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5 years of 日本語 TAC 13 桜/Schnitzel | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 281 of 436 21 July 2013 at 3:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had a trawl of Google this afternoon looking for information about kanji study for advanced learners. One of the permanent frustrations of my Japanese studies is that kanji is such a big problem and I often feel quite overwhelmed by it. I could settle on a routine or a method which suited me for a few hundred characters, but I can't seem to extrapolate this to the few thousand that are actually needed. And of course, lack of kanji knowledge really hampers my ability to learn from reading.
Unfortunately most of the kanji advice or study guides online are geared to beginners. I guess this is a natural consequence of the fact that most people quit before they even get to my current level of ability! I did uncover an interesting paper here which looks at kanji learning strategies and motivation for a small group of students at a range of levels. I found the discussion of motivation problems for the advanced learners to resonate so much with my own experiences. After five years I'm bored of studying kanji. I'm disappointed that I don't know as much as I thought I should know by now. And I'm overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the task. Unfortunately I don't think there are any easy solutions to this one. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 282 of 436 21 July 2013 at 3:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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読みたい
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| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 283 of 436 21 July 2013 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||
I presume that by "kanji" you don't mean simply being able to write (or recognise) a kanji by seeing it or by being given the associated keyword? Because that's pretty easy (given RTK and 30 mins a day for few months). For the kanji that you learned on the way to N2, did you learn the readings for each or just remember umpteen words of vocabulary as pronunciation + kanji? I can see how learning the readings would be useful for a native Japanese speaker, as then, when faced with a word in kanji, you can throw out all the pronunciations that don't map to a word and then just pick the (hopefully) only correct possible word. But for a non-native speaker, I don't see how the readings would help. There are about 200 kanji with only a single reading (although I expect that there are always exceptions for even these) and I've found a few of those helpful. Beyond that I've not deliberately learned any readings. That just leaves learning せいじ is 政治 (politics + reign). That was fine up to N4 and may even work for N3. But N2 with about 6000 words, it's looking a bit daunting right now. So, even though you don't seem satisfied with them, which approaches did you try? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 284 of 436 21 July 2013 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm actually facing the same problem with kanji. I've tried to find the motivation to
restart studying them but no technique seems to work. There's always too many I know in the middle or some I "kinda" know but if coupled with another one in a word I don't know I'll feel as if I've never seen it. As a result, tired of this search for a good technique I've just settled for reading stuff online while using rikaikun. I've been doing that for a few months and now a few characters are starting to stick but my knowledge doesn't seem to really precise. I guess, at our level, the only option is reading and hopefully remember as many as possible 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 285 of 436 21 July 2013 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have absolutely no interest in completing RTK.
I want to be able to do two things: 1) Read Japanese books with the same ease as I can read French ones. 2) Take handwritten notes in Japanese with the same ease as I can in French. For my own kanji studies, I'm not sure if I can faithfully sum up everything I've done over the years, but I'll try. I started by working through Basic Kanji Book at the same time as working through Genki. In both books, kanji is presented with a stroke order diagram, English keyword, on/kun readings and some example vocabulary, followed by exercises to test your mastery. I loved having the exercises, but both textbooks are sadly missing an answer key (a problem which applies to a lot of general Japanese textbooks, unfortunately). For each new character, I would write it out about 10 times on squared paper to practice my handwriting. I'd then make Anki flashcards with the example vocabulary, testing both reading/meaning and ability to write the word when prompted with the reading/meaning. I learned maybe three hundred kanji this way, but then I got scared by the fact that Genki only had 350 characters and the two volumes of Basic Kanji Book only had 500 (and there was a lot of overlap between the two, which makes sense). So I bought Kanji in Context with it's promises of a systematic method to learn 1947 characters. The great thing about Kanji in Context is that it's comprehensive. The bad thing about Kanji in Context is that it's really comprehensive. And also the workbooks only test your ability to read the characters. And at the time I first bought the course the language used in the workbooks was too advanced for me so they were pretty much unusable anyway. So I stuck to my previous method, applied it to the reference book, got through the first 500 characters or so, until I experienced my first major kanji/anki-related burnout! Since then I haven't systematically learned how to write any new characters at all. I did use the Kanji in Context workbook to help with my reading in the run up to N2, but I only covered a very small number of chapters before the test. Everything else I've just picked up either from testing recognition of words and phrases in Anki, or simply seeing certain characters so many times I've got used to them. This brings two problems. First of all, no matter how wonderfully systematic a method is, I don't really know what to study because I have partial knowledge of a lot of characters. I get bored and frustrated with kanji textbooks really quickly because I kind of half know what I'm looking at already and I miss the immediate hit of discernible progress that is one of the few pleasures a beginner can experience. Once upon a time I could look at a list of kanji and point out which characters I'd already studied and which were brand new. These days they all kind of look sickeningly familiar. The other problem is that I know I confuse similar looking characters when I'm reading. Sometimes with humorous effect (which is great,because at least I can learn from it), but mostly it just impedes my ability to learn from reading. I actually think that if I worked steadily through Kanji in Context it would probably go some way to helping me achieve the first goal listed at the top of this post. It would do nothing to help with the second unless I took the time to make my own writing exercises, which is time consuming and boring. And the other problem with Kanji in Context is it is so damn long and every chapter follows exactly the same format (i.e. every chapter looks exactly the same). Which is actually quite unhelpful when you are being asked to memorise several thousand items. I wish someone would actually create a whole course around the system, complete with writing exercises and proper articles for reading practice, in addition to the example sentences of the workbook. Along with some kind of SRS with all the data entry already done for you. In fact any proper, thorough kanji/reading/writing course aimed to take you through N2 to N1 levels, but actually emphasising being able to really read and write rather than just doing multiple choice questions, would be truly awesome. I would pay serious money to do something like that via distance learning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 286 of 436 22 July 2013 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
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@yuhakko I think you posted while I was in the middle of writing that last essay! I just wanted to reiterate that what you wrote sums up exactly how I feel. I have imperfect knowledge of a lot of characters. Not enough to be able to read particularly fluently, but enough to make any study feel like very boring revision!
I've tried using rikai, but it makes me incredibly lazy. I tend to come away from an article remembering the gist of the content, but none of the words seem to stick. I had better results when I sat down with a dead tree book, extensive reading as much as possible but looking up anything which was either repeated a lot or seemed particularly interesting. Just figuring out how to break the kanji down in order to look it up helped to reinforce the characters. I need to do more of that. Edited by g-bod on 22 July 2013 at 12:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 287 of 436 22 July 2013 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | ||
One unintended but important consequence of the essay-post I inflicted on my log last night is I somehow managed to spell out two clear learning goals for Japanese:
Well, that at least solves my problem of not knowing what I want, at least to a certain extent! I've also been ruminating a little more on the kanji problem. It seems the biggest stumbling blocks for me at present are that: 1) The problem of learning 1000s of kanji is too big and overwhelming. 2) Frustration borne out of both disappointment with progress so far and the difficulty in establishing where the limits of my current knowledge actually lie. 3) Boredom from repetitive methods and materials, and also the frustration of being stuck in a permanent revision cycle. It seems to me that there are three things I might be able to do to help resolve this: 1) Redefine the problem I'm trying to make the task seem more manageable by breaking down the problem of learning kanji into smaller chunks that can be dealt with somewhat independently. I guess this is the appeal of RTK to many people. You don't get rid of the big number, but you only have to memorise one aspect of each character. I'm already pretty certain that RTK is not for me, however I can already see from my own experience that I could still separate out the task of learning to read and the task of learning to write. Writing takes more time, effort, repetition and hard work (including wrist ache). Reading takes a few good books, a dictionary and a little bit of patience. I already know from experience that I can recognise plenty of words written in kanji without having a clue about how to write them from memory. Up until now that has definitely contributed to some of my frustrations, but it's actually perfectly natural to have a better passive kanji knowledge than active. And to put more of a positive spin on things, if my reading goal is to be able to recognise around 2-3000 characters in context, I should be perfectly satisfied with being able to produce around 1000 characters (also in context) from memory. I'm still talking in terms of 1000s, but at least my problem has suddenly become a little smaller. 2) Mix up my methods For a long time I've held on to the belief that if I could only sit down and deal with kanji consistently, persistently and systematically, I would have learned it all by now. Maybe that is true, but it doesn't really match up with my personality or my general scattergun approach to learning. It seems like I've hit on a few good methods or coursebooks which I've found really helpful along the way to learning a few hundred kanji words/compounds, but then I get bored with the method, lose motivation to study, and when I do study the whole process has become so automated my retention level drops. This is why Anki has served me well when I've made small decks which I've kept alive for a few months, but incredibly poorly when I've tried to create and maintain massive decks over a longer period. It also explains my frustrations with Kanji in Context. The way in which characters are presented in such a cleverly thought out and systematic order is fantastic. In some ways it's like Heisig but without the crap. I've actually had a couple of fun evenings just sat flicking through the books, not doing deliberate study but simply marvelling over the differences and similarities between the characters (naturally learning a lot more about kanji in the process than I normally do when I try to study). But I simply can't learn by doing the same thing over and over (all be it with a different set of characters each time), for months and months and months (which is what it would take to memorise everything in something like Kanji in Context. So the solution, I think, is to mix up my methods a bit. Spend a few weeks on one course/technique and once the boredom sets in, switch to another. To some extent this fits in quite nicely with my first point about breaking down the problem. I could set myself a single goal over the period of a month to study the first 4 chapters in 留学生のための漢字の教科書 (160 characters, including both reading and writing exercises). Once this is done, if I want to mix things up a bit I could maybe set myself a different goal of making sure I can read all the highlighted words in 5 chapters out of Kanji in Context (covering approximately 50 characters and maybe 200 vocabulary words). This mental trickery will only go so far. Because I still know that 留学生のための漢字の教科書 has 32 chapters (covering 700 kanji) in total. And I still know that the massive Kanji in Context has a whopping 143 chapters. I'll have to really try and convince myself that the overall size of the coursebook is completely irrelevant to whatever short term goal I pick. I also need to let go of the frustration about whether I am revising or actually learning something new - at this stage in my study both activities are just going to go hand in hand. I don't worry about the inefficiency of seeing or hearing something as familiar as です every time I open up a book or put on a TV show. So long as I am varying my activities to stave off boredom, it's all good. Which brings me on to the final point: 3) Learn to love kanji again I occasionally still remember the initial awe and wonder I felt when I started slowly cracking the mystery of the Japanese writing system. They say that familiarity breeds contempt and maybe that is true in my case. Breaking down the problem and mixing up my methods will certainly help to keep things fresh, but I would also benefit somewhat from rediscovering that feeling of childish wonder when it comes to kanji. There's no doubt that I learn better when I'm enjoying myself - but the catch is you can't fake enjoyment! But if I can start to think about kanji study in a positive way again, it will be a huge step forward. Edited by g-bod on 23 July 2013 at 12:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 288 of 436 23 July 2013 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have had the same problem with rikai, but I feel it's sticking slowly but surely. Definitely not the solution though.
Your plan seems interesting. I hope it works out well! I remember having like you that love for kanjis at the beginning. I was actually the best at kanjis among my friends because I was always studying them more and more. But I stopped and now they're all way better than me... I am finding it difficult to stay working properly on them but it may be just the solution. Your motivation to actually get through it motivated me and I am going to try to study again kanjis too. I've posted my plan on my log if you're interested. But knowing myself, it'll probably take about 2-3 weeks at least before I finally get a proper working plan... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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