Crossroads
 

Well, I just finished one of my programs ("Human Japanese") and I really think I should begin putting some serious effort into learning kanji soon. At the moment, however, I can't say cramming a couple thousand of nonsensical (at least at the moment) small pictures with anywhere from 1-5 different readings and/or meanings is a notion that appeals particularly to me.

I've thought a little about it, and it seems to me that these are the options:

- Cram kanji. This has a couple of disadvantages, namely that I'm not really all that "up for it" and also people keep telling me that trying to learn kanji out of context isn't a good way to go. I have to say, I can see why.

- Read stuff. Reading is, at the moment, the primary focus of my "Japanese studies" because I don't really have anyone to write, let alone talk to, in Japanese at the moment, and I don't really feel ready for that anyways. There'll be time later, I guess. :p
By "stuff", I'm a bit unsure whether I should go for something "real" (which'd be heavy going, especially at first, because I'd likely have to stop 8 times per sentence and look something up without really knowing what I'm looking for and how/where to do so) or go for something with furigana on it.

- A combination? I don't really know which of the two above mentioned options is the better one, so combining them is a possibility, I guess. However, it could become a bit difficult to manage.

I'm hoping for some input on this whiole thing. What did you do when at my level, and how did that work out for you?

What would be the best way to learn kanji at the moment, that is a little more engaging than just getting a picture of the kanji and five different ways to read it thrown in your face?

If I decide on "learning by doing" (or rather, by reading,) what would be appropriate reading material? Obviously, it shouldn't be too complex, but I also don't want to end up with a heap of fairy tales and children's books.

Thanks in advance for your answers.

If you can make your way through newspaper articles now with a dictionary, start reading them on Google News in Japanese, and make flashcards in Anki of any vocab with kanji you don't know. Do one or two of these articles each week.

While I do want to get started as soon as possible, I think newspaper articles are a little too heavy at the moment. As I can see from the Google News front page in Japanese, over half of the signs are kanjis and I know only a small fraction of them.

Thanks for the tip, though, I'll do that once ready.

Then you're not at a point where cramming is going to help—namely because you don't have the kanji base to cram more than 10 or so per week, I'd wager.

Use something like Rikai.com to provide you meanings and readings for the kanji in a news article.

But hey, you know your abilities better than I.

I like learning languages using movies. First you have to choose some familiar movie, which you probably seen many times and you know well what they talk about in different scenes even if you mute the sound out. Something with easy plot like Matrix :P

Then you have to find a dubbed version of that movie in language you want to learn, and what is rather difficult, you have to also find subtitles which do exactly match the spoken words. It is crucially important to find them equal. Many subtitles which you can download from web are heavily different by their content, and so cannot be used.

After I found a right version of movie and matching subtitles I use to play it round and round, so I continually embed a proper pronunciation into memory (they say - repeating is a mother of knowledge). As I know the background of the movie I may sometimes decipher meaning even when they use words I don't know yet, and so learn them from context. And if I don't know, that is where subtitles come to place, I can pause movie and look up the meaning in dictionary.

The key is, that anything I learn during watching movie I immediately associate with a moments of that movie and thus it writes into my memory with a less chance to be forgotten :P what is the main problem of human memory :)

And you can watch the movie on the background, you don't have to sit there and look at it all the time. Watch it e.g. when you cook alongside :) you cannot absorb whole movie during one evening anyway.

ps: i don't know however whether this method would be any good for learning kanji :P

My personal advice would be to start with the kanji order that Japanese children learn them in.

If you start somewhere random or by following a random Japanese textbook, you`ll have a bunch of kanji that you know but that are scattered... You may be able to read something quite advanced, but be lost on simple things.

When it comes to learning in the Japanese order there will be no shortage of materials just at or just above (enough to be challenging but not discouraging) your level as you advance. There are children`s newspapers, learning materials aimed at adults with learning disabilities, novels, etc - all following the Japanese curriculum order.

Right. Well, I just started reading a manga in Japanese. I found a system that seems to work reasonably well; reading Japanese first, attempting to loosely translate it, then if I'm unsure, confirming with an English translation I have in the background. All the while having a dictionary practically on speed dial. (Quick search mnemonic in my browser. Endless possibilities. :D)

I have to say, it went smoother than I'd imagined and I do get most of it right. Also, the manga is fun, so even if I get a little stuck there's still "entertainment value" in it that prevents me from getting bored/demotivated.

The furigana help a lot, I'd be dead meat without them, I'm afraid I'll have to say-- but all in all: everything went better than expected. :D

On another note, I still do come across words that I'm not sure of at all - with true/false adjectives, verbs that end in god knows what and a couple of nouns thrown in for good measure, it's not always too easy to find what I'm looking for in a dictionary.

Is there something like (English) wiktionary in Japanese that take most words (or rather, most forms of words) and still "understand" what the root form is?

I think I'm doing a lousy job explaining this, but look at this: if you enter "jumped" into wiktionary, it will gladly spit out an explanation and link you to the "base" form of the word (jump) which is very useful if you're not quite sure what exactly a given word is and does in a sentence.

I use Jim Breen's Online Japanese Dictionary Service a lot to help me look up words I don't know yet. A lot of the time, I believe it is capable of a little more help than the root of the word, but sometimes not. I use it either by typing in Japanese romaji in "Word Search/Home" or copy pasting kanji into "Translate Words". It doesn't do a very good job of typing in English words and finding a good Japanese equivalent though, so I wouldn't rely on it for that... Also, for "Translate Words" you still need to know grammer because it will only tell you the meanings of individual words in a sentence, not the meaning of the sentence itself! Anyway, I hope it helps!

WWWJDIC: Word Search

If you don't remember the site address, you can also just google "Jim Breen" and it's always the first link :)