Re:Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
by hudibras on Saturday November 11, 2017 @10:53PM
(#15679567)
Probably goes without saying that there are as many ways to learn Japanese as there are students. The only really hard-and-fast rule is that whatever you're doing, you need to do a lot more of it than you think.
That said, I've found that the kanji separately really helped my Japanese studying. If nothing else, it's kept me from falling too far behind the Chinese and Taiwanese students in class...
The book I used for the kanji is The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course by Andrew Scott Conning. Can't recommend it enough.
https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/d...
Re:Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
by timr on Saturday November 11, 2017 @11:40PM
(#15679679)
There's definitely a lot of wanking about learning methods, but if you're taking an immersion class, you have to consider the amount of word study you're already doing. I'm just responding to the self-learner folks who want to start by "learning kanji", as if that's some kind of preliminary step to learning the language. I've met a bunch of those people, and it rarely works well for them.
(Though, it should be said that the reason the Chinese kids are better isn't that they "know kanji", but that many of the words are written the same way in Japanese. Substitute some of the kanji with hiragana, and they'll lose the bubble quickly.)
Re:Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
by dastbe on Sunday November 12, 2017 @11:27AM
(#15681340)
And even if they don’t know the words, they have internalized the learning methods to quickly ingest characters. Chinese classes go from learning barely 200-500 characters in a semester at the introductory level to that much in a week by your third or so year.
Re:Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
by timr on Sunday November 12, 2017 @11:52AM
(#15681445)
Wellll...I don't know Chinese and have never studied in China, so I can't speculate in that domain. But I wouldn't be so quick to infer specific techniques from their memorization speed -- they're fluent in a very similar written language, and it's much faster to learn things (in any language) when you're fluent. They also grew up in a...well, let's call it a memorization-intensive learning environment.
The only things I can say with confidence are:
* focus on words
* learning words becomes faster in *any* language as you gain proficiency
* learning radicals helps you recognize kanji, and is a good thing to do
Don't worry about "learning kanji": learn words. A few kanji are used in isolation as words, but most kanji have meanings that you can only infer from context (as part of words). Furthermore, even if you "know the meanings" of kanji, you'll find you just have to memorize words anyway, because you usually can't combine the meanings of the kanji to come up with the meaning of a word. Not easily, anyway.
Too many westerners try to learn Japanese by memorizing 2,000 kanji, because that's easier than memorizing 30,000 words. It doesn't work. The way you "learn kanji" in immersion language schools is that you get word lists, and you're quizzed on how to read (i.e. write the readings) and write (i.e. write the kanji) those words. You quickly start to see patterns.
Memorizing lots of words is painful, but then, language learning is painful. This method comes with the huge advantage that the sooner you start learning words, the sooner you'll get positive reinforcement from the real world. You won't get that by memorizing kanji.