serious trouble learning kanji

[RickOShay]

To add to Jesselt's explanation about Kanji, you may feel like it is a pain now, but after about 800 or so you will wonder how anybody could learn Japanese without it. It will become your "friend" and a learning tool to help you gain a large vocabulary more easily and be able guess the meanings of unknown words while reading.

Also about the knowing kanji through other kanji.. there are some instances like words with 心 (heart) in them as a radical, usually have something to do with emotions or feelings. Often times though kanji that have similar radicals will have similar pronunciations, like many kanji with the radical 青 will have せい as a possible reading.

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by aphextwin

Kyle, I'm gonna try Anki and try your pacing, but I just today started "Remembering the Kanji" so might stick with that for a while. Memorizing readings, meaning, and symbol was seriously not working. Maybe it will after I get a bit more used to the language, but for now I like Heisig's idea of just learning all the kanji, how to write them, and their meanings, and then learning the readings later on. I think breaking it up that way will help me, at least for now. That's the same thing I was doing when I played Slime Forest Adventure (memorize the kanji's appearance and a mnemonic) and it seemed to work great. It's only when I started trying to learn meaning, reading, and appearance at the same time that nothing seemed to stick. Anyone have any opinion of this method of breaking up the tasks?

One last thing: If I studied the "Core 2000" and turned off the kanji setting so that everything appears in kana, would that be a really bad idea? I am basically trying to learn as much grammar, structure, words, etc. as possible in a short period of time so I think studying it will just help me in general to speak basic japanese and understand more, but if going through the Core 2000 in kana will somehow lay down bad memories in my brain or if it's just bad in general to learn that way without also learning the kanji at the same time, I might reconsider. I'd ideally just like to learn a lot of words and sentence patterns and then later on learn match the kanji to the individual words.

Alright, thanks in advance for any help : )

1. I have no opinion on Heisig's method, although I've heard both good and bad things from others.
2. I think turning off kanji would be an awful idea. For example, I'm at the point now where knowing the kanji makes learning words easy. For example, I've never ever had to use the word 自閉症 (autism) in Japanese. However, it is very easy for me to remember how to read, write, and say it because I know the meanings of all three kanji, and they just make sense for this word:じへいしょう (self+close+sickness).

Had I not learned the kanji, there's no way I'd know a word like that, because the kanji are mnemonics for a significant portion of compounds you'll learn, and without the kanji, remembering a word will mean you're just memorizing a series of meaningless kana. I mean, it's ridiculously easy to remember 飛行機 for airplane (fly+go+machine) or 飛行場 for airport (fly+go+place) because I know the kanji individually.

If I just had to memorize ひこうき or ひこうじょう, it would be tons harder. The hardest words for me to learn are simple Japanese verbs and adjectives (not 漢語 verbs like 用意する and such) because there's often just one kanji, which deprives me of a mnemonic to learn at first. For example, 勇ましい. How the hell do you remember that is いさましい? You have to memorize the single use of いさ as the reading for 勇. Obviously, you also have to learn the reading of it ユウ, but that reading is used all over the place.

As another example: 使. There is only one time you'll read it as つか, and that's when you're using the verb つかう. However, you use it often as シ, so it is very easy to memorize: 使用 、天使 (angel: heaven+use)、etc.

Think of kanji as Greek or Latin affixes. Would you rather know what "pseudo" means and then learn words like "pseudopod" and "pseudonym," or would you rather say "oh OK, that word starts with the 'soo' sound, then the 'dough' sound, then 'pod'"? Learning what "pseudo" means gives you a gateway to learning tons of other vocab very fast. Basically, attach "pseudo" to a lot of stuff to make that new word mean "fake" whatever. Kanji lend themselves to the very same vocabulary explosion.

You should develop all your skills together, including kanji knowledge. Without it, it will be like playing basketball with only four guys on the court.

[RickOShay]

Originally Posted by KyleGoetz

You should develop all your skills together, including kanji knowledge. Without it, it will be like playing basketball with only four guys on the court.

Haha, very nicely said.

[aphextwin]

Hmm, very interesting. Thanks a lot, everyone, for your continued help. Hopefully in a couple weeks all these concerns of mine will be outdated.

Think of kanji as Greek or Latin affixes. Would you rather know what "pseudo" means and then learn words like "pseudopod" and "pseudonym," or would you rather say "oh OK, that word starts with the 'soo' sound, then the 'dough' sound, then 'pod'"? Learning what "pseudo" means gives you a gateway to learning tons of other vocab very fast. Basically, attach "pseudo" to a lot of stuff to make that new word mean "fake" whatever. Kanji lend themselves to the very same vocabulary explosion.

That made perfect sense. Thanks for typing it all out for me.

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by aphextwin

Hmm, very interesting. Thanks a lot, everyone, for your continued help. Hopefully in a couple weeks all these concerns of mine will be outdated.



That made perfect sense. Thanks for typing it all out for me.

You're welcome. I find that the general caveat "don't try to compare Japanese to English" is a good rule of thumb, but an experienced speaker of both can often make things easier to comprehend with actually accurate analogies like that.

At some point, maybe I'll talk about o-/go- honorific prefix usage and how detecting what are on- and kun- words is so very easy to comprehend (if not do) once you get a good English-Latin analogy going on.