partner55083777 wrote:
erlog, I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about your problem.
Judging from your past posts, it seems like we have a similar level of Japanese, but opposite problems. It's rare for me to see words/kanji I can't read (or at least guess the reading of), but I often see words I don't know the meaning of (although I can guess the definitions of a lot of the words from the kanji).
I wonder if our study methods are different enough to bring out these differences in knowledge. I've never really studied kanji except for a class or two in college. I'm currently working through RTK, but I'm still only on frame 600. I know that you're working pretty hard on the 漢検.
Yeah, extremely heavy kanji study along with RTK has been a staple since I started studying Japanese. I took a bunch of years worth of classes in college that ended up only ever covering beginner level Japanese. I was pretty angry about that when I graduated, but I've since rectified it with like 18 months of extremely solid studying since 2011.
I did RTK in tandem with normal methods of study. I got up to around frame 1500 the first time I tried RTK in like 2006. I fell off the wagon when I started concentrating on a second major, and then picked it up again in 2008 when I was on study abroad in Japan. I got up to around frame 1300 that time. Then I graduated from school. Then life happened.
I started RTK again around March of 2011 after I lost my job before I moved to Japan. I finished RTK1 a year later around the same time that I finished Kanji in Context.
My formal kanji study stops where the 常用 list stops. If it's not a 常用 kanji then there's a chance I know it's meaning because of working my through RTK3, but there's a lot of non-常用 kanji that I don't know that I come across in the novels I'm reading. If the kanji is in a compound where it uses the 音読み then I can usually guess the reading just based on the clues within the kanji itself. With the 訓読み instances I haven't the foggiest idea a lot of times.
Until very recently, I also never did as much reading from native sources as I should have. It's mostly been a lot of Anki with some native stuff tossed in from video games and manga.
If someone studied a lot more from native sources instead of studying kanji very systematically the way I've done then for sure that person would end up with exactly the opposite problem from me. The kind of things I'm running into that I don't know are quite common in novels. For me, who's just reading their first novel now, that creates its own kind of barrier.
My second novel, once I'm used to common ways novelists tend to describe things, should go a lot more smoothly.
Last edited by erlog (2012 July 04, 7:33 am)
http://www.pilot.co.jp/products/pen/sig … xionlight/
mainly on my own handwritten notes