars.

...or you could work hard and memorize all the readings and exceptions.

Aijin, are you atheist?

Of course not! I believe very firmly in the kanji gods and would never blasphemy them with sarcasm

The quickest way is to watch every episode of Naruto twice. You see, most people only watch them once. THAT's where they go wrong.

Actually I just had a better idea.
http://smart.fm
KO2001 lists.

welldone101 Wrote:The quickest way is to watch every episode of Naruto twice. You see, most people only watch them once. THAT's where they go wrong.

A hemispherectomy sounds safer



I am not sure how to answer the original question. If you mean the readings for a character, you simply just have to memorize the basic readings. If you mean how to know what a character is going to be read as in every word, well, the unfortunate answer is that there is no way. Lots and lots of exposure will allow you to recognize patterns and have more of an innate sense of which reading should be used in which words, but it's very flawed and there's far too many exceptions. In many cases you will simply have to memorize how the word is pronounced. Even us natives have trouble with knowing which reading to use.

But, the uncertainty makes it much more interesting I think!

Aijin Wrote:I believe very firmly in the kanji gods and would never blasphemy them with sarcasm

gods or god?

I think it's a typo. If it is not, then you're polytheist!

Now seriously, you are not shinto or christian. are you?

ahibba Wrote:

Aijin Wrote:I believe very firmly in the kanji gods and would never blasphemy them with sarcasm

gods or god?

I think it's a typo. If it is not, then you're polytheist!

There's just too many kanji to have a single god for all of them, duh!

Oh, I am neither.

Aijin Wrote:

ahibba Wrote:

Aijin Wrote:I believe very firmly in the kanji gods and would never blasphemy them with sarcasm

gods or god?

I think it's a typo. If it is not, then you're polytheist!

There's just too many kanji to have a single god for all of them, duh!

I'm imagining a whole pantheon of kanji-gods; one for each kanji in fact. Each one's power and influence is based on how frequently they are used. Clearly the 常用 kanji formed an alliance, and this was a power-play for more influence. Some of the outcasts formed the 人名用 kanji, hiding for a number of years, rebuilding their power base, until they struck back recently by forming an alliance with various ministers to form "plans to increase this list by 578 kanji in the near future" [from wiki]. Others try to build their power by influencing and placing themselves in the writing of popular authors.

...clearly I've got too much time on my hands.

Aijin Wrote:

welldone101 Wrote:The quickest way is to watch every episode of Naruto twice. You see, most people only watch them once. THAT's where they go wrong.

A hemispherectomy sounds safer

I was gonna say Orchiectomy, but yeah...

My guess is that kanji don't have readings per se. Words have kanji. Sounds have kanji. Not the other way around.

When you associate two different types of information in your head, it seems there is a certain direction. I can read most of the words that use 生 such as 先生, 生きる and 生もの. I can write out and render into kanji when they're spoken. But I'm pretty sure I fail to list all the readings of 生. I know usages and pronunciations of tons of Japanese words. I can easily associate words with corresponding kanji. But it's not as easy to name words that use a given kanji. Native speakers would have trouble answering how many readings a given kanji has because information doesn't stored in that direction.

So it might be easier if you pick up new words/phrases by listening to tons of Japanese and then associate them with kanji you already learned through RtK. Native speakers learn most of the Japanese words in this direction, too. This view is too simplistic, I know. But I think at least the most frequent words should be learned this way.

In my experience new words and phrases sink faster into oblivion if I learn their spellings/kanji before their pronunciations and usages regardless of whether they're Japanese or English.

magamo Wrote:In my experience new words and phrases sink faster into oblivion if I learn their spellings/kanji before their pronunciations and usages regardless of whether they're Japanese or English.

When I was learning Indonesian I could *never* remember a word unless I knew how to spell it. Not only that, but I often also had trouble even repeating the word if I couldn't spell it (even though the language is mostly phonetic).

blackmacros Wrote:

magamo Wrote:In my experience new words and phrases sink faster into oblivion if I learn their spellings/kanji before their pronunciations and usages regardless of whether they're Japanese or English.

When I was learning Indonesian I could *never* remember a word unless I knew how to spell it. Not only that, but I often also had trouble even repeating the word if I couldn't spell it (even though the language is mostly phonetic).

Interesting. Maybe things are different from language to language, or maybe it's just a spellings based learning method works better for you. I just wonder how native Indonesian speakers learn the language. Phonetic languages may work very differently from languages like English and Japanese.

Native English speakers may not experience this, but sometimes a phrase pops up in my mind while writing English, so I try to write it and realize I don't know its spelling. Most of the time, those are phrases not in my SRS, and I don't know when and where I learned them. I just know them. Sometimes I don't even know how many words a phrase has. Those are fairly rare cases and I can't come up with a good example, but it's like "Hmm. Do I write 'I can't take it any more!'? Was it 'I can't take it anymore!'??"

That sucks. Really. I realize I don't know how to write a phrase I thought was very very simple and easy.

For a native speaker, I guess you would almost always be going from knowing a word and then learning how to read it. At least, those would be easier to learn for them.

However for someone learning Japanese as an L2 who has a ton of alien sounding vocab to learn, it is very helpful to know the writing when learning new words, especially for kanji compounds. And perhaps especially for those who studied RTK or already know kanji like Chinese learners.

welldone101 Wrote:The quickest way is to watch every episode of Naruto twice. You see, most people only watch them once. THAT's where they go wrong.

LOL,

So that's what I've been missing this whole time. Twice dammit, twice... gotta remember twice.

Since the thread derailed, Magamo, I have a question about your experiences with the sentence method.

Ok, now many here talk as if they only add a sentence if it has a new word. I recently started doing actually sentence mining. Before then, I was using sentences from learning resources that have built in i+1 set-up. Basically, every sentence had a new word or grammar point.

With sentence mining though, I found I will add sentences that I know the meaning of every word at times. My thinking, based on rereading a bit of Antimoon, is the sentence itself is new. It's not something I could spontaneously create, even though any of its parts would be no problem.

So, how did you approach sentence mining when you started 7 to 8 months ago? How do you approach it now? Oh, and how would you gauge your level 8 months ago in speaking and listening to now? It's hard to tell these verbal ability on a written forum, but your reading and writing are flawless.

vosmiura Wrote:For a native speaker, I guess you would almost always be going from knowing a word and then learning how to read it. At least, those would be easier to learn for them.

However for someone learning Japanese as an L2 who has a ton of alien sounding vocab to learn, it is very helpful to know the writing when learning new words, especially for kanji compounds. And perhaps especially for those who studied RTK or already know kanji like Chinese learners.

Ah, I see. Rtk + memorizing readings may make things easier.

Probably native English speakers and advanced learners can easily guess correct pronunciations of unfamiliar English words, but pronunciation is a nightmare for beginners. Memorizing spellings doesn't help much unless you already know a lot of spelling-sound pairs in real words. At least it didn't work for me, and probably that's why my spelling is terrible...

When I was a high school student, I had to cram the most frequent 1900 English words before listening to them in real life. I didn't know SRS back then, and of course, I fell by the wayside.

@Nukemarine
I'll write my experiences and sentence mining in a separate post. I have a bad habit of writing too long. But it's totally off-topic, I guess. Is there a thread for sentence mining??

kazelee Wrote:So that's what I've been missing this whole time. Twice dammit, twice... gotta remember twice.

I basically wrote that post for you. I knew you would appreciate my discovery.

kanjibot16,
find sentences containing words you already know, but in kanji form, and add them to your SRS. This way you'll start associating the sounds with the characters. Then keep going,exposing yourself to tons of Japanese in the meantime.

magamo,
you reply n.13 is super-cool.

I know some people recommend learning readings only through learning sentences/vocabulary, but I think for onyomi at least there is benefit in bulk memorizing readings. This is because although kanji often have more than one onyomi, in most cases only one reading applies to 95% of vocabulary. Because of the vast number of compound words, you'll get a lot of mileage from learning these readings. Many of the alternate readings are closely related to the main reading anyway (eg. sometimes just add〝). The exceptions which are common are easily learned, and uncommon ones will be learned easily if they ever become common.
I've started using mnemonics now for any kanji whose onyomi I don't know. The way I do this, is essentially think of one sound primitive for all the possible onyomi sounds. For example: chuu is CHEWing gum, shoku is an electric SHOCK and so on. It is then very easy to think of a mnemonic linking the kanji's heisig keyword and the corresponding sound primitive.
I use http://nihongo.j-talk.com/parser/search/...arch=paste to find the most common onyomi.
I started rereviewing kanji at this site after having finished RTK quite a while ago, but this time I'm primarily testing myself on onyomi. While I do my reviews, I write kanji down in a grid. When I finish my reviews, I read over the page of kanji in random directions using their onyomi.
I would recommend this method to anyone who has completed RTK1 and knows hiragana/katakana. I wouldn't recommend doing this if you're still relying on romaaji.
If I could go back in time, I'd probably have tried to learn the most common onyomi while doing RTK1 by incorporating the sound primitive into my stories, or trying the movie method, but I have no way of knowing how well this works.

I'm very interested in any quick and dirty ways people have of learning kunyomi in bulk.

nadiatims Wrote:I'm very interested in any quick and dirty ways people have of learning kunyomi in bulk.

I think I start understanding how intimidating kanji are... I never imagined kunyomi would be more difficult than onyomi. My guess is Japanese kids can easily imagine the core meanings from kunyomi because they are often used for simple daily vocabulary while the connection between images of kanji and their onyomi are weaker in children's mind.

If everything sounded foreign, it'd be daunting to learn all the 2000 characters... You guys are awesome.

magamo Wrote:I think I start understanding how intimidating kanji are... I never imagined kunyomi would be more difficult than onyomi. My guess is Japanese kids can easily imagine the core meanings from kunyomi because they are often used for simple daily vocabulary while the connection between images of kanji and their onyomi are weaker in children's mind.

If everything sounded foreign, it'd be daunting to learn all the 2000 characters... You guys are awesome.

Already knowing Japanese natively does seem to help on picking up the kanji readings. The jury is still out on the kakikata.

magamo Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:I'm very interested in any quick and dirty ways people have of learning kunyomi in bulk.

I think I start understanding how intimidating kanji are... I never imagined kunyomi would be more difficult than onyomi.

Kun-yomi can be difficult in the sense that there's no 'trick' to learn them. With on-yomi you can use phonetic grouping, kanjichain/movie method, but with kun-yomi you just have to remember the words, plain and simple. Now, I like kun-yomi, but sometimes they can be tough(I kept thinking 荒む was さすむ and it took me quite a while to remember 妨げる was さまたげる)