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As a Japanese, I agree with you. When friends who are learning the language ask me questions, I sometimes can't even answer them. So I end up saying "that's jus

by kh1 6y ago

As a Japanese, I agree with you. When friends who are learning the language ask me questions, I sometimes can't even answer them. So I end up saying "that's just how we say/use it". And much respect from me. I wouldn't learn Japanese if my mother tongue is European language.

robotmay 6y ago
I've tried twice to learn Japanese and I consistently get stuck on kanji. The spoken language is actually really intuitive in a lot of ways, and hiragana/katakana fit easily into my brain, but kanji, with the multiple and inconsistent readings, is just mind-blowingly hard for me. And it's a shame that I keep getting stuck there as it really is a beautiful language.
- charcircuit 6y ago
  Learning kanji is a skill. The more you practice it, the easier it will get. Also what's a few thousand kanji if you also have to learn 10s of thousands of vocabulary.
- kh1 6y ago
  I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Japanese). On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. So you shouldn't feel bad about it, taking small steps serve you well in the long term.
  - matt-attack 6y ago
    How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??
    - kleton 6y ago
      Nowadays you draw it in your phone/computer. In the old days you looked up by "radical" and number of strokes in large tables.
    - kh1 6y ago
      When you finish middle school, you're supposed to learn most of kanjis used in real life.[0] At that point it's pretty rare to encounter kanjis that are completely foreign to you. But there's electronic dictionary on which you can draw to search for kanji.[1] I used one of these in high school. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji [1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales/jp/ja/exword/product/X/XD/XDS/XD-SX4900WE/assets/XD-SX4900WE_Seq1.jpg https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...
    - charcircuit 6y ago
      The easiest way is just using OCR which for example the Google Translate app lets you do. After that you can search by drawing it or search by the radicals that you recognize in it.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    > On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. Do you have any thoughts on the implications (social, mainly) of logographic writing systems? Also would be interested in having a sense of the historic patterns of literacy in Japan in context of Tokugawa caste system. /tia
  - charcircuit 6y ago
    >Those kanjis are the easy ones One thing to note is that the order they are learned is not from easiest to hard. The order is more based off the complexity of the meaning of the kanji.
- aasasd 6y ago
  Perhaps ‘spaced repetition’ tools like Anki might come in handy in organising the memorization. You still need to come up with a system, but the app will then help with putting kanji into the brain. Spaced repetition is suited precisely for things that don't have a prominent internal structure which would lend itself to learning. Afaik Anki is popular for learning Japanese, iirc even the author did exactly that, so there's probably plenty of readymade material. Though it may be mostly for vocabulary.
  - cehrlich 6y ago
    Yes, IMO the easiest way to 'learn' the kanji is Heisig's book "Remembering the Kanji", along with an Anki deck to review daily. I 'learned' 2000 kanji this way in 3 months, with a daily time investment of about 1 hour. There are plenty of pre-made RTK Anki decks. The reason I'm putting learn in quotation marks is because afterwards you need to reinforce them in context, ie by learning vocab and doing tons of reading (there's a term called 多読 which means it's not the quality of the material or even your level of comprehension, but just the sheer amount of pages you read).

by kh1 6y ago

robotmay 6y ago

I've tried twice to learn Japanese and I consistently get stuck on kanji. The spoken language is actually really intuitive in a lot of ways, and hiragana/katakana fit easily into my brain, but kanji, with the multiple and inconsistent readings, is just mind-blowingly hard for me. And it's a shame that I keep getting stuck there as it really is a beautiful language.

charcircuit 6y ago
Learning kanji is a skill. The more you practice it, the easier it will get. Also what's a few thousand kanji if you also have to learn 10s of thousands of vocabulary.
kh1 6y ago
I think you should start with easy ones. IIRC kids take small tests in class every semester at elementary school (like 50-150 kanjis per test). Those kanjis are the easy ones and then you can build up. So learning kanjis you find on a newspaper or a novel might be too hard. Understanding those words in real life context requires you to have higher language skills anyway (e.g. understand economy news or whatever in Japanese). On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. So you shouldn't feel bad about it, taking small steps serve you well in the long term.
- matt-attack 6y ago
  How do you look one up you don’t recognize? Like there must be dictionaries but what is your “alphabetical order”??
  - kleton 6y ago
    Nowadays you draw it in your phone/computer. In the old days you looked up by "radical" and number of strokes in large tables.
  - kh1 6y ago
    When you finish middle school, you're supposed to learn most of kanjis used in real life.[0] At that point it's pretty rare to encounter kanjis that are completely foreign to you. But there's electronic dictionary on which you can draw to search for kanji.[1] I used one of these in high school. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji [1] https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales/jp/ja/exword/product/X/XD/XDS/XD-SX4900WE/assets/XD-SX4900WE_Seq1.jpg https://www.casio.com/content/dam/casio/product-info/locales...
  - charcircuit 6y ago
    The easiest way is just using OCR which for example the Google Translate app lets you do. After that you can search by drawing it or search by the radicals that you recognize in it.
- eternalban 6y ago
  > On a slight side note, kids can't even write their own names in kanji. You can imagine how happy we got when we were taught kanjis that were part of our name. Do you have any thoughts on the implications (social, mainly) of logographic writing systems? Also would be interested in having a sense of the historic patterns of literacy in Japan in context of Tokugawa caste system. /tia
- charcircuit 6y ago
  >Those kanjis are the easy ones One thing to note is that the order they are learned is not from easiest to hard. The order is more based off the complexity of the meaning of the kanji.
aasasd 6y ago
Perhaps ‘spaced repetition’ tools like Anki might come in handy in organising the memorization. You still need to come up with a system, but the app will then help with putting kanji into the brain. Spaced repetition is suited precisely for things that don't have a prominent internal structure which would lend itself to learning. Afaik Anki is popular for learning Japanese, iirc even the author did exactly that, so there's probably plenty of readymade material. Though it may be mostly for vocabulary.
- cehrlich 6y ago
  Yes, IMO the easiest way to 'learn' the kanji is Heisig's book "Remembering the Kanji", along with an Anki deck to review daily. I 'learned' 2000 kanji this way in 3 months, with a daily time investment of about 1 hour. There are plenty of pre-made RTK Anki decks. The reason I'm putting learn in quotation marks is because afterwards you need to reinforce them in context, ie by learning vocab and doing tons of reading (there's a term called 多読 which means it's not the quality of the material or even your level of comprehension, but just the sheer amount of pages you read).