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Japanese: Help with Chinese characters | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| SevenSyndicate Newbie United States Joined 3543 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 12 24 November 2014 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I am in dire need of help with learning the Japanese Kanji. I have been trying to learn the kanji with the RTK method and various other methods for a while now. And I keep having an issue. I can't seem to remember the stories I create for each kanji no matter how hard I try.
I've tried writing the stories down, making short stories, making long stories, making poems, using the memory palace technique, using visual imagery and mnemonics, drawing pictures for my stories, and various other methods. But no matter what I do I can't seem to remember my stories. But I am doing fine in all of my other areas of study, it's just this that is holding me back. I have also made a post on the koohii forum and I did receive some good responses, but I have tried pretty much everything they suggested. But still to no avail. Please help me, I am out of ideas. Anyone who has any advice for learning Kanji (Chinese Characters) it would be great. Thanks. And to those who aren't familiar with the RTK method. You basically break the character down into radicals and create a story with those radicals to help you remember how to write it. Edited by SevenSyndicate on 24 November 2014 at 12:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5567 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 12 24 November 2014 at 1:23am | IP Logged | ||
There, I fixed it for you. The thing about writing kanji is that if you don't write them, you'll lose them rather quickly. Mnemonics are a strategy to slow down that rate, but if you don't write by hand you will still lose the kanji you thought you knew. And if you struggle to remember the mnemonic it's useless. I know some people swear by mnemonics, but those are people for who mnemonics actually work. I do have a handful of mnemonics for kanji, but usually I struggle more to remember a mnemonic than the actual fact. (The only one I remember easily is 'dead moon king is hope') That is one part of the problem. I fare much better looking at chineseetymology.org - when you enter a chinese character, it tells you which part is the radical and which the remnant, and when you then enter the remnant again you puzzle together the history that character might have had. (Oh, I just saw they actually added an etymology explanation!) While some of those still may be folk etymologies it is much easier for me to remember characters when I have a story that makes sense in relation to the people who actually use that character, rather than using a mnemonic for a fact without relation to anything else I know. That may work for you too, or maybe it won't. Then, when and how do you practice? When do you write letters or essays containing the kanji you have studied? Do you test yourself and monitor your progress, and have a good look at the kanji that give you trouble; if you actually use them, if you have examples for their correct usage, if you know the stroke order, if your mnemonic actually makes sense to you some days or weeks later? If you just study a set amount of kanji every week but never actually use them in real life - what use is there for your brain to remember how to write them? Especially when there is no consequence for failing to remember. So, write, and concentrate on learning those kanji you will use in writing. You have to make a selection for the time being, so make it a smart one. Also ... can you count strokes accurately? Can you tell the radical under which you'll find the kanji in a paper dictionary or one of the more traditional minded online dictionaries? Can you guess at the on reading of a kanji, can you guess at the rough meaning/category (like, 'concerning illness, body parts, plants, related to the earth/sea' etc)? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3693 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 3 of 12 24 November 2014 at 7:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Mnemonics is not a method which works for everyone.
Try using this add-on, it changes the first letter of every English word to corresponding kanji. Seeing kanji all the time will help you to eventually remember. Characterizer Also, some people say that for them writing down a particular kanji in their notebooks 100 times or so helps them remember much better than all the mnemonics in the world. Other than that - read, read, read. It'll stick. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5567 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 12 24 November 2014 at 7:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Weird app. As for "read, read, read" - that helps a great deal. With reading. With writing? Only when you actually do some kind of handwriting practice synergy can work with.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3693 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 5 of 12 24 November 2014 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Bao, you are only partially right about the writing thing. The "read, read, read" will help with writing, too. I almost never write by hand (I type), but if I need to write down any Chinese character, I just sit down, remember kind of what it looked like, add bits here and there, untill it starts looking right. OK, sure, sometimes it does not work, but mostly it actually does!
If SevenSyndicate will need to write by hand, starting first by recognizing the kanji and only then focusing on writing CAN work very well. But then again, if he is more of a kinesthetic memory type of a learner, that's not the best approach for him specifically. Another way to try adapting mnemonics method to your needs is to DRAW your "stories" instead of making them up as verbal stories. I see you say you tried, but why not convert your drawings to flashcards? Or try using memrise.com website, other people there have uploaded their visual mnemonics for many characters. There are some great books for Japanese character learning using this kind of picture mnemonics, I think this one is one of the nicest: Kanji Pict-o-Graphix They have some phone app, too. Try! Edited by day1 on 24 November 2014 at 8:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SevenSyndicate Newbie United States Joined 3543 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 12 24 November 2014 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the advice so far everyone, it is really helping me formulate a new gameplan. And Bao I have a question for you. You seem to have much different methodology when it comes to tackling kanji. So what would you say would be the optimal study routine from finding a kanji to learn, to having it mastered?
And to answer some of your questions Bao. I do not do as much writing practice as I should. I keep a notebook with me at work and write in it during down time. I do that maybe twice a week. So I need to practice writing more. I do monitor my progress with Anki, and I have just started going through my cards to see which ones I can't remember and I "relearn" them. Other than that I don't monitor my progress any other ways. I can count strokes very accurately, maybe with an accuracy rate of 80-90 percent. But I cannot usually look up kanji by their traditional radicals to look them up in a paper dictionary, as I have came up with my own names for most radicals or used Heisig's names. But I can use the SKIP system very well and generally find a kanji within 10 seconds. As for guessing the meanings and readings, I generally am unable to do that. I can guess the reading occasionally if I have seen the kanji often enough, but not very much. Also I can't say I have ever once been able to guess the meaning of a kanji without having seen it before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5567 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 12 24 November 2014 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | ||
... can you read handwritten characters? I made the experience that before I paid attention to stroke order and writing a character correctly and with a certain balance, native speakers had a hard time reading what I was trying to write, and I couldn't read most people's handwriting because I didn't understand the patterns people use to move their pen on the paper. Yes, I can also write some characters like you say, but if I have to puzzle around and check if the character I had written was correct, I don't think I actually know how to write the character. I just think I have a vague idea of what it might look like. That's okay for characters I am unlikely to use or when I really need that character for communication, but not with characters that I use frequently. If people never plan on writing by hand or reading handwriting, well, that's their decision. Though I do think having some basic handwriting knowledge helps with learning to read more characters. Practicing reading/IME only I hit my limit at around 1500 kanji (recognition, maybe 1/3 of them in writing), some of which were a lot shakier than others. The thing about learning types is that they are, uhm, not as exclusive as most proponents of the typology want to make them. There's no one ideal learning situation for any single person in which they can learn effortlessly, I'd rather say learning is often quite patchy and when one strategy alone fails, adding a second method that is not 'more of the same' can often do the trick. Apart from that, memory decays and information often is blocked by similar information. In the case of chinese characters there are many visually similar ones that you can easily confuse. [I use kanjibox every now and then to help me with that] But they have some degree of phonological information encoded (not all, not perfectly, but there is some) which helps with the auditory route, the pictographic character and the internal logic of the system help with associative learning -so do mnemonics, when you can remember them-, practicing handwriting helps with motor memory, and forced recall helps to fortify your memory. I'm also for learning in a variety of environments, so that you don't need consistent environmental cues to facilitate recall. SevenSyndicate, my methology could be summarized as "try out whatever comes my way, stay with the things that don't annoy me, seem to make sense, seem to make it easier for me to communicate with other people" Heisig and the people on koohi often annoy me. :P I think spending some of your time writing something meaningful can bring you a long way. 一期一会 - I mean, when you do something meaningful you will have a unique experience (and you can learn a lot from it), while when you practice times and again in preparation for some possible future experience you will probably remember that practice as part of a regular activity rather than a unique experience. I think both kinds of situations are necessary, but they perform different functions. Treating a situations as a unique and meaningful experience helps you learn fundamentally new things, while treating it as a single eposide in a long series of similar experiences helps you achieve routine and automacity so you can use your new skills without too much effort. As I wrote before, I don't think there is a perfect way of learning anything, but I think if you go through cycles of studying, practicing and then using your not perfectly learnt skills in a way that is meaningful to you, you will figure out what works for you. I can't explain it all that well, but when I actually do that (and I often don't ...) I feel that I spend less time and effort practicing but seem to learn faster, because when I then practice I can remember unique situations in which I learnt the information or tried to use the skill. Twice a week would be enough for me, if it's not copying characters or using flash cards, but trying to write a text in my own words. Other people on this forum who use Anki [I only accidentally open it, decide I don't really want to find out how to make The Perfect Deck today and close it again] say it's a good idea to change the cues you get for leeches - like adding a better explanation, sample sentence, a different mnemonic. That seems to make a lot of sense. I think you should learn the radicals and their general meaning, and learn how to look up kanji based on main radical. Now, when I started out I just memorized kanji I thought looked interesting or meant something interesting, and my learner's dictionary had radical lookup. I didn't learn the radicals initially, I just ... figured out that 扌,龵 were related to 手, 疒 to sickness etc because of the kanji they appeared in. My dictionary also had a reading lookup, and searching through different kanji with the same on'yomi, I noticed patterns there too. Later I realized that there are books and websites, even wikipedia, which have all that information and that I didn't have to figure out all of these things by myself ... Of course you are unlikely to guess the exact meaning of a kanji, but if you know that it must be related to sickness, that the radical means dog or grass/plant you can think about what it might mean in the given context, and that thinking about it before you look it up makes it easier to remember. Edited by Bao on 25 November 2014 at 12:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5029 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 8 of 12 24 November 2014 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm learning Chinese characters for Mandarin, but I imagine the method is similar.
So here's what I do--if it doesn't work for you, that's fine, just sharing. I use Anki. I create a card for, let's say, "child." Front: child Back: Pinyin: zǐ. Picture of the character, with stroke order. Available many places on the Internet, notably on Wiktionary. Wiktionary also has gifs that show the character being written. Add the pronunciation from Forvo. Sometimes certain words (or, pictures, in this case), just don't stick. So, if you like, you can add a story. However, I prefer, instead of an artificial story, to add the etymology (which is helpful to know otherwise). You can find this on Wiktionary too. zǐ, for instance, has pictures that show the development of the character from the original oracle bone script (which is often closer to the actual meaning of the term--with zǐ, for instance, the oracle bone script looks a lot more like a child than the modern ideogram). To count the card as answered correctly, I require that I pronounce it correctly and can draw the character (with proper stroke order). Carry around a notebook so you can write while you review. Then make the reverse as well. A fact becomes much better fixed in the mind when you can both recognize and reproduce it. Best of luck! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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