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The Asian 3 - Japanese easiest? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6049 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 41 of 43 31 December 2009 at 7:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
You need to understand around 90% of the material for literacy, whether you use a frequency based method, list method, no-method, is up to you, but in the end you must understand around this percentage. This does not only mean "know" the characters, which as the other poster mentioned, will get you nowhere if you don't know the words the characters form. Or put another way, 1) knowing more common characters does not necessarily correlate with knowing more common words. 2) Yet, knowing more common words does necessarily correlate with knowing more common characters. 3) You must be around 90% most common words to understand through context (according to various people, it could just be an arbitrary percentage around this number). Where you go with these facts is up to you. Edited by irrationale on 31 December 2009 at 7:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5582 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 42 of 43 31 December 2009 at 10:58am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Oh, I am not advocating the Heisig method at all! I have his book for the Japanese characters, and to put it bluntly, I think it is a pile of crap! I have only used his book once. Then I replaced it with a vocabulary/context heavy textbook which addresses compound vocabulary or combinations as you call them. I agree with what you say about learning combinations. It is exactly the same with Japanese. If you just learn the character but no related vocabulary, you just end up with the ability to write pretty patterns with no practical application whatsoever. I personally dont count as character as "learned" unless I have a grasp of many of its combinations. And yes, in Japanese one given character can have various meanings. Because the Heisig method doesnt cover compound words or even pronunciation, I am not an advocate of it. In Japanese as well, the vast majority of compound words are formed with very common basic characters. So just 1500 characters can take you a long way. Knowing 1500 characters thoroughly bears more fruit than knowing 2000 or more superficially. However, once you have got that down, I still believe that the learner should complete the Joyo Kanji and them make an effort to learn non-Joyo Kanji as you encounter them. The reason being a lot of very everyday words are non-joyo (which defies the meaning of Joyo in my opinion). For example 凭れる (to lean on) and 跪く (to kneal) are very everday words, yet are not included in the Joyo list! They are normally written just with Kana. However, even if there kanji are rarely used, learning the non-joyo for the purpose of expanding ones vocabulary is really helpful in my opinion. Also, you would be surprised by the amount of non-Joyo Kanji that appear in high level texts aimed at educated natives. Therefore, my point is that it is still beneficial to learn 2500-3000 Kanji even though everyone will think you are crazy for doing so. Of course one mustnt neglect the much more common characters as they are the bedrock of Japanese vocabulary. First mastery of common character combinations, then once that is properly learned, frequently occuring non-Joyo characters. As for my plan to learn Chinese, I dont intend to take it lightly at all. I dont intend to just make calques and hope for the best. A lot of chinese people studying Japanese make than mistake. However, I still believe that already knowing many Kanji will be a huge help for learning Chinese (assuming I dont neglect certain areas). For a start, although the pronunciation differs, many of the Characters are written the same which means I wont have to spend loads of time learning proper stroke orders like I had to when I first started Japanese. Again, I have found that a lot of combinations are common throughout Chinese, Japanese and Korean. At least with Korean, a Japanese speaker gets a hell of a lot of "cheap" vocabulary. Although there is room for confusion, this is a huge benefit in my opinion. I would rather have the 2000 plus Kanji I have now and start Chinese as opposed to starting from scratch with no knowledge of characters at all. I am really serious about learning Chinese and really hope I can do it. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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