In my first post about learning Japanese, I described some of the problems I encountered as a new student of Japanese, one of the main problems being kanji.
The relative difficulty of the grammar, pronunciation, politeness, and vocabulary of Japanese compared to other languages is often debated, but ultimately these are among the common elements shared by most all languages, and no matter what language you learn, you have to deal with them. Kanji, on the other hand, requires a massive amount of work in addition to the effort you would usually put into learning a language.
Not learning kanji leaves you at a huge disadvantage when it comes to aquiring new Japanese. If you go to the store and you see 牛乳 written on a milk carton or 砂糖 written on a bag of sugar, you have no way to learn the new words. You either have to hear the words or encounter them in hiragana: ぎゅうにゅう…さとう. Learning kanji requires a lot of work to become competent in what is normally a very basic step in most other languages — being able to read and write.
After about a year and a half, I hadn’t made a lot of progress. I would estimate I knew around 300-400 kanji to varying degrees of mastery, depending on whether I could read, write and/or recognize the characters.
In early spring 2007, I started studying using the book Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig (There is a free sample of RTK online that you can check out). This book breaks with many of the traditional methods for learning kanji. The typical way to study kanji — the way I had been studying up to that point — involves learning kanji in roughly the same order that Japanese children are taught. Typically, one learns kanji based on how useful they would be to know. Learning in order of usefulness might seem like common sense, but Heisig takes a different approach that I found to be much more effective. In the book, kanji are arranged not by their usefulness, but by how efficiently they can be learned. As a result, the ordering of the kanji in RTK can seem a little odd. For example, “gall bladder” 胆 is taught very early, while more useful characters like “go” 行 or “horse” 馬 are not taught until much later.
However, this makes sense because 一 ・ 月・日 are taught very early in the book. Once those are known, it is very easy to put them together to get 胆. In my first post, I mentioned my difficulty with 歳, but I had a much easier time learning it in RTK. Once I had learned the pieces making up the character, 一・小・戊 ・止, the kanji was no longer a meaningless squiggle of lines to cram into my head via repitition, but something I could actually remember.
When your doing RTK, it is important to practice writing the kanji and to test yourself to see how well you are retaining them. RTK can’t just be read; it has to be studied with a pen in hand. For reviewing I recommend either the excellent site Reviewing the Kanji or the spaced repitition program Anki.
Another key feature of RTK is learning how to write the 2000 daily use kanji before attempting to learn vocabulary and readings. This turns off a lot of people new to RTK, but I found the approach to be very helpful. Instead of getting bogged down worrying about the many readings of the characters, I could keep moving forward learning how to write new kanji.
Once I learned how to write all 2000 of the daily use kanji, acquiring new vocabulary became much simpler. Before RTK, kanji was an obstacle to learning new vocabulary since new words often contained unfamiliar kanji. It was like studying English words before learning the alphabet, hoping to pick it as you go along. ”cat”….”c – a – t”… three letters down, 23 to go! After learning “cat”, you could easily learn “act”, but when you see “car” or “cab”, you would have to shift gears from learning vocabulary to learning the letters “r” and “b”. In English, this problem would work itself out fairly quickly since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet; however, there are thousands of kanji.
For anyone starting to study Japanese this is what I would recommend:
- Learn hiragana and katakana
- Learn some basic grammar and vocab to get a feel for the language.
- Do Remembering the Kanji. While doing RTK, it should be your main focus, but it’s ok to multitask a little — continue learning some grammar or listen to Pimsleur Japanese to work on speaking and listening.
- Go crazy learning vocab and grammar.
- ???
- Profit!
I’ll write more about points 4, 5, and 6 in a later post dicussing my post-RTK studies.
sneaky
Did you know that Hesig also invented a method to learn each of the Kana syllabaries in 3 hours each!!!?
I didn’t belive it until I gave it to some friends, who knew nothing of Japanese, and they actually did it.
Kanji is certainly a major key, like I said before it needs to be stressed more in colleges back at home. The problem there is they start off teaching basic, necessary kanji, but then in my advanced classes it moved to teaching kanji with vocabulary, so that while you learned new kanji and the most important vocabulary that went with it, you didn’t learn it all. For example we might learn 一生懸命, its meaning of hard and such, and thats it. We never learned the individual kanji or all its meanings. Sure I knew the kanji, but my classmates didn’t know them all. Of course I had a advantage from the year before at Sophia.
There is so much to each kanji that is necessary in learning the full language, and yet I found at time most of it was skipped. At Sophia because both parts of the language were split into separate classes, we could focus on learning kanji and then learn new grammar and vocabulary separately, but also use them both with each other. I found that using what I learned from both classes at the same time helped me to retain my kanji and my grammar skills much better than I had in my UT classes.
And that is why I don’t really agree with step 3. There should be equal focus on kanji and grammar and vocabulary. It can be done, very effectively, I know this from my own studies. What I believe though is that kanji should be learned very much like the system you say. Learning the radicals first is the key, and thats how I was taught too. Once you learn those, writing kanji, and understanding them becomes much easier. Learn all the sayings, how to write them, the vocabulary with them and so on. And continuing down the list through all 2000 is good. I would do 40 kanji a week, it was pretty daunting but very helpful.
It certainly is a challenge. We end up learning kanji much faster than Japanese people. Students are still learning the 2000 kanji in high school, and many of my friends, old adults even, don’t even know some of the kanji I learned in my first years of study. Its quite interesting.
Maybe I should add my thoughts on learning Japanese to a blog post?
Defininately blog it up.
I think we agree a little about step 3 actually, with maybe a little difference in emphasis. While you’re doing RTK, it’s great to learn 一生懸命 but I wouldn’t worry at all about the kanji in it until covering them in RTK.
But I do think there is a large benefit to finishing it as quickly as possible. If you compare finishing the book to being only halfway done, the difference in kanji knowledge may only two-fold, but the overall benefits you’ll get are many times greater than that difference would suggest.
Also, I think well-structured courses for a full-time student would need a different plan than part-time self-study where there is maybe more need to prioritize.
Heisig rocks. There’s no two ways about it. He does have some problems from a practical standpoint, however. The first is that if you are starting from zero kanji knowledge you’re likely to be very frustrated with how slowly you’re progressing in terms of your basic literacy level. While Heisig doesn’t teach you 回 until about a quarter of the way through, knowing what that kanji means can help you greatly in actually getting around in Japan. If I recall correctly it’s only a second grade kanji, too, so if you were learning kanji in the traditional order you’d get it pretty quickly.
I learned perhaps 150 by rote memorization, writing them over and over again. It wasn’t terribly efficient, and many of those I still can’t write with great accuracy, but I recognize them (and many more) and know what they mean, and with that I can make quite a bit of sense out of Japan. Doing Heisig now, I’m learning quicker, but I’m not gaining many more tools for understanding the language, at least at this early point. This is maybe my third serious attempt to do Heisig on a regular basis, so we’ll see if it really sticks this time.
Japanese is a language that you really have to devote yourself to on an almost religious basis. Learning French or Wolof for me was fairly easy. I just kinda picked it up, mostly. While much of my conversational Japanese was learned the same way, in order to really master the language I’ll have to get serious about it in a way that I never had to with French or Wolof.
I don’t know the word for gall bladder in Russian…
Fail?
Epic fail!
actually I didn’t know the word for gall bladder either…just the kanji with the general meaning for it, but I just looked up the actual word…it is 胆嚢 たんのう tannou
That second kanji actual isn’t in the first RTK book, but I think it is often written as 胆のう…at least as often as people write about gall bladders anyways.
There’s no way I’m gonna learn that second kanji right now, because I don’t want to be bothered and also it’s not important. But hopefully I’ll remember the word. But overall, words with new kanji are a pain in the ass.
Whereas when I learn a new word with all RTK kanji, which is the vast majority of useful words, I’m good to go. For example, I decided to look up another random body part that I didn’t know: eardrum 鼓膜 こまく komaku
Both those are RTK kanji with key words of drum and membrane respectively, so I have a nice hook to remember not only the word but also the writing. As an added bonus, I already know the word 字幕 じまく jimaku “subtitles”. If you look at the right character in each word, you will notice they have the same main part. So I just made a mental note that maybe that radical sometimes/often/always has the reading まくmaku. Which also helps reinforce the word.
So basically the more kanji you know, it is easy to learn words…and RTK is a fast way to learn a lot of kanji quickly.
I think most of y’all are fairly open to Heisig, so you don’t need convincing…but just thought I’d toss out an example ^_^