well we had a japanese course as elective in last term at my college
i was fine as long as hirangana was being taught but even my teacher was messing up kanji as it depends a lot on context and i could tell because i watch loooooooooooooot of anime that she was erring many times

what are ur views??

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best shonen manga couples :

shinichi X ran
natsu X erza
ippo X kumi
naruto X gaara

i think when you're learning kanji it can be really annoying but once you know it, it makes reading easier because you can separate words better and understand meaning just by the kanji (like ame ame candy rain kinda thing) (although i don't think they'd be in the same place anyway... but you get the point hopefully )

I've tried to learn japanese, but I'm at a standstill, because I can't learn their writing. I'm sure, it wouldn't be so difficult if I had someone to teach me, but with self study only, I can't get past even the very basics.

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"Thus is our treaty written, thus is agreement made
Thought is the arrow of time, memory never fades
What was asked is given, the price is paid"

I havent tried to learn japanese, but i have seen in some manga where the characters have trouble remembering kanji, so i guess it isnt just non japanese people having trouble with kanji i think that even native japanese can have trouble with some kanji

Kanji scare me. (~_~)

I've been studying Japanese on my own for ~6 years now (off & on, as I have time/energy/motivation) and I've learned a few kanji, but so many are so complicated and just different than my brain is used to processing that I have a lot of trouble even *trying* to learn them.

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

Wait, how did watching anime help you know your teacher was making mistakes with kanji? o_O What? I'm confused...

But yeah, kanji makes reading a lot easier later on. Once you have to read entire paragraphs then you want kanji in it otherwise everything is a big mush of hiragana. I agree its really annoying in the beginning though. It gets a little better later once you start remembering kanji parts, but yeah, its going to be an ongoing struggle. XD

I'm some what literate in Chinese so I can understand some kanji, but I wouldn't know how to say it in Japanese...
For hiragana, it's the opposite; I can say it, but I have not a clue of its meaning.

My 6 year old cousin could probably understand more kanji than me, she practically read the instructions to some toy for me.

yeah about that i watched many anime with gags and cultural references like zetsubou sensei

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best shonen manga couples :

shinichi X ran
natsu X erza
ippo X kumi
naruto X gaara

Learning kanji is just a matter of memorizing them. I just learned the most commonly used ones that are normally taught in schools. Others, I just look up when I need to. Even Japanese people don't have all of them memorized. It's no different than an English speaker having to look up an English word in a dictionary.

It's easy peasy!

Just kidding, I cheated. I'm fortunate to be fluent in Chinese so the literary aspect of Japanese wasn't very difficult for me at all during the first several years. That is, the fundamentals of the language were easy to grasp, but learning new material at my level now is, IMHO, much more difficult for me than it was six or seven years ago.

I can imagine that the characters must be very difficult for those coming from a language background completely unrelated to the East Asian languages, however. It probably just seems like rote memorization, that gets harder and harder the more you learn.

The problem with Japanese when it is taught as a second/foreign language is that there is very little time available to focus on the fundamentals of the language, relative to the effort that is spent getting the student to a point in which he/she can use basic Japanese in daily conversation. From a logistical standpoint it seems only practical, but that makes the classes in effect a crash course.

That means you don't learn things about kanji like radicals and character types (semantic-phonetic, semantic-semantic, ideographic, etc) that actually make it easier to understand conceptually. It's not as bad in Japanese, where you usually have a phonetic system (kana) to fall back on, but in Chinese you NEED to know these basics of character construction because they serve as memory aids and a way for you to "spell" out new characters for people that have never seen them before.

And in response to:

Honestly, memorization will only get you so far. Do you really think Chinese people have to memorize each and every new character or term?

Maybe enough for the most basic 2000 minimum characters or so you need to know in Japanese (that bare minimum is 6000 in Chinese, by the way. And in both cases most people know many more), but the more you learn on memorization alone, the more you will find that you lack a foundation upon which you can quickly conceptualize new characters in far more effective ways than rote memorization.

Last edited by mewarmo990 at 11:00 pm, Nov 2 2010

I learned Chinese through memorization. What's wrong with that? >_>
It's basically the foundation of asian languages, memorizing that is.
As opposed to heavy emphasis on originality in western countries.

Last edited by lambchopsil at 12:31 am, Nov 3 2010

Everyone starts through memorization. But you also pick up better ways to understand and learn more of the language as you go. It's the basics of linguistics - you learn language and grammar conventions and then generalize them as you go, learning from your mistakes.

My point is that people learning Japanese in the context of a foreign language course have much less opportunity to do this with kanji.

I don't know what you mean with European languages and originality. It's not like you just make up stuff as you go when learning English or French or German, other than applying things you already know to new contexts, which is common to all languages and human behavior.

I spent about a week on hiragana and katakana. After trying for 1 month at learning individual kanji and failing completely, I skipped individual Kanji study and went straight to vocabulary (with kanji). Been rote-memorizing using anki for about 1 month and learned about 1200 vocabulary so far (can probably recognize about 800 or so vocab when I'm reading manga). This way I could learn the most commonly used onyomi and kunyomi readings of each individual kanji before I start on individual Kanji study again. Personally I honestly think rote memorization is the most useful because with rote memorization you recognize a kanji instantly instead of deciphering it (if I had to decipher a kanji that would mean my memorization of said kanji is insufficient anyway, not to mention deciphering is too slow imo). As such I prefer the harder way of instant recognition over slowly piecing a kanji together.

By the way, its purely self-study (no courses/classes), with about 2 hours per day.

For years, I never had a problem with it, and I was a self-study person. Taking a class does help immensely because it allows you to put into practice what you've learned yourself. I don't have a lot of issues with Kanji, except when they're almost exactly the same, haha.

Rote memorization is one of the worst ways to learn anything.

I do see your point but I think you misunderstood what I said. All that stuff about learning the components of kanji is mostly what you pick up along the way as you learn. Just like every time you see an English word, you don't waste time delving into its Greek or Latin roots in order to divine its meaning. Obviously you have the word memorized and can recognize it on sight, but such things are still good to know.

Here are some examples...

If you don't remember how to write a character:
people can orally "spell" it out for you. "Oh, you don't remember how to write 明? Well, the left side is 日 and the right side is 月"

I'm probably oversimplifying, but in English, it would be something like:
Let's say you know the word "backpack" but have no idea that "back" and "pack" are actually separate words with meanings. Just visually memorizing the word "backpack" is going to be less effective and slower than if you had understood that it is a compound word.

The very first time you see the word "unconventional", instead of trying to memorize that it means "not conforming to accepted rules or standards", you might make the connection that "un" + "conventional" could mean "not conventional."

Or, if you'll indulge me, a basic example of semantic-phonetic characters:

廳 can mean room or parlor (as in "dining room") in Chinese. It is pronounced ting. The largest, most obvious component of the character is 聽, which by itself is pronounced similarly but means "to listen." The 广 portion of the character represents a character that originally meant "hut", is what gives it that building-related connotation. Now, the second character obviously has no relation to the meaning of the first character, but influences its pronunciation. The third character influences the meaning.

Since pronunciation and meaning can be markedly different in Japanese - all the more so because of the usage of both kunyomi and onyomi - it's not much of an issue like I said before. However, in the context of learning new characters, such things are quite useful to know.



Last edited by mewarmo990 at 11:14 pm, Nov 3 2010