Well it has been 2 months now since I started doing Heisig. The good thing is I am 500 kanji away from being done. The bad thing is, I have training for the Army coming up in 2 months. I mean military training is not too bad, but the fact that there will be little free time to study Japanese is bad. So I came up with this plan to help me at least retain the kanji I have learned through Heisig.
You can't just pull out cell phones or any electronic devices while at training. They take all your personal stuff away. But you can have small notebooks and such so you can take notes. So I decided to keep a small notebook and write down the kanji that I have a difficult time with. That way I can still review kanji while waiting in line, sitting, eating, and pretty much whenever there is down time. I can just trace the kanji on my palm or in the air when reviewing. And if I get bored I can think of new stories for the harder ones.
I am like deathly afraid of forgetting the kanji I have learned. My training is 3 months long. That might be a big blow on my Japanese. I am going to AIT so at least I will have more freedom then in BCT. Just in case they give us our personal bags back I am bringing my Japanese-Japanese dictionary, two manga(s), and my MP3 player. 
zer0range
Member
From: US
Registered: 2009-03-18
Posts: 158
I'm in a similar situation. I enlisted a few months ago in the Navy as a Linguist. I will be sent to school in California for two years to learn a language. I've been learning Japanese for a year and started RTK when I stumbled on it a few months ago. I was psyched to be able to continue my language studies and get paid for it in the military.
Unfortunately I didn't do as much homework as I should have and I found out that Japanese is not an option for enlisted Navy. Fortunately, Chinese is, and there's a good chance that's what I will be learning. Remembering the Hanzi for the win!
Anyway... there's a tendency to feel like you've wasted time, in that you're going to forget what you've worked so hard to learn, but that isn't the case, as Codexus touched on. Also, and possibly more importantly, the time you've spent learning how to learn the Kanji will prove invaluable in other areas of life - imaginative memory and SRS are powerful stuff.
zer0range
Member
From: US
Registered: 2009-03-18
Posts: 158
LegionOfDeicide wrote:
Man that is cool. You get paid to learn a language that is at least somewhat close to Japanese compared to other languages. Good luck!
Yes, I mean, sitting around learning languages is something I'd be doing anyway. One of my favorite quotes goes something like, "Find something you love, and then figure out how to get paid for doing it."
Granted, I'll be doing a lot of military things that are un-language related, but my target language will play a big factor.
Tobberoth wrote:
Mandarin is a fun language though, regardless of similarities/dissimilarities with Japanese.
Word. I'm definitely going into whatever language I get with excitement. Although I have an affinity for eastern languages from a childhood spent emulating Bruce Lee and TMNT, I think every language has unique and interesting facets to it.
Harrow
Member
From: Eugene OR USA
Registered: 2008-08-26
Posts: 122
LegionOfDeicide wrote:
They take all your personal stuff away. But you can have small notebooks and such so you can take notes.
How about a T-shirt? I'm thinking Mighty Kanji T-shirt...
http://www.kanjiposter.com/shirts.html
Are you allowed to bring personal underclothes? The white one in XXL could be a nightshirt...
Even if you couldn't wear it, if you could sneak it in you could look up kanji and write a set on your arms etc. to review when you have a chance to glance down at your own body -- soldiers are allowed to have tattoos, right? Why not kanji written on your arms?
If kanjishirt doesn't fly, Bodhisamaya posted a list of the 2042 (actually I think it was the 3007) which I copied and printed out to review while travelling. You could print out a bunch of copies and take them with you to have on hand for review. Unfortunately, I don't know which topic that was but just message him directly if he doesn't cruise by and post a link to the topic here...
BTW, thanks for your service, LegionOfDeicide, zer0range, lamewing.
Jarvik7
Member
From: 名古屋
Registered: 2007-03-05
Posts: 3946
Of course there is still benefit from knowing Japanese, especially because of the grammar. It would however be MUCH more beneficial if Sino words were still written with Sino characters though
学生 (gakusei)
学生 (xuesheng)
학생 (haksaeng - god I hate romanizing Korean)
Clearly it's much easier to tell the relationship between the first two than the second two, even though the Korean pronunciation is closer to Japanese than modern Mandarin is.
Bonus: Here is Vietnamese, another language that threw out hanzi for political/nationalistic, but not linguistic, reasons. 60% of Vietnamese vocab is Chinese according to wiki.→Học sinh
Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 April 06, 8:29 pm)
Jarvik7
Member
From: 名古屋
Registered: 2007-03-05
Posts: 3946
wrightak wrote:
Jarvik7 wrote:
Korean vocabulary also borrows a large percentage of words from Chinese (I read 70% somewhere). Unfortunately they stupidly discarded hanja for hangul (the most overhyped writing system ever) so it's harder to get the benefit out of knowing Chinese.
What have you got against Hangul?
Other than how it hides Sino-origin words like I mentioned above, I think it's just very overhyped. Many (nationalistic I suppose) people claim it to be the most perfect writing system ever etc, when in reality it suits modern Korean quite poorly. For example modern Japanese kana writing basically has only one situation where the reading isn't phonetic, the weak upper vowels (u/i). Korean hangul on the other-hand has 9 different rules/exceptions (resyllabification etc) to pronouncing hangul just in the introduction in my text, with a bunch more later on (including some instances where the pronunciation could be one of two ways and the only way to know it is to know the word by rote).
The actual construction of hangul blocks is pretty interesting and logical, but that has no bearing on it being good or bad for transcribing a language. The move to hangul was purely for nationalistic reasons (independence from Chinese influence). Linguistically, the alphabet would have been just as good of a fit. In short, switching to hangul didn't make Korean any easier to read for Koreans, since it's still just as non-phonetic as hanja was, but now they don't have sino characters to aid them with all of the sino vocab. An optimal balance would have been hanja for sino words and hangul for native words.
Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 April 06, 10:43 pm)
I see.
Jarvik7 wrote:
The move to hangul was purely for nationalistic reasons (independence from Chinese influence). Linguistically, the alphabet would have been just as good of a fit. In short, switching to hangul didn't make Korean any easier to read for Koreans, since it's still just as non-phonetic as hanja was, but now they don't have sino characters to aid them with all of the sino vocab. An optimal balance would have been hanja for sino words and hangul for native words.
I've only just started studying Korean but it seems to me that your claim that the alphabet would have been just as good is stretching your argument a bit. As you said yourself, it looks horrid.
Putting aside the nationalistic influences and concentrating on whether using Hangul only is a good idea or not, why do you think it is of benefit for Korean kids to have to memorize the hanji as well as the hangul? I know that Korean kids study hanji anyway but theoretically it's a big burden off their shoulders, right? You can research where the words come from but you don't need to write down the hanji each time, which sounds like a good deal to me.
EDIT: sorry for thread hi-jacking, will create a new thread if it looks like this conversation will develop
Last edited by wrightak (2009 April 06, 11:20 pm)
Jarvik7
Member
From: 名古屋
Registered: 2007-03-05
Posts: 3946
wrightak wrote:
Sounds like a lack of hanja is more of a problem for you than it is for the Koreans. .
No doubt 
I'm against it from a linguistic angle, a historical angle, and from my personal distaste for (militant in the case of Korea) nationalism.
A Japanese child could be taught to read kana-only from birth and would probably be able to learn to read just as well as someone taught normal 漢字仮名交じり (assuming all reading material was kana-fied), but it doesn't mean it's a good idea. They for one thing lose the history of the words, the ability to read old texts, some ease of learning for natives other sino-character based languages, and some ease of learning of other sino-character languages for Japanese natives.
Vietnamese is another language that got rid of Sino-characters, but apparently the replacement, while to my eyes being extremely ugly, is actually a very good representation of the pronunciation due to the masses of diacriticals and not being restricted to representing whole syllables in one block. The reason for the change was still political though (forced on Vietnam by French colonizers). I've never studied Vietnamese beyond encountering it in linguistics study though so I can't comment too much on it.
Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 April 07, 2:14 am)
