Longtime readers might remember that I've been lost in the kanji forest for years now. I plod along, slowly and unsurely, not in any hope of finally learning Japanese, but because I enjoy the mental challenge. Some people do the crossword puzzle. I study kanji.
In Essential Kanji P. G. O'Neill says that two years "is perfectly reasonable for an average, conscientious university student to come to recognize (as distinct from write) two thousand characters and to learn their main readings, when studying them as part of a full-time Japanese course."
Ah, the wonder of young minds! My feeble old mind, however, has barely grasped the first 1000 in twice as many years. One obstacle is the time I can devote to study each day. I still find that my system for making my own cards is my best learning tool--and that's time-intensive. Despite all the books I have on kanji, it is my own associations that best help me remember. Another strategy I find useful is to always mark the kanji and words I look up in my dictionary. That way, if I forget them and look them up again, it reminds me that I've come across this word before. The more connections I make, the more it strengthens my memory.
Although I use the kanji cards for flashcard review, I agree with J.W. Heisig that the best review is from word to kanji. Make a list of words and then try to write the kanji. It exercises a completely different part of your memory than looking at a kanji and trying to remember its meaning or reading.
I don't spend a lot of time anymore writing a kanji a 100 times to memorize it. Most complicated kanji can be broken down to several components, and once you learn how to write the components, writing is easy. It's sort of like memorizing phone numbers. You don't try to memorize a 10-digit number. You break it down to three smaller components. Also I'm most interested in recognizing kanji quickly so that I can read more fluently, or use the word processor. Just as in English sight-reading (recognizing the whole) is a different skill than sounding a word out (recognizing the parts).
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
February 28, 2005
Comments
Thank you very much for leaving the comment about Totoro. Now I hope sometime to see it again with its original sound. Your entry on Kanji is interesting to me also; I bought a pack of flash cards from Europa Books of lamented memory, and sometime I hope to get to them. I can transliterate the Greek and the Cyrillic alphabets and recognize the difference between Koren, Japanese, and various Chinese forms, but no more than that. I *hate* not knowing what things mean! Life should be long enough to learn everything there is to know! p.s. we had some Jet Fire among our surprise bulb mix this year, identified thanks to you.
Comment by: Rantor. Posted March 24, 2005 06:36 PM.
i want
Comment by: giang. Posted January 11, 2007 04:15 PM.
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I break a 1000!