Learning kanji from scratch (method)

[sup3t33180]

こんにちわ！

I have been studying hard in the past three days and i have managed to learn hiragana. So now i will chew my way through the katakana and after that i will have to get to the kanji part.

My question is, how do i practice kanji in a structured way? From what i understand all the kanji characters have several meanings and so i can't use my usual "quiz" method to mash it into memory. Should i watch Hiroko-san's kanji videos and just start struggling through sentences?

//Peter

[kraave5297]

Thats a question I'm looking forward for an answer as well. I almost mastered hiragana and I'm starting with katakana now.
But what is the best way to learn kanji?

[mmmason8967]

I have been studying hard in the past three days and i have managed to learn hiragana. So now i will chew my way through the katakana and after that i will have to get to the kanji part.

My question is, how do i practice kanji in a structured way?

I don't think there's a generally-agreed satisfactory answer to that question. You can learn the kana even if your Japanese vocabulary is tiny, but I don't think that applies when it comes to the kanji. When Japanese children start to learn kanji, they're already good at speaking the language and they have a vocabulary that is a lot larger than a beginning student is going to have. So I don't think that us beginners can get very far trying to learn kanji in the same way we learn, say, hiragana.

I'm only a beginner so my experience is quite limited. For me, at any rate, I think the best method is try and learn the key kanji as you go along, not in isolation but as part of your vocabulary. I'm finding the "Kanji Notes" and the "Lesson Notes" that accompany the JapanesePod101 tutorials to be very helpful. Typically I try to read the Kanji version of the dialogue before listening to the audio, and when I run into a kanji I don't know, I then check the kana section to get the pronunciation--and sometimes it's word I already know. I try to keep the romaji section off the screen because it's way too much of a give-away.

Also, a book like "Essential Kanji" by P G O'Neil is helpful, especially for the stroke order that the kanji is supposed to be written in.

[lolita]

Konbanwa

I'm thankful that this question is asked because I'm in the same position too... it's quite frustrating. At the moment I am going through the absolute beginners audio lessons and brushing up on my kana (after 6 years, this time round I will not rush learning Japanese and become more patient).

I think mmmason8967 gave a great explanation (arigatou gozaimasu), learning kanji that appears within your lesson notes may be the best way for a beginner because it is key to build on your speaking skills, vocabulary and know your kana like second nature before diving into 1000 different kanji.
As and when I find a new kanji in the lesson notes, I look it up using romaji, find out what the kanji means (roughly), then learn the stroke pattern and number and write it over and over and over again until I can remember it just like what I do with kana.

I found this website a few minutes ago and it looks quite helpful in regards to this subject, they also have 200 basic kanji lessons for free plus more http://www.coscom.co.jp/learnjapanese.html
I wish there were more kanji based lessons and tips on Japanesepod101 though...

If anyone else who is reading this post and can help us with any more advice on how to approch kanji, then please do so, so that we can all become better in Japanese.

[ooyahyooha8695]

Some useful sites about kanji and Japanese

forum.koohii.com/
kanjidamage.com/
nihongo-e-na.com/eng/site/tag/Kanji/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

[mwbeale6642]

I find www.skritter.com really useful for studying kanji. I'm pretty sure that someone has put some of the jpod101 vocab and kanji into their system. However I use the basic kanji books with skritter (rather than jpod101 and skritter).

Although skritter's really useful, I think it's also useful to write the kanji out onto paper.

マーティン

[lolita]

Thanks! You've all been very helpful.
Kanji books and skitter sounds like a good duo for learning.

Here's another website:
http://nihongoichiban.com/

[Javizy]

mmmason8967 is right that combining vocabulary and kanji simplifies things. If you try to learn readings in particular in isolation, you're probably going to struggle and ultimately waste a lot of time. Learning how to read 行く・行う・行きずり・行政・実行・行脚 makes more sense than learning the readings い・おこな・ゆ・ぎょう・こう・あん in isolation and then attempting to "apply" them to words. You can never be sure how a word is read without learning the word itself, so why not make that the starting point? It's not even necessary to learn the kanji themselves in some cases in order to read. I didn't bother learning 痙攣, 蹂躙, 癇癪, 顰蹙 etc. When am I going to need to write them?

In most cases, however, it's helpful to be able to recognise/write the character in advance. Then you can focus on learning vocabulary and how to read and not be simultaneously worrying about radicals and stroke order. This is the essence of Heisig's 'Remembering the Kanji' approach. Learning how to write/recognise the characters first also overcomes the newbie problem of non-existent vocabulary. Kanji koohii is a good place to find out more about this approach.

If you don't like the idea of RTK, I still strongly advise a systematic approach. Attempting to learn kanji as you meet them is a recipe for disaster. What if you meet 憩 before 舌, 自 and 心? Even 舌 can be broken down to 千 and 口. You rob yourself of the opportunity to simply assemble "building blocks" that you already know. Instead you have to force a high number of strokes to memory with little foundation. People succeed with different methods, so I guess the most important thing is finding one you can commit to, since its consistency that ultimately leads to mastery.

[finixy73371]

I personally really liked Heisig's remembering the kanji. I'm doing it right now at a steady pace of 32 a day I currently know how to write and recognize 672 kanji (+ some more that I knew before starting the book). I really like the goal setting, I know how much I do a day, I know how much work I'll have, I know when I'll finish. And 32 a day is ~1.5 hours of work a day, leaves me plenty of time to learn to speak on this site.

[choneb9359]

If you don't like the idea of RTK, I still strongly advise a systematic approach. Attempting to learn kanji as you meet them is a recipe for disaster. What if you meet 憩 before 舌, 自 and 心? Even 舌 can be broken down to 千 and 口. You rob yourself of the opportunity to simply assemble "building blocks" that you already know. Instead you have to force a high number of strokes to memory with little foundation. People succeed with different methods, so I guess the most important thing is finding one you can commit to, since its consistency that ultimately leads to mastery.

Thank you for sharing this info. Having been using the"learn it as I meet it" approach, I find that it consumes quite a bit of time as well. I just use brute force to remember the stuff (write it out a lot of times until I remember).

Thanks for the knowledge. I'll definitely give the RTK a go!

[confusionary9335]

One question I have for anyone who has finished RTK is, what did you do after? Because if I understand the method correctly RTK doesn't teach any readings or words at all. You can only identify the characters and have a general sense of their meaning from the keywords. So how did you take the next step, and did you think that RTK was ultimately helpful or could you have done just as well without it?

ありがとうございます！

[choneb9359]

One question I have for anyone who has finished RTK is, what did you do after? Because if I understand the method correctly RTK doesn't teach any readings or words at all. You can only identify the characters and have a general sense of their meaning from the keywords. So how did you take the next step, and did you think that RTK was ultimately helpful or could you have done just as well without it?

ありがとうございます！

Hi I haven't yet finished the RTK, but I can offer you some insight on how I find it. Before RTK I have had some experience learning Kanji (as I'd hinted in the post above) After having used both learn-it-as-you-go mehod and RTK(spent 2 days on it so far) I found the kanjis I learned to be more memorable. Before RTK I was relying solely on my photgraphic memory to remember the characters associated with different worlds. The story really helped to put the characters into context.

As for what to do after RTK, what I planned to do (and what I have seen many talked about in their posts in other japanese learning forums) is to learn the vocabularies and grammars in Japanese. I find this approach to be logical, because if you think about it, before we learned English, we had to learn the alphbets and their sounds. We then put them into words, which have meanings. These words are then put together to form sentences, with the grammar being the structures that dictates the sequence of the words. In the case of Japanese, there just happens to be (many) more characters and pronunciations. RTK gives you the alphabets, the rest is up to you to learn the pronunciations and how they fit in to the structure. How you go about achieving this is up to you. Look at grammar rules or memorise sentences. Different people on the net seem to have different approaches on this one.

I hope that was of some value to you.

[choneb9359]

Oh, I forgot to add

In the two days spent looking at RTK I have "learned" about 150 kanjis, not including the other 90 or so I learned with the learn-as-you-go method. I put learned in " " because it still require a lot of revision before I commit it to my long term memory.

[mmmason8967]

In the two days spent looking at RTK I have "learned" about 150 kanjis, not including the other 90 or so I learned with the learn-as-you-go method. I put learned in " " because it still require a lot of revision before I commit it to my long term memory.

How's it going, now that you're a week further in?

I've never found the idea of RTK very appealing, mainly, I suppose, because the impression I had about it is that it doesn't teach the characters in context. But a lot of people seem to like it, and I'm finding the learn-as-you-go method to be difficult and a bit hit-and-miss, so I'm very interested in how effective you're finding it.

マイケル

[choneb9359]

How's it going, now that you're a week further in?

I've never found the idea of RTK very appealing, mainly, I suppose, because the impression I had about it is that it doesn't teach the characters in context. But a lot of people seem to like it, and I'm finding the learn-as-you-go method to be difficult and a bit hit-and-miss, so I'm very interested in how effective you're finding it.

マイケル

Hi マイケル さん

I find it quite ok actually. Since I posted that post, I turned down the learning rate to about 20 characters a day. Most days I do 20. I missed a day, and some days, like today, I did 40 characters. I have 266 letters in my anki list now. I'd say I can totally recall about 200 of them though, since many oftem have only been resently added to the deck. I had to slow down the rate as well since my final assignment submissions and exams are coming up (i've only got two weeks of uni left, then it is exam period).

With this current rate of progress, I spend, in total, about 1 hr per day reading the RTK book and doing anki flashcards.

Having said all that, I still also do the lessons from Jpod and still using the learn-as-you-go method for the lesson, but I have to admit that I spend more of my japanese-learning time on learning RTK.

So far I find this approach quite okay. It is much easier to learn new vocabulary (that contains kanji) if you already know the characters. For instance, the other night I was reading Tae Kim's grammar guide. I couldn't remember what the word was, but there was a kanji and there was a kana pronunciation on the side. Since it was a kanji I had seen before, in RTK, I was like "ahhh, so that's where this kanji goes".

To me it feels like the kanji is bridging the gap between the vocabulary you know in kana form and its usage in real printed meadia. Plus, I hypothesise that once you've learned the kanjis and they rooted down into your brain, it can act like a hook which can allow you to more easily "hang" new words to, thus making it easier to be remembered.

Almost forgot, another positive thing I found from RTK was that the order in which the characters were presented, builds upon each other. They go through the radicals and primitives. This can be a really big help when if you are also doing a learn-as-you-go method. The radicals, if you know their meaning, makes learning new kanji easier.

Let me know if there was anything in my explanation that wasn't clear, its 11:30pm here in Australia and I my brain is a bit tired from (not) working all day.

Ps. I don't think it would take me very long to finish the whole list ~2000characters. If I am totally free: that is, I don't have any daily obligations (uni holidays, which will be permanent when I complete my degree at the end of the year ), I think I am capable of doing more than 50 characters a day (just need to follow it up with some serious repetitive reviews.

Let me know if there's anything I can do