I don't know how to go on, really. I'm kind of desperate. キョウ、ショウ、コ、きょうきゅう...

All the same for me. I see a compound, I might understand what it means by seeing it, sometimes I don't, but then - is it きょうく？きょうきゅう？こきゅう？maybe こうこう? or even きょうりょく？ or what?!?

Im at Kanji 90 in KO2001 and already going mad. I can't imagine keeping all those readings in my head, and how you guys manage to learn KO2001 in a couple of weeks is absolutely beyond me.

Am I just plain stupid, too old, too short, or do you know something I don't?? Are you all geniuses?

Please help me. Thanks.

Yes you are plain stupid.

I kid.

Are you attempting to memorize readings?

You want to focus on the meaning of the word itself, or the meaning of the example sentence. Trying to sort out the readings individually will drive you mad.

If you separate the readings sometimes it helps if you look at them like English. A lot of words in English can be broken down in to components.

'Asymmetrical' for example is composed the negating 'a' combined with 'sym' meaning together and 'metry' - a measure.

不安 ふ.あんー　fu negates. an has a meaning of easing. 不安 uneasy.

Quote:きょうく？きょうきゅう？こきゅう？maybe こうこう? or even きょうりょく？ or what?!?

Through repetition you'll naturally associate which compounds go with which character. Perhaps you're going too fast.

Are you using an SRS?

Also... a couple of weeks? Yeah, who ever did that was probably a genius.

I felt the exact same way before, but without noticing it the problem went away. For the most part a kanji's on-yomi won't change apart from voicing/っ being added. Practice reading a lot, and focus on learning kanji compounds that don't contain more than 1 kanji that's new to you. This will reinforce what you already know and lessen the amount of new material you're learning at a time.

As for doing KO2001 in a few weeks... that's about how long it took for me to know I've had enough of its long boring sentences

Thanks, kazelee

kazelee Wrote:Are you attempting to memorize readings?

not sure.

I take a compound, say 供給, きょうきゅう, a word I didn't know before. (the ones I already know by their sound, easy example say 子供, are no problem, I learn the Kanji compound once and then know it) So, back to 供給: I memorize it, English word, Japanese reading, and after 3 minutes it's gone. I cram it 10 times but in the evening it's gone. Yes, I'm using SRS with Anki. I don't know how many times 供給 has shown up. Just doesn't stick. Same with many others. They just don't stick. Sometimes I make up a stupid mnemonic, that helps, but only temporarily.

Quote:'Asymmetrical' for example is composed the negating 'a' combined with 'sym' meaning together and 'metry' - a measure.

不安 ふ.あんー　fu negates. an has a meaning of easing. 不安 uneasy.

I'm aware of that and things like this are quite easy. Sometimes I can figure out a reading the first time I see a compound. But many others are driving me insane.

Quote:Through repetition you'll naturally associate which compounds go with which character. Perhaps you're going too fast.

I hope this is the reason, I really do...

Quote:Also... a couple of weeks? Yeah, who ever did that was probably a genius.

read it on this forum: "took me a couple of weeks to finish level 2..." many stories like that. very intimidating... you're he mod, you must have read tons of incredible stories from people blazing through thousands of vocab in a few weeks / months.

Anyway, I appreciate your help, I feel a bit better now.

quincy Wrote:I felt the exact same way before, but without noticing it the problem went away. For the most part a kanji's on-yomi won't change apart from voicing/っ being added. Practice reading a lot, and focus on learning kanji compounds that don't contain more than 1 kanji that's new to you. This will reinforce what you already know and lessen the amount of new material you're learning at a time.

As for doing KO2001 in a few weeks... that's about how long it took for me to know I've had enough of its long boring sentences

The problem went away? glad to hear that, I guess I'll give myself more time then... Thanks for your advice.

Practice more.

Well, the light at the end of the tunnel is that the more on-yomi you learn, the more likely it is you'll remember them. Sure, 供給 is hard now and maybe anki isn't even enough to learn it, but pretty soon you learn some other words with 供 in them, and then you learn that 共 in 共益 is also "きょう" and pretty soon you begin to associate that radical (or primitive) with that sound and pretty soon, even though there are a lot more words (and kanji) crammed into your head than before, the readings slowly become more easy to memorize.

The real problem (at least for me at my level) comes from primitives that don't share a lot of kanji in common and "rare" readings that are often as arbitrary as they are rare.

exactly it really jsut comes down to repetition with compounds, youll find yourself flipping things around a lot at the beginning but later on it wont really be a problem at all, just keep at it.

As other people have mentioned, learning multiple compounds with the new kanji you're trying to learn is really helpful especially if the other kanji in the compounds are ones you already know since it will give you a lot more concentrated practice on the new kanji. Plus the meanings of the different compounds will help you to gain a "deeper" understanding of the meaning of the new kanji. This is really easy to do with the sorted core 2k + 6k deck.

As they say, give it some time and you will start to associate correctly.

Don't worry about it - it's not the worst part. The worst part is the most common kanji all having 500 different readings based on context. Heck, I still fail at 大...

Oh, thanks a lot everybody. This is most reassuring, just the thing I needed. I'll just keep going, then.

Cheers!

You can try KanjiTown, Movie Method or other memory palace methods to get Onyomi under control.

In addition, using some sort of Kanji Word organizer like Cangy made can be of benefit in putting lists of word in a better order so you're not getting compound words that contain kanji (and their onyomi) that won't appear for dozens of pages. Not sure if there's a Vocabulary List for KO2001 outside of the Smart.FM lists Hashirya finished almost single handedly.

Thanks, Nuke, good points. I'll check them out. Somehow I like the KO order, though... I guess it'll get easier in a few weeks.

KO2001 took 2 years to complete. Of course I did other things while doing KO2001. My deck contains now 7400 cards. So, I have added about 4000 to KO2001. It's really worth it.

truando Wrote:キョウ、ショウ、コ、きょうきゅう...
All the same for me. I see a compound, I might understand what it means by seeing it, sometimes I don't, but then - is it きょうく？きょうきゅう？こきゅう？maybe こうこう? or even きょうりょく？ or what?!?

I've exactly the same problem and thought RtK2 might help it after finishing with RtK1, but i was certainly wrong, as the words introduced as vocabularies at the beginning of RtK2 are far away from being called "for beginners". (Economy specific words etc.)
I get confused whether the reading - to be more specific than you truando - is a こ or こう and く or くう and きょ or きょう and きゅ or きゅう (and so on.. same for the r-series). They don't stay in my head and the only method helping A BIT, slightly, is writing the kanji compounds on a sheet of paper while reviewing Genki1&2 deck in Anki and writing the furigana above them in hiragana naturally. That's time consuming and works only very limited.. But all in all it's damnd time consuming and kills the fun learning any further, although I - and certainly you, too - have made big success with RtK1, ne.

@kazelle:

Quote:You want to focus on the meaning of the word itself, or the meaning of the example sentence. Trying to sort out the readings individually will drive you mad.

Fact. I tried it, it sucks. I will never ever waste time with doing so. i tried the AJATT method with a little vocabulary book i was carrying around all the time where i add a few kanjis including their common readings in words/compounds to memorise them, but no success (after 4 months). It's demotivating.
same with the "fu negates.." method, like with truando, that's easy for me (truando, bruder! Ich denke man muss das problem bei der Wurzel packen bei uns beiden oder?)

I TRIED EVERYTHING. The last thing I will be working on and which is also timeconsuming is creating donkey bridges for readings as in kanjidamage..

Another option would be learning the readings for the radicals ("pure groups" form Rtk2? Anyone?) by heart. Maybe helpful (@truando?).

@Tori-kun

Try the KO2001 lists on Smartfm as per Nukemarine's advice, and listen to more Japanese audio. Maybe even vocab lists will help.

How would you rate your progress, in detail, during the 4 month of no success?

@tori-kun

I've seen a few posts about how people go through material in shorts times. The thing is, I don't think they stay on any particular section until they've mastered it. They learn the information to the point where they can grasp it, and then enter in an SRS. Through repetition they master it over time.

Some people need that feeling of certainty when learning, others don't.

This is how I see it.

So in particular you mean i should learn the vocabs first (how? i mean Eng-Jap [Ger-Jap] or Jap-Eng [Jap-Ger]?) with this Kanji Odyssey 2001 (that's a software right?) and then srsing them with anki? In lists =) That sounds promising ("kanji chain" like). i will give it a try, thanks a bunch kazelee!

Edit: How shall i exactly preceed with KO2001?

You need to learn those "economy specific words."
Remember that Recette from Recettear (videogame by EGS) is an item shop owner; many of these so-called "economy specific words" are found in the game text.
I hear "Spice and Wolf" (light novel series) includes many of these terms.
I am trying to say it's not so farfetched that you'd run into them.

Second:
In your native language, you know many "economy specific words" even though you are probably not an economist.

You start with a Genki or Nakama or JfBP or Minnano which have common words in them - because you'll be completely unable to read anything if you don't know those. The next step, I think, is "just learn it." Please note resource "Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar" is bad for this sort of thing - they use common words instead of ones you don't know because the aim is to teach you grammar and not vocab. For vocab, KO2001 is a good resource (because the aim is to teach you vocab).

KO2001 is a series of two books published by CosCom.
http://www.coscom.co.jp/

If you are getting similar sounds mixed up, try making mnemonics, just like you did for RTK (assuming you did rtk).

I was having trouble with the words 四日＆八日. Until someone on this forum showed me a good mnemonic for them. I imagine dhalsim from street fighter yelling out ようか！ I can imagine him stretching his long limbs into the shape of a figure 8 while yelling it, and his limbs are long, like the sound is long.
Or a simpler mnemonic could suffice. 8 is twice as long as 4, so the sound is also twice as long.

If there are words that you definitely want to remember, but you just cant keep them straight, I think mnemonics can be a big help. It's just too time consuming and difficult to apply them to everything though.

kazelee Wrote:I've seen a few posts about how people go through material in shorts times. The thing is, I don't think they stay on any particular section until they've mastered it. They learn the information to the point where they can grasp it, and then enter in an SRS. Through repetition they master it over time.

Some people need that feeling of certainty when learning, others don't.

This is how I see it.

I find that very reassuring. I like to go in depth, also because I believe it will help me later.

truando Wrote:I take a compound, say 供給, きょうきゅう, a word I didn't know before. (the ones I already know by their sound, easy example say 子供, are no problem, I learn the Kanji compound once and then know it) So, back to 供給: I memorize it, English word, Japanese reading, and after 3 minutes it's gone. I cram it 10 times but in the evening it's gone. Yes, I'm using SRS with Anki. I don't know how many times 供給 has shown up. Just doesn't stick. Same with many others. They just don't stick. Sometimes I make up a stupid mnemonic, that helps, but only temporarily.

When you first start KO2001, it's going to be difficult. You will spend a lot of time on just a small amount of material in the very beginning. When I started KO2001 I was only clearing 20-30 sentences in 15 minutes. This is natural. You may fail a card many, many times.
With that said, there are ways to improve retention. You can try learn mode, an Anki plugin. Or, you can try and review as often as possible. For me, I get great results when I'm doing a few cards every 10 minutes. Unfortunately, life doesn't let me do that very often, so I often settle for twice a day: Once at lunch time, once at night time. If I can, I review cards during breakfast as well.

Quote:read it on this forum: "took me a couple of weeks to finish level 2..." many stories like that. very intimidating... you're he mod, you must have read tons of incredible stories from people blazing through thousands of vocab in a few weeks / months.

Some people have more time than others. That's okay. Everyone's different.

I will say this though: As you get better, you'll work faster and pick up vocabulary faster. I can clear about 50-60 sentences in 15 minutes now. But that wouldn't be possible if I didn't work hard and concentrate when I first started. It took me a while to get into a routine and add cards appropriately. I'm sure if I put in more time when I started, I would've been done with KO2001 by now. After all, I started in the beginning of the year.

kainzero, that's exactly the stuff I was hoping to hear. Thanks. I'll just keep going no matter what.

I started working with paper flash cards along with Anki, I have them in my pocket all the time, with all the difficult words. I can quickly review them without any need of hardware. Once they're in my memory I put them into Anki and throw the paper away.

It has already started to give me some results.

I feel more confident now. Knowing that others had a hard time at the beginning and failed cards over and over is reassuring.

Pretty much what kainzero said. The start is undoubtedly slow. This is because you're simply not used to it and your brain needs to spend more time to comprehend what's going on. This is necessary and will pick up with time.

I added most of my vocab cards from reading sources. My reading was ridiculously slow at first since I had to look up at least one item per sentence, and then try to make the puzzle come together in my mind. Which didn't always succeed, either. Still, this same fact spurred me on. Even though I failed like never before, I was moving forward with every step.

You could also try adding keyboard input to your reviews. This potentially helped me in the early stages. I used to fail a card, then undo it and type the word in before I failed it again, just to force myself to making it count. It's hard for your brain to ignore the cards this way.

It might help more to learn other words that use the same kanji at the same time. Remembering 供給 is read　きょうきゅう is hard when that's all you have to go on, but if you learn 月給　減給　自給 (random examples), you'll start to naturally associate 給 with きゅう. Also, phonetic groups help too (RTK or kanjitown/movie method resources can supply this info), like FutureBlues points out with 共 and 供 which are both read きょう. It all boils down to exposure to more words and kanji, which takes some time.

I love you all

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