Okay, I've finally bought my first set of Raw Manga and it will be here in about a week or less and I'd like to get somewhat started. I was told to make a Kanji chart to help me learn the words in the book, but I don't know how to start.

Any suggestions? Especially Nohika, which was the person to suggest the Kanji Chart!

-Arisu

Okay, since no one wants to respond to that post then I'll ask it another way.

Hmm....

Okay, are there any interesting Kanji which have designs that are easy to memorize? Or even...are there Kanji characters that you like the most and why?

-Arisu

凹, 凸, and 互 are all easy to remember, since they're pictographs, and barely abstracted... At least I think that's what you're asking

By extension so is 日, being an evolved form of a circle with a dot in it, a pictograph of the sun. And the numbers, 一 二 三... Am I helping here?

frony0 Wrote:凹, 凸, and 互 are all easy to remember, since they're pictographs, and barely abstracted... At least I think that's what you're asking.

By extension so is 日, being an evolved form of a circle with a dot in it, a pictograph of the sun. And the numbers, 一 二 三... Am I helping here?

So what do they mean then? LoL! ^-^;

Hmmmm......

Does 一 二 三 really mean ichi, ni, and san?

-Arisu

AliceDraken Wrote:So what do they mean then? LoL! ^-^;

凹 = Concave
凸 = Convex
互 = Mutually
日 = Sun

AliceDraken Wrote:Does 一 二 三 really mean ichi, ni, and san?

Indoubetebly. Though beyond that get's a little funky, so to speak [四,五,六,七,八,九,十,十一,十二,十三,...十九,二十,二十一,...]

I'm not sure what a kanji chart is, and I should probably find out before writing this, but I'm lazy. I think what you're trying to achieve is just a subset of what James Heisig acheived in RTK1, i.e. deconstructing the kanji into units/radicals/primitives, and giving these semantic meaning by translating these into pictographs and ideographs (albeit not always etymologically accurate or even sensible). You'll be hard pressed to find many kanji like the 5 above of which the meanings are obvious, I believe.

Then again, my opinion is invalid, since apparently I can't count

I guess I'll just have to read. I have two books at home that teach me about Kanji, Katakana and hiragana.

-Arisu

Nohika actually mentioned a kana chart. I'm not nohika but I want to help.
I'm a long time lurker of the forums and use the website for stories but never posted before

nohika Wrote:I'd suggest also looking for "Remembering the Kana" or heck, even googling for a kana chart on the internet and writing down the kana enough so that you can remember them. Your manga isn't going to have any roomaji, so you might as well start learning the language/kana/kanji now.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid167573

I do agree with the quote of learning the kana and ditching romaji ASAP. Mainly because it's not really Japanese but a written system to help us not Japanese native to start to read. Problem is that there are different types of romaji which causes confusion @_@

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanizatio...ion_system

A irl example I had trouble with due to romaji was the word "today"

(kanji)今日 ---- (kana) きょう　---(romaji) kyoo/kyō/kyou/kyô (?)

In my Japanese textbook I take for college (which is riddled with romaji >.>), it was written "kyoo" and for the longest time during my first semester I would write in kana as 「きょお」. Ever since that mistake, I try to avoid romaji as much as possible.

Hope this helps

I understand all this... Though, I'm not as fast as the next person... I do hope that with a bit of reading and a BUNCH of cramming will help me.

I do know that I probably wouldn't be having such a hard time if what I've been learning would have been showing me the Kanji version along the way. Though, the way I've been doing it is know where near an actual educational version and it's understandable why I'm taking a little longer than the next person...

-Arisu

I'm not exactly sure what you just said but I will try to reply. I wasn't implying that you should learn how to read functionally in Japanese ASAP (which I believe is having knowledge of ~2000 kanji) but just the kana for starters. Based on my experience in a classroom setting, we first learned phrases in Japanese like "watakushi wa buraun desu", then we covered kana and then saw the same romaji phrases in kana 「わたくし
は ブラウン です。」Finally as we started to learn kanji, we back track to those phrases and now see them as 「私はブラウンです。」

I myself only know about 60 something kanji via traditional textbook/classroom method. My japanese 101 teacher gave us 2 weeks to learn the kana before being tested on our kana knowledge via simple vocab like "apple (りんご)". We learned about 40 kanji a month before the final.

Pretty much I'm nowhere near fluent and pretty much struggle to read any native Japanese without looking up a dictionary so I wasn't implying that I'm some sort of expert level Japanese learner if that how it came off in my last post. I even asked my Japanese 102 teacher what level we would be compared to Japanese kids and she said "better grammar than 1st grade but less vocab" xD lol

Overall, what I'm trying to say is that Japanese fluency takes a while and requires a lot of work/exposure to native material. I don't expect to be fluent by next year, 5 or 10 years from now and I'm ok with that. Everyone has different perceptions of fluency so it's subjective. As long as you enjoy learning and make an effort that's all that counts. It's a journey ^_^

AliceDraken Wrote:I understand all this... Though, I'm not as fast as the next person... I do hope that with a bit of reading and a BUNCH of cramming will help me.

I do know that I probably wouldn't be having such a hard time if what I've been learning would have been showing me the Kanji version along the way. Though, the way I've been doing it is know where near an actual educational version and it's understandable why I'm taking a little longer than the next person...

-Arisu

With regards to the kana, cramming and reading as a combination works fine, I did it myself and can read pretty fast now. Kanji-wise, as RawrPk says, even basic literacy (yes basic) involves knowing about 1900 kanji, so it's generally accepted here I think that cramming is a most inefficient way of going about it. For that to be effective, you'd have to have colossal determination and either combine it with SRS (google it, it's your new best friend) or intense reading which involves very regularly having to use every single kanji you've learnt so far. I don't mean to scaremonger, and I may be wrong (I've never tried it) but I wouldn't recommend it D:

You can start learning kanji via RTK. There is a sample pdf of the first 12 lessons on this website's homepage so you can get a feel of the process. Pair that with an srs (like Anki or the website's srs) to get the most out of your kanji learning process.

If you decide that you like RTK, you can buy the book (Amazon as far as I know has it @ $25 + free shipping for the 6th edition), rent in local libraries (search via---> http://www.worldcat.org/ )

or by other means o_O *coughdownloadpdfcough*

I thought you would finid the followinig websites useful since you're reading manga.

http://www.punkednoodle.com/champloo/200...-japanese/
http://tastymiso.com/how-to-learn-japane...-manga/492
http://anime-manga.jp/index_english.html

3rd website is pretty cool because it's has interactive manga where you can click on the text and it plays audio. I'm sure if you browse through the stickies from the "Learning Resources" and "The Japanese Language" section you're bound to find valuable info

Remind me...how do I download Anki again. LoL! I almost wrote Aniki there for a second. ~Smacks forehead~

Btw, I finally got my first manga and it's already hard to decipher. I'm picking up the habit of reading only the tiny hiragana beside the kanji rather than memorizing the character itself. Though, I've made a promise with myself...not to move to the next page until I can read what is there and understand what it means. ^0^

-Arisu

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=anki

Or, in a less patronizing link: http://ankisrs.net

Once you "rtk-know" the kanji, so to speak, you don't have to worry about memorization, because for the 2000 most common ones you'll already have a translation, which makes pseudo-reading easier, and learning to actually read far more possible

Okay well my biggest annoyance is the fact that in a Kanji sentence, I can't tell where the word ends and the particle begins.

-Arisu

Plus, what recommendations do you have for pre-made decks on Anki?

-Arisu

AliceDraken Wrote:Okay well my biggest annoyance is the fact that in a Kanji sentence, I can't tell where the word ends and the particle begins.

-Arisu

I'm still in the early stages of learning myself, but I found that Tae Kim's Guide (http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/basic) really helped me in grasping the particles and recognizing the separation of words.

AliceDraken Wrote:Remind me...how do I download Anki again. LoL! I almost wrote Aniki there for a second. ~Smacks forehead~

Btw, I finally got my first manga and it's already hard to decipher. I'm picking up the habit of reading only the tiny hiragana beside the kanji rather than memorizing the character itself. Though, I've made a promise with myself...not to move to the next page until I can read what is there and understand what it means. ^0^

This may not be the most efficient way to learn. Spending huge amounts of time on a tiny amount of Japanese can be a waste of time and you may find yourself burning out rather quickly. Generally it's better to use some sort of organized approach (like a textbook) and then work in native materials later.

AliceDraken Wrote:Plus, what recommendations do you have for pre-made decks on Anki?

-Arisu

Any is fine, so long as it has all the kanji. You can always import more info later. I posted a deck onto my dropbox if you want to try that, otherwise the top result for "heisig" is probably fine

yudantaiteki Wrote:This may not be the most efficient way to learn. Spending huge amounts of time on a tiny amount of Japanese can be a waste of time and you may find yourself burning out rather quickly. Generally it's better to use some sort of organized approach (like a textbook) and then work in native materials later.

It is hard, but with everytime I read the same sentence again...I'm learning new kanji. I'm also learning new words with each one I translate.

I am having trouble with figuring out words sometimes, since I still can't tell where the word begins or ends. So, I guess I'll keep trying to learn in various ways.

-Arisu