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Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by timr on Thursday May 14, 2020 @05:47PM (#23185962)
"In Chinese, words are really compound words. For example, 熊猫 means panda. But 熊 means bear and 猫 means cat. This makes these unbounded morphemes, which is different than what we do in the Indo-European languages. And Chinese is composed of radicals that make things harder."

I'm intermediate in Japanese (conversational + able to read at an N2 level, albeit slowly), and my first response to anyone who says they "learned X kanji" is "how many words do you know?"

There's probably some value to learning the meaning of individual kanji in isolation, but it's very limited (especially in Japanese). Most words have only tenuous relation to the meanings of their individual kanji, and "learning kanji" is kind of a crutch for beginners to pretend that they're making rapid progress.

I suppose from that perspective, "learning X kanji in Y days" is a useful meme, because it pushes people to quickly move on from the approach. But that said, for most learners, it's much better to simply start learning words.

Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by imtringued on Friday May 15, 2020 @04:44AM (#23190148)
You have to learn kanji the same way you have to learn the alphabet. If you don't knoe the symbol you're going to have an extrenely hard time when you are learning writte. Word because suddenly you need to learn 3 kanji at once to understand a single word. Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't a big deal. At roughly 15 Kanji per day you can finish the first 2000 in 5 months but your vocabulary deck meanwhile is far away from being finished. I don't know why you are saying "move on" because as I said, it is one more thing you have in your toolbox. Your toolbox should consist of multiple anki decks(one of which could be a hiragana, katakana and a kanji deck, a listen only vocab deck, a reading only vocab deck for example), listening exercises, speaking exercises, grammar exercises and so on.
Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by timr on Friday May 15, 2020 @12:41PM (#23194197)
"You have to learn kanji the same way you have to learn the alphabet."

The RTK/RTH method is nothing like learning an alphabet: at no point in my education did we sit down for weeks and "learn the meaning" of A, B, C...etc. For phonetic alphabets like hiragana and katakana and roman and hangul, it's absolutely worthwhile to memorize the shapes of the characters, because there's a small set of them, and once you know them, you can convert written words to sounds. With RTK, that's not true at all.

An adult of average intelligence can learn to read kana in a week. That's time well-spent. Spending months memorizing the "meanings" of kanji is a whole other process, of dubious value.

"Learning kanji and vocabulary at the same time isn't a big deal."

This is true, and is the way that Japanese children learn the language: you learn a character, along with some words that contain the character. To the extent that individual kanji have meanings, you learn them in context.

"I don't know why you are saying "move on" because as I said, it is one more thing you have in your toolbox."

Most people who do RTK don't do it this way -- they do things like the OP, and try to "memorize X kanji in Y days". I think that's largely a waste of time.

Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by thiagocesar on Thursday May 14, 2020 @07:04PM (#23186680)
I disagree. It was impossible for me to just learn words, because kanji made no sense to me.

After RTK, I created ways to mentally breakdown and identify the characters. Then, suddenly, I was able to learn words much faster too - instead of struggling with “well this one has this curve here and then it points there and it means that”, reading became automatic, and I could focus on the word itself.

Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by godelski on Thursday May 14, 2020 @07:46PM (#23187153)
This has been my experience too. Like I said before, just learning characters doesn't let you read in of itself because there are compound words. But you have to think of characters as building blocks. Then you repeat the process with words and it is easier to form mnemonics because you already have the base structure. The idea is to start from the ground up and build a strong base before you move to building the house. This is opposed to the classical Western style that is building random walls first. The thing is that the latter will get you conversational faster, but the former leads to a better understanding but takes more time.