Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
I cannot recommend Kanji in Context enough. It is hands down the single most important book an intermediate student of Japanese can own. No other single book comes close.
|
I also want to take this oppurtunity to recommend Kanji in Context.
I started using it as a begginner, which was a little difficult at first because there were no English translations, but it really did help me to learn how to read kanji and get used to reading and understanding Japanese in general.
You say you are thinking about writing an application for kanji instead of making flash cards, so I just want to recommend trying out a flash card program called Anki before writing anything yourself, just because it is already a well written program and just works.
As for how many kanji to study at once, you can make that number anything you want provided it doesn't burn you out, so you will have to experiement with different numbers until you find an amount that is right for you.
But at the same time I would also say that even if you don't reach your goal of X kanji every day it doesn't matter.
The kanji aren't going anywhere so you have as much time as you need to learn them all.
The important thing is to not stop (So don't burn yourself out) otherwise you will have to re-learn everything (As I have had to do twice now)
And just to give you my experience in reading, I can read roughly 900 ~ 1,000 kanji after about 3 years of study.
During this time I have been working, taking holidays, seeing friends, being a normal human being etc, and I feel as though I haven't taken my study very seriously and have been quite lazy.
I also haven't gone out of my way to find kanji which I can't read yet; I just learn them as they come up.
When it comes to writing, you can learn to write anything without actually being able to read it.
This is what I did to start with and learned how to
write (
not read) 2,000 kanji in 6 weeks.
However learning to write (and remember how to write with correct stroke order) roughly 100 kanji a day was very tiring.
I also didn't have any reason to write kanji by hand after learning how to write them all so I stopped reviwing my flash cards and forgot how to write all but the most basic kanji after a couple of months.
So if you are thinking of trying to learn how to write each kanji with it's readings at a rate of 100 a day, based on my experience with writing only, I would agree with Kyle about not being able to do more than 20 a day.
Try something like 10 ~ 20 a day instead and see how it goes
