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Mandarin? Japanese? Characters or Speech? | ||
Tags: Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4629 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 9 of 19 27 May 2014 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese uses more characters than Japanese, so Japanese will be more manageable if you do decide to
focus on the script. A lot of people seem to use Remembering The Kanji by James Heisig when starting out with Japanese. It teaches the 2000 kanji which are taught in Japanese schools. However it only teaches 1. How it's written and 2. A single general meaning. You have to learn the pronunciations and different subtleties of meaning later. I used Heisig for the first 1700 kanji and found it very helpful. I used the website http://kanji.koohii.com/ for reviewing and looking at other people's stories(which are used to help memorisation). The Chinese equivalent course doesn't seem to be as popular. Edited by AlexTG on 27 May 2014 at 4:23pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4659 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 10 of 19 27 May 2014 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Even if you know all 3K Kanji used in Japanese newspapers, you still don't know how to read, because Japanese vocabulary is made from words and not from isolated Kanji.
It's better to learn 5K most frequent words in Japanese (I recommend ''Routledge Japanese Frequency Dictionary'') than 3K Kanji in isolation. Edited by Medulin on 28 May 2014 at 12:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 11 of 19 27 May 2014 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
What about Mandarin? Can the traditional characters be learned in isolation? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4629 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 12 of 19 27 May 2014 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Learning one thing at a time can be a helpful strategy. No, you can't read Japanese if you only know
individual kanji. But learning the kanji beforehand makes the task of learning the words easier. If you try to learn kanji at the same time as the words, you'll end up getting similar looking kanji mixed up. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4629 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 13 of 19 27 May 2014 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese has the same problem. No matter what you're going to have to learn both how individual kanji/hanzi
are formed, and how individual words are formed. Whether to learn one thing before the other or both at once is up to personal preference. I find segregating the different elements of a language makes my learning more efficient because it reduces confusion. (I use a passive wave-active wave strategy for instance) Edited by AlexTG on 27 May 2014 at 5:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 14 of 19 27 May 2014 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
Could you elaborate on that? I'm not familiar, although I think I have an idea what you mean. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4629 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 15 of 19 27 May 2014 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||
Initially I only read and listen to the language. I make no attempt to produce output. No speaking, no writing, and no excercises/drills. Only once I'm already quite comfortable understanding the language do I 'activate' by talking to natives, thinking in the language and that sort of thing. Assimil courses formalise this technique, with the first half of lessons meant for passive learning and the second half for active learning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4706 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 16 of 19 27 May 2014 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Again, it will depend on what you want to do with the language.
Do you want to read newspapers or websites? Go for learning both the language and the characters (either in Japanese or Chinese). Do you know people and want to chat with them asap? In Japanese, ignore the Kanji, learn Hiragana and Katakana and do only the audio/language studies. In Chinese, ignore the Hanzi, learn Pinyin, and do only the audio/language studies. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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