OK I'M WORN OUT NOW so not much to say here but I wanted to chronicle this a bit coz I never studied before in my life so its nice to reach a sort of milestone.
I moved on from learning the 1st and 2nd grade Kanji and a few days ago started grammar at last (and moved on to learning accompanying words).
In this video I (just now) try to write out the kanji I've "learnt" so far (and recite their common reading). I hadn't really revised them for a while (had a quick glance before I started) and LOTS of (minor) mistakes and takes me like 5 minutes just to warm up and get the third one (LOL...sad) and took me freakin 1 hour and 42 minutes in the end!!!
It sort of shows just how crappy the human brain is (my brain? ) and that just memorising things doesn't really work, instead you gotta get into reading literature as soon as possible because the alternative is literally 2, then 4, then 10 hours a day of just "revising" shit so you don't forget it :/
Of course no1 is going to click on a 1hr 42 min video of me failing to remember things so here is a photo of my flashcards....
Here is the full video. Yeah it blows but I fancied doing it right now and at least its pretty "genuine" i.e. I hadn't looked at a lot of these words for quite a while other than a quick glance before I started.
So ya I'm super excited to progress into grammar now and learning words that consist of multiple Kanji. Although they are harder coz you end up looking up the individual Kanji, then trying to figure out them and their separate meaning and whether or not its even ever used, just to help you remember the full word, so you end up with a lot more 'work' than you figured. Anyway its fun if you got infinite decaf coffee and put on TV shows nonstop to take breaks and chip away at it.
I'm using http://www.guidetojapanese.org/grammar_guide.pdf (just starting on the adjectives so right at the beginning) and cross-referencing with random places like http://www.punipunijapan.com/japanese-grammar-adjectives/ for different detail etc. I'm glad I found this link coz it does an awesome job of throwing Kanji straight at me, coz I'm at that stage, whereas other grammar guides are romaji/hiragana only. It's really perfect for me so far because of that!!!
Good job Looks like a lot of hard work. Those cards look fun to write out.
I just started learning Hangul less than a week ago. I have very basic knowledge already and have had a few small milestones myself. It's fun to write out.
On October 09 2016 01:43 Th1rdEye wrote: Good job Looks like a lot of hard work. Those cards look fun to write out.
I just started learning Hangul less than a week ago. I have very basic knowledge already and have had a few small milestones myself. It's fun to write out.
Definitely way easier than Japanese though!
TNX LOL. its not hard work if you have nothing better to do than sit around all day watching TV. im really slow ass at stuff and my attention/willpower goes down the drain pretty fast . but they are just symbols, there's no heavy lifting involved like MATHS lol . so i like it
GL with your hangul, i think you should aim for learning like 10 new words a day (if u dont have a job anyway), but learn the words following on from grammar examples. so you learn some grammar rules first and then words to implement in them. coz really , you learn a language by practicing it , not just by memorising the vocab one time
you can probably also get teachers on skype easily , there are teaching websites that main on skype etc, it might be worth trying out a free lesson sooner than later so 6 months down the line you could have had like 24 weekly lessons by then!! i think probably anyone who study a language sucessfully will tell you something like "it didnt even really begin until i started having to listen to and talk the language myself with another person!"
On October 09 2016 01:44 Th1rdEye wrote: Just sayin tho... that video... bunch of Japanese girls.... hmm. Weird.
edit: I watched like 3 seconds of it before i turned it off, sorry
LUL they are amazing i love them to bits. they (some of them) are actually touring the UK with red hot chili peppers
Awesome job, man. Keep it up. I've actually started studying the language myself recently, Kanji was the reason why I fell out of love with the language in high school, but I'm determined to try again. Hopefully when you study the grammar you'll be able to read more stuff, I think that is the best positive reinforcement for your learning.
Have you looked into an app/service called WaniKani? It was highly recommended to me by my peers.
On October 09 2016 08:35 lestye wrote: Awesome job, man. Keep it up. I've actually started studying the language myself recently, Kanji was the reason why I fell out of love with the language in high school, but I'm determined to try again. Hopefully when you study the grammar you'll be able to read more stuff, I think that is the best positive reinforcement for your learning.
Have you looked into an app/service called WaniKani? It was highly recommended to me by my peers.
its really hard to say if i would benefit from it. online flash cards help you learn to read but i use my offline flash cards to let me learn to write the kanji (as you can see from my "long" video now posted). a lot of people will say learning to write kanji is a waste of time but but i feel like (not to say its true) that its a necessary process for learning them..... rather than staring at the screen , you get a lot more involved by looking them up yourself and spending time figuring out how to write them and their nuances . at the end of the day i think it doesn't matter , if you have a lot of time to kill like me then the important thing isn't how you learn them but the amount of practice you put in once you've learnt them
the 1 thing i need to def try is reading a bit of Remembering the Kanji and applying some "crazy" mnemonics (however they suggest to do them there). maybe i retain information for longer and more accurately by FORCING myself to use "crazy" mnemonics rather than casually implementing subtle/incidental mnemonics when i feel like i need them
another thing about sites like WaniKani , you need to be careful that you are giving yourself your own degree of flexibility in learning concepts. like it may (for example) want me to learn ョ as meaning "pigs head" but at the end of the day i just want to learn "ョ" as being "that ョ" :/ IDK, maybe more is better when it comes to mnemonics ...if you learnt ョ = pigshead then you could say that 当 (to strike) = "strike the small pigs head to kill it" and 帰 (to return) = "return the pig's head to the market" ... idk personally i just remember them as "they got an ョ in 'em" :|
kanji are a fucking dick for the first like .... 200 lol , but u start to warm up to them . i did learn the academic order ones which makes absolutely no sense so its understandable to rage a lot learning them. now im onto more interesting words i am liking it more because i'm used to single kanji being annoying and i can enjoy making useful words with them at last. like i finally learned the word for "Japan", "Kanji", "watashi" and "today" after months of learning random words that i might not even use in a sentence for another 6 months . also because i write them and try to use correct stroke order (tnx to people replying in my previous blog), i am having a MUCH easier time of writing them now
A quick suggestion, at some point, there might just be too many kanji to memorize so a better way to retain them is to actually start learning and using them in reading and/or writing.
Learning 한글 is easier cause those are just characters; you still need to learn a lot of words. Learning kanji is not necessarily the same, because kanji are in a way already words themselves or are 'halfway' there. Just an opinion. ^_^
I'm impressed at the effort I saw in the 10 minutes of the video. (couldn't finish all 1+ hour of it haha)
ya absolutely, that's why i'm so happy to move into grammar now and try to be able to read things asap. otherwise i would end up revising for literally 12 hours straight every few days based on that video lul :| (2000/270x1.6)
i'm offended you didn't spend literally 1 hr 42 minutes LOL!! actually i fancy doing it again today just to revise them better , see how much faster i am, but mostly so i can write them more neatly to show off lol :| i was mad when they didn't fit on 1 sheet
edit: funny thing just now i wanted to write that emi is a wind child (in a photo of her) but it turned out 風子 (fuko) was the name of a famous giant-boob gravure idol (aka porn star) and i needed to use 風の子 (kazenoko) instead LOL bullet dodged. you hear that respect and stuff is so big in japan and then you go and alike a little girl to a porn star by mistake .....
SO COOL! I really believe that c3rberUs makes a good point when he/she says that at some point it may seem like there are just too many characters to just simply "memorise" - Watashi wa Nihongo O benkiyo shimashita (I studied Japanese) - in high school and LOVED it! and I remember my JA teacher telling us that from like kindergarden to grade 3 they learn something like 600-800 Kanji then gr 3 -6 another like 800 then like another 600 and another 1200 or so . . . which is really quite alot. My teacher, (lucky me!) was/is acctually Japanese and the daughter of a Japanese diplomat and being Japanese she was able to impart to us certain nuances of Japanese culture,tradition and the essential values which embody the identity of Japanese people and how these these things are reflected in the language. We only learned @ 20 or so Kanji during the 2 years I studied with her but those 20 or so we learned we were trained which direction and in which order each stroke went etc. but on top of that we learned the kanji in each of it's individual parts as an interpretation of this simplified and abstract tiny drawing because each Kanji is not just an idea or concept but also each kanji is an acctual drawing depicting what that idea is embodied by for example the kanji for okaasan (mother/woman) is acctually nothing more than a drawing of a kneeling woman cradling a baby and the kanji for "japanese language" is literally a drawing of 1 person + five senses writting lines and speaking + idk some other stuff but anyways point being learning how things in the physical world are/were percieved by Japanese people and the ways in which they interpreted the things in everyday life and how these interpretations were then expressed by these people so very many centuries ago and manifested into these tiny simplified drawings seemed to me acctually much more useful in the process of learning these characters and retaining them. add to that as c3rberUs suggested the practising or "using" of these characters daily and you may be well on your way to becoming well versed in the art of kanji. One other thing too idk if you are any kind of artist? but another way of practise with Japanese character writting is in the traditional (with paint and brush) after all the whole point of learning to do each stroke in the correct order and in the corrrect direction is after all so that the character will have a certain look based on this correct execution and that can only be truely appreciated when the artist has used a brush. anyhow GL.
On October 09 2016 20:01 FDGAMEDESIGNS wrote: SO COOL! I really believe that c3rberUs makes a good point when he/she says that at some point it may seem like there are just too many characters to just simply "memorise" - Watashi wa Nihongo O benkiyo shimashita (I studied Japanese) - in high school and LOVED it! and I remember my JA teacher telling us that from like kindergarden to grade 3 they learn something like 600-800 Kanji then gr 3 -6 another like 800 then like another 600 and another 1200 or so . . . which is really quite alot.
you never really think about this , but i wonder how many classes in school Japanese have dedicated to just "Japanese". like, in english class we read some book and dick around the whole time and score an A coz we write a short story about aliens in the exam. but japanese kids have Japanese lessons so they can learn to actually write!!! and their homework every day is learning to write! so it makes a lot more sense when you hear that japanese kids have to study a TON and then take a ton of extra/evening/holiday classes. coz they are trying to grind kanji every day their entire school lives :O
My teacher, (lucky me!) was/is acctually Japanese and the daughter of a Japanese diplomat and being Japanese she was able to impart to us certain nuances of Japanese culture,tradition and the essential values which embody the identity of Japanese people and how these these things are reflected in the language. We only learned @ 20 or so Kanji during the 2 years I studied with her but those 20 or so we learned we were trained which direction and in which order each stroke went etc. but on top of that we learned the kanji in each of it's individual parts as an interpretation of this simplified and abstract tiny drawing because each Kanji is not just an idea or concept but also each kanji is an acctual drawing depicting what that idea is embodied by for example the kanji for okaasan (mother/woman) is acctually nothing more than a drawing of a kneeling woman cradling a baby and the kanji for "japanese language" is literally a drawing of 1 person + five senses writting lines and speaking + idk some other stuff but anyways point being learning how things in the physical world are/were percieved by Japanese people and the ways in which they interpreted the things in everyday life and how these interpretations were then expressed by these people so very many centuries ago and manifested into these tiny simplified drawings seemed to me acctually much more useful in the process of learning these characters and retaining them.
ya my kanji book (Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji) has etymology next to each character. i usually read it through once and it usually isn't useful. either coz :
a) i don't really seem to "need" something extra to remember the kanji by - example 年 (year)
b) i already got my own thing to remember it with which differs from the etymology or radicals or other suggestions - example 会 (meeting) which is said to resemble cooking pots and could be described with "2 people", "with a pot lid", "private/personal" but to me just looks straight-up like a clubhouse lul. well there are better examples than this one
c) because its description is not reasonable, or has too great a scope, e.g. a kanji that uses characters that used to mean something completely different to mean their old meaning - example (apparently) both 里 (village) and 力 (strength) come from an old word family that was was given the association of "lines" (as in, straight lines, 線), so they are sometimes seen in kanji to use this hidden meaning instead of their current meaning, e.g. 裏 (lining of a garment)
d) and lastly kanji breakdowns might not be useful because the components are other kanji which you might not want to learn for ages yet - example 週 (week) which is #157 in acedemic order uses the kanji 周 (circumference) which is #532 . you gotta choose then how much time you are gonna spend looking up an EXPONENTIALLY increasing number of kanji that may or may not be useful to you
having said that, and just now spending time going thru a bunch of etymologies in kanji i learnt already, i must say that i seem to see a lot more merit in them than i used to. often in the past i would read one and be like OH WELL THANKS FOR NOTHING lol but i think you might be able to get a lot more out of them with experience
add to that as c3rberUs suggested the practising or "using" of these characters daily and you may be well on your way to becoming well versed in the art of kanji. One other thing too idk if you are any kind of artist? but another way of practise with Japanese character writting is in the traditional (with paint and brush) after all the whole point of learning to do each stroke in the correct order and in the corrrect direction is after all so that the character will have a certain look based on this correct execution and that can only be truely appreciated when the artist has used a brush. anyhow GL.
mm i got this black normal pen coz i wanted to practice just normal handwriting. but its kinda interesting trying to figure out how to write them with it and look nice. the funny thing about them is sometimes you do one JUST RIGHT and it looks beautiful and you want to make a screenshot . but then you can't do it again nomatter what lol.
it is REALLY tricky sometimes even staring for 5 minutes at a simple character just to copy what you're seeing. like i still can't draw 女 for the life of me.
sometimes i make my own design , like the left portion of 近 (which is used a lot) i draw it in my own way that ends up looking like the unicode version. of course if i had some sample japanese handwriting things would be different, i googled a few times before and nothing useful comes up. i should go ahead and post on a forum for this
today i went and re-done my long video , i didnt look at them beforehand and so struggled with the newer ones coz i haven't written them much yet, どうぞ
I really enjoyed the video, although I wish the English text was bigger or the camera was closer so it was easier to read the meaning you are trying to write out in kanji.
You have an interesting approach to learning Japanese but I think it is fine. I would be wary about learning the kanji in the same order of Japanese school curriculum. That pedagogy is designed for children who already know how to speak Japanese and learn to attach kanji to words they already know. So as you mention, they learn the kanji for "week" much earlier than "circumference", because Japanese kids don't know what a circumference is until middle school. It's also worth noting that Japanese don't learn the kanji by radicals or think of them as separate radicals put together, they just learn it through rote memorization. Your attitude about that depends on how you feel about the value of memory as a trainable mental ability, and from what I've seen, Japanese place much higher value on it than Americans.
To make some judgment, your stroke order is a bit off but your writing is generally quite clean. Stroke order becomes more important if you want to draw the characters really quickly like the natives. It's most glaring when you draw the character for 出 or for right angles in general. Your characters also look too much like computer characters and are missing the hooks and curves that come from a writing style derived from brushes. For instance, the left character in river should be curved.
You seem to already know this from your approach, but written Japanese is very different from spoken Japanese. If you care, that comes from Japan's modernization necessitating a universal way of writing for a country with lots of little dialects and regional quirks, and this did not fit with the conception of a modern nation-state as explained to the Japanese by the British and Americans. There were big conflicts whether to use high Japanese (as used by samurai with honorifics and lengthy hierarchy) or the vernacular (with fewer honorifics and shorter verbs), but literary writers started publishing books and articles in the vernacular and set the standard. Imposing this standard on everyone is also the genesis of the Japanese becoming insistent that they are a singular homogeneous ethnicity, even though it ignores and defies Japan's long history of conflict between clans and regions. To a large extent, Germany did the same thing with their written language and national identity. Getting more into the weeds, the Japanese Ministry of Education sets the standards for kanji and grammar and thus guides changes to the Japanese language. They make big changes about once every 20 years, with the last big change in 2010. The last big changes included moving about 200 kanji around and scrapping obscure readings. They also set rules that children are not allowed to have certain "bad" kanji in their names, so having a child with the kanji for cancer or hemorrhoids in their name can not be registered.
Anyways, good luck and keep up the posts with your progress!
おおはああああよおお i will try zoom more next time, clearly i can't draw larger coz every time i do they go small again lul.
yeah i have dumped school order now. i milestoned to learn 2nd grade and now will just learn whatever pops up in grammar, which is a bunch of common nouns and adjectives and verbs and phrases, and stuff i see when trying to read twitter posts. like Bucho posted a video of the girls preparing this elaborate restaurant do-it-yourself dinner so i wanted to reply with 大工ですか (carpentry?)
ya its hard to get it right without seeing actual handwriting (i use jisho but still end up with my own variation). stuff like か or 女 (or anything) can be drawn like 1000 slightly different ways (if you have an unsteady hand like me lol) so unless i look up a handwritten version i'll end up just doing whatever. and lots of curves will be jagged lines i noticed, you're right (especially noticeable in my hiragana/katakana iirc). as for stroke order, i try to get it right and look up another one that i forgot to look up in the past every so often. i got a lot wrong writing them down in the video coz i was spending the time to remember them and then writing them too quickly without care. i definitely need to look up 出 again tho (yeah i would never guess to start with the middle line...). for some kanji, but not many, i think i have my own stroke order which i prefer to the official one
thankyou for your comments!!!! i am sick for some reason at the moment .... i was fainting and dizzy a lot last night and now trying to get a blood test .... i think it is carbon monoxide poisoning or lung disease or something from stupid behaviour a week ago. so i am feeling pretty dizzy and fuzzy head :| but because of all your comments i will definitely try my best today to study thanks to all your support ^______________^ edit: nice i can go tomorrow for blood test of many different things
I did read a weird tip a while back that if you want to get good at reading normal Japanese, you should actually try reading manga for girls, like school drama and such.
The problem with boy's manga (i.e. Shounen Jump, which in Japanese is literally for boys) is that most of the stories are too fanciful and the actual word usage is too obscure. It is the equivalent to someone learning English by reading sci-fi and fantasy stories, which certainly might be interesting but is not a good reflection at all of how native English speakers speak or interact with each other. The characters in boys' stories also tend to address each other in very gruff ways that would be considered somewhere between offensive and abusive in normal speech (as in, we're way past disrespect). In some manga like Dragonball, it's a joke that Goku doesn't know how to address people politely and it's very funny to Japanese.
Girls' manga tends to focus around human drama in situations that are more familiar, like office environments or school, and thus the language is more reflective of how people really act towards each other, albeit with some flair and effect. But there's generally no fighting and no giant robots and no girls with absurd breasts, so you might not find it interesting.
I haven't tried it myself so I can't vouch one way or the other for this, but it might be worth checking out.
EPT
) and that just memorising things doesn't really work, instead you gotta get into reading literature as soon as possible because the alternative is literally 2, then 4, then 10 hours a day of just "revising" shit so you don't forget it :/ ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/W2buUlZ.jpg)
Looks like a lot of hard work. Those cards look fun to write out.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pKhZHCf.jpg)
