Kanji practice (kanji book recommendations)

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

I've been practicing a bit by myself since I began learning the language. I figured I don't want to be shocked when they suddenly introduce kanji to us. I wonder if they'll teach us some when I restart classes tomorrow, so I can show off . I'm finishing conversational btw.

Check out my crappy handwriting:


I'm up to 46 pages.


and I know about 150 kanji + kana of course.

Edit: All the sheets only have kanji on one side. I'm recycling paper.

[GaijinPunch]

Looks better than my handwriting. I had to write a birthday card to my mother in law not long ago. It looked like shit. Big characters, scratch outs, and everything. Computers have ruined me.

[umi]

I'm teaching myself Japanese... it's an easy language, but you need a passion for any language you want to learn, and I have that for Japanese. Kanji is damn scary at first... until you realize that it's simply EXPOSURE to it that imprints it in your brain... it's not even "learning". As adults, we don't soak up as much as young kids, but we're not useless, we can learn almost as well as any Japanese child, just a bit slower. Also, when I first started, I'd try to drill each Kanji into my brain until it stayed there... doesn't work... move on to higher Kanji, then start again from the beginning ones... do that over and over... each time you complete a loop, you pick up more knowledge and simple intuition that you can't really "teach". The "hard" kanji are just a bunch of easy kanji slapped together... it's a great feeling when you are able to dissect a complex kanji upon inspection. The readings are a nightmare at first, but it's the same thing, at some point they just stick in your head. Just make sure you expose yourself not just to the kanji, but compound words as well... builds vocab and a feel for the meanings of the kanji and how they're used. Also, find a website that works for you, though you might already have. I'm cycling through the first 1000 kanji... I'm not sure how many of those are "hard-wired" yet, but it's a fair amount. I have a pile of old school scrapbooks I never used that are chock full (double-sided) of my kanji practice... it's cool to see someone else here is learning them as well :P

[GaijinPunch]

t's an easy language

You must've not gotten very far into it yet.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

@umi: I've noticed some of the things you're saying. For example, the pace I've been learning kanji has accelerated when I began going to school despite practicing less . I think it's because I read my kanji book while I ride the train, thus exposing myself to them. But then, it could be I'm learning the kanji building blocks and practicing with words, not just the kanji.

Learning the kanji pronunciations without learning words is pretty stupid imo because a lot of kanji share the same pronunciation and could cause massive confusion. It has happened to me .

Edit: I don't think Japanese is easy either. I'm pretty limited in my sentence making so far.

[umi]

Child's play, compared to English. It has been called the "Devil's language", but that's only due to the fright factor of the various scripts, which is pretty easy. Pronounciation and syllabaries? Arguably the easiest in the world (especially for English speakers, one would think). Conjugation? Beautifully consistent. If you're talking contextual issues, then I agree, not easy.

I feel sorry for Japanese learning English :/

p.s. No, unfortunately I'm not an expert :P

t's an easy language

You must've not gotten very far into it yet.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

I think English is cake, though my pronunciation is kind of shitty. Spanish is the easiest, but that's my first langugage hehehehh. Japanese is harder than both of 'em.

[GaijinPunch]

I never said English was easy. It is indeed a nightmare to learn as a second langauge. Foreign speakers may never truly understand some forms of humor. The same can be said for poorly educated native speakers as well. Conversely though, Japanese is definitely something you don't pick up by accident... even by living there. Even with kanji set aside: the different levels of politeness, keigo, onomotopeia (sp?), implication, counters, the queer verb tenses (eg: commandive mixed with passive forms [saserareru]) those weird ass words that we just don't have (eg: wake, koto, etc.). Then you have all the kanji.

There's tons of rules, and for the most part, they're adhered to pretty well. Makes it seem all fun and games at the first, but the wheels come off when you start getting into JLPT level 2 crap. The problem is, it's really useful stuff.

Speaking your mind in Japanese is one thing -- speaking someone elses though is a whole new trainwreck.

Is Japanese harder than English? I guess it depends on the person and exactly what one is trying to achieve. They indeed both have a multitude of pitfalls. I'd like to hear twe's take on it. He's studied a lot of langauges extensively.

[extrarice]

Child's play, compared to English. It has been called the "Devil's language", but that's only due to the fright factor of the various scripts, which is pretty easy. Pronounciation and syllabaries? Arguably the easiest in the world (especially for English speakers, one would think). Conjugation? Beautifully consistent. If you're talking contextual issues, then I agree, not easy.

I feel sorry for Japanese learning English :/

p.s. No, unfortunately I'm not an expert

t's an easy language

You must've not gotten very far into it yet.

I agree with Umi. The main thing about Japanese is that it's rules are consistent (99% of the time). Grammatical rules in English are followed and disregarded seemingly randomly.

As for Japanese pronounciation and syllabaries, most English speakers that I know who have taken a stab at Japanese can't get the pronounciation right. The ra-ri-ru-re-ro set especially, but really all the vowels get messed up somehow.

[GaijinPunch]

I agree with Umi.

Just to get an idea, about what level is your Japanese?

[extrarice]

On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being fluent, call it a 2 (sentance structure is there, vocab, kanji and slang is not).

I should clarify what I meant about calling it "easy":
I mean the grammatical structure is very easy to understand. Granted, like any language, there is slang, and dialect, so what is correct in one region can sound strange in another region. But from an academic standpoint, the grammatical structure and rules in "proper" Japanese are much easier to understand and used much more consistantly than "proper" English. Thus, it is easier to learn Japanese than English.

The phonetics used are also very easy to learn and remember. If you see a kana for "ki", you know it's pronnounced like "kee", not "kai". In English, the pronounciation of every letter is dependant upon what letters are next to it, and even that rule is not consistant. Take, for example, the "u" in "rude", versus the "u" in "rudder".

Kanji, however, is difficult for westerners because of the memorization needed. We're not used to the idea of picture-words as a language.

Does that clear things up a bit?

[TWITCHDOCTOR]

Hey Extrarice...
I don't know what it is, but I quite like your avatar.
(Yea, I know its a smilie playing with a joystick, but its just cool to me)

I just now noticed why I like it so much...that smilie has a "twitch"!!!!

[MSZ]

English is my 4th language, and I found it way harder than Japanese or Korean.

But thats just me, because Chinese(Cantonese to be exact)is my first language.

[BulletMagnet]

I feel sorry for Japanese learning English :/

I feel sorry for ANYone learning English, heh heh. Even having spoken it my whole life, I know that I still do a lot of things wrong (incorrectly?) without even knowing it...trying to figure it out as a second language, especially when you've previously been speaking a more "consistent" language (Spanish, etc.) must be murder.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

English wouldn't be hard at all if it had consistent pronunciation, but every language has to have something messed up. How the heck do we make foreigners scared shit to come here if English was easy to pronounce?

I think about that all the time.

[Ganelon]

Basically:

Japanese's difficulty is from memorization.
English's difficulty is from experience.

[GaijinPunch]

I think Ganelon illustrated it pretty well. Japan's dialects can be pretty crazy, but if you're thinking of pursuing some type of career speaking Japanese, rather dry Kanto-ben will take you a long ways. Think of all the different version so English in the US alone. Northern accents vs. Southern draws vs. ebonics. Fuck that. My wife's English isn't that bad, but there's so many people that speak shit English here on the island she has a hard time. O_o

MSZ: I took Japanese w/ some very ambitious people that took it simultaneously with Cantonese. They said Cantonese was easier b/c the grammar was much more similar to English. Lots more characters to learn though... I ain't into that.

[LUNardei]

Foreign speakers may never truly understand some forms of humor.

It's sadly true...

[Randorama]

"Forms of humour" aren't part of a language, though, but of a culture. Of course, learning some typical expressions of everyday talking may be useful, but they're useful when language interacts with a culture.

Aside that...

I'm studying a bit of japanese grammar, and it's interesting how much it's context-based. My first language allows me to be quite context-based, but not as much as japanese. On the other side of the continuum, there are languages like Norwegian in which you are basically forced to spell out every single detail (but this is somewhat of a simplification).

One thing about English is that no government ever bothered to make a true phonological standard. While dialects are normal, it is not difficult to learn the written form of a language, if this written form is somewhat coherent to the inventory of phonemes (the sounds, so to speak) of a language.

For instance, English has something like 40 phonemes (letters or combinations of letters: respectively, "f" or "ch", both correspond to one phoneme) and about 1100 different combinations to represent these graphemes. Basically, learning English written words is like writing kanji, as the representational power of written words is extremely low and incoherent: it's all about memorizing the exact written form, instead languages like Spanish (or Italian,but Finnish and Russian are 99,9% coherent) are based on, let's say, writing what you actually say, more or less.

Speaking of syntax...well, this depends more on the first language you learn. It may be difficult to learn the syntax of a language like, let's say, german, if you are taught in a language which doesn't share any rules with german.However, this is more difficult, as syntax tends to be more like..."Universal rules with specific variation".

Also, it's easier for a local who hasn't access to a good instruction to speak a lousy version of his language (which is DIFFERENT from dialect ) than for a foreigner: most of the time a foreigner has to learn a pretty standardized version of a new language. No one at the standard English school (or at any school, private or public) will teach you the dialect of some small community, but the official version of a language. For instance, no one will teach you the dialect of Shetland Islands, but the official version of British English.

About dialects...dialects are usually seen as regional variants of a language. This is not proper, actually. Most of the time, a common ancestor can be found (let's say Latin) and we can see that, depending on zones and regions, this common ancestor evolves in a way or another.

"Language" (English lacks this difference between "the faculty of language" and "specific anguage" but for instance in spanish it's "lenguaje" vs "lengua") is usually the most common dialect which is used as a common language...since it's used by more people, it has a specific standardization, unlike dialects, but there's no real hierarchical relationship between a language and its related dialects.

Of course, in cases when a language or a dialect come in contact with other dialects/languages, there can be exchanges and influences. In this sense, the various English dialects usually hint at the origins of their speaking communities (if you hear a southern dutch/central german speaking english, he may sounds like someone from southern states of the USA, most of the time).

[GaijinPunch]

"Forms of humour" aren't part of a language, though, but of a culture.

But are quite often expressed through langauge -- these are the ones that are hard to understand for non-native speakers.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

Foreign speakers may never truly understand some forms of humor.

It's sadly true...

Some of my friends keep accusing me of killing jokes .

[Randorama]

But are quite often expressed through langauge -- these are the ones that are hard to understand for non-native speakers.

Well, almost always, that's what i meant by saying that they're a form of interaction between language and culture. And, judging from what i'm seeing from my small newly acquired knowledge of japanese, some expressions are so context-based that they're easy to figure out without a good knowledge of (the native) context ( intruiguing subject, i'd add).

[GaijinPunch]

Japanese humor is... different. There are no "guy walks into a bar" jokes. The written language allows for quite a few puns, and there is some silly shit out there, but it's quite different.

[Randorama]

And how does it work? Now i'm curious...

EDIT: oh, i've read something about ragoku, very funny and not different from some of our humour

[Triple Lei]

Very nice, but it always breaks my heart to see anyone writing kanji over and over again. I just don't think it helps you memorize. Sure, you're practicing stroke order and all, but after just your first hundred kanji or so, you'll have already gotten most of the patterns and mental processes down. When I was learning new kanji, it was often, "okay, it's like that other kanji, but...", and I realized that writing them over and over would just be a waste of time. At that point in the game, you're just practicing stroke order instead of practicing recalling how to write them.

That's why I just make flash cards and mentally go over the stroke order a couple times a day. I even made a page about it! (gotta update, though...)

Personally, I think my method works great, and it saves yourself from a lot of pain and wasted effort. Just recently I passed the Kanken levels 9 and 8 and I only specifically studied for those tests for about 10 minutes.


It's true that in real life, you probably won't need to write a bunch of kanji. I've made it my hobby, though, because (among other things) not knowing how to write your own language is frustrating and embarrassing. Plus it's always fun seeing people's reactions when they see some non-Asian writing Chinese. Great icebreaker!

Fun sites:
http://www.kanjiclinic.com/
http://www.hanzismatter.com/

(there's more where that came from!)

[GaijinPunch]

I think writing is fantastic practice, but time consuming. When I was in college I could write almost as many as I could read. If you write them, you know them -- they are ingrained. I, of course, don't do this anymore and really can't write shit w/o a computer.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

I do both looking at the kanji and writing them. I look at them while riding the train and practice when I get home. It's a good thing to grab a pen and write since just looking at them won't teach anyone how to reproduce them nicely on paper.

And yes, writing eats a lot of time, but I think it's worth it. I usually write for 1 1/2 hours per day and fill up 1/3 of a page.

[umi]

Best thing about writing is you can practice and develop your vocab at the same time as your stroke orders and general familiarity with the kanji. Flashcards are great for when you're on the train or whatever, but if you want good practice at RECALLING kanji, there's a much more simple and effective way than that -- visit Japanese websites (or read some Japanese books, preferably with furigana). Personally, I can't stand the idea of being able to recognize but not write the kanji (extremely well). When you first start, you should write the basic kanji down 100 times each (or thereabouts), but once you're famiilar with the radicals and such, you won't need to write down even new kanji anywhere near that many times. You'll know when you reach this point, you'll just notice it's redundant.

Writing kanji IS the best way to learn them, without a doubt (actually, that should completely go without saying). The time is worth the rewards! But you MUST learn the meanings and compounds (not just the main 1 or 2, either) parallel with the characters themselves, or you are cheating yourself out of time, for sure.

There's are lots of different people in the world, and the same teaching method won't work for all of them I guess... (actually, in truth, the opposite is true... any method words, just some more efficient than others for a given person... DEDICATION is the key I think :P).

[GaijinPunch]

You will eventually get to the point where you have to weight writing them down getting them imbedded vs. being able to read a lot more. Believe me, you can function quite perfectly being able to read them and not be able to write any of them (except your address). Doctor's forms are almost always yes/no questions, and everything else gives you the computer. Yeah, it's cheating, but think about it -- how much do you hand write in modern times in your native language?

I'm preparing to fail the JLPT this December. The grammar book I'm flying through, but I hit a brick wall when I started the vocab book. There's just SOOO many words. Anyways, my method of studying is a bit geeky, but I made a MySQL database and store the words, then wrote a perl script to display them. It's rather crude, but it's like flashcards on my computer. The best part is if I find a word I want to remember at work, there's a web front end to stare it (from anywhere really).

[umi]

Shit... just wrote a big paragraph but I got an error when I sent it. Anyway, that's a good idea, re. the database. It's what I'd do if my programming skills were't so rusty :P You're lucky it's only vocab you're worried about, as that's pretty much a "brute force" task I think...

You will eventually get to the point where you have to weight writing them down getting them imbedded vs. being able to read a lot more. Believe me, you can function quite perfectly being able to read them and not be able to write any of them (except your address). Doctor's forms are almost always yes/no questions, and everything else gives you the computer. Yeah, it's cheating, but think about it -- how much do you hand write in modern times in your native language?

I'm preparing to fail the JLPT this December. The grammar book I'm flying through, but I hit a brick wall when I started the vocab book. There's just SOOO many words. Anyways, my method of studying is a bit geeky, but I made a MySQL database and store the words, then wrote a perl script to display them. It's rather crude, but it's like flashcards on my computer. The best part is if I find a word I want to remember at work, there's a web front end to stare it (from anywhere really).