11 ms·

A New Way to Learn Kanji

13 points by sova 5y ago

ranger_danger 5y ago
> I propose a method called and orthographic gradient typo
AkshayPrabhu 5y ago
How does this differ from existing stuff like Wanikani?
zaik 5y ago
I learned my kanji with Wanikani. Beyond level 30 I found myself ditching the mnemonics and basically "brute force" the learning process. If I had to start all over again I would choose Anki and example sentences (my current learning routine). I don't think there's really a way around learning by example sentences (either through Anki, reading a lot, ...) so you might as well start from there.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
klodolph 5y ago
“We can imagine many little tongues, a 千housand specifically, to help us recall this kanji and how to draw it.” Well, first of all, my teachers would take issue with “drawing” kanji. You write Chinese characters, just like you write letters in English. Second of all, my teachers would encourage you to not rely much on mnemonic devices. There is a large body of research about how effective mnemonics are for learning. From https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full > On the basis of the literature reviewed above, we rate the keyword mnemonic as low utility. We cannot recommend that the keyword mnemonic be widely adopted. It does show promise for keyword-friendly materials, but it is not highly efficient (in terms of time needed for training and keyword generation), and it may not produce durable learning. (Note that the paper specifically discusses learning foreign language vocabulary.) The thing is… it should not take you long to learn Chinese characters. You can just put in the time to memorize it by going over it again and again, and trying to read aloud passages written in Japanese, or answering questions about the content. Really engaging with the material and using it in the same way you intend to use it in the future. I see a lot mnemonic tricks, apps, etc. for foreign language learning. For some reason, a lot of focus on Japanese, specifically (never seen a post about learning Spanish on Hacker News). My opinion of these apps and techniques is, by and large, very low. If you want to be proficient, you should be reading and writing as much material as possible, and you can remember Chinese characters mostly with rote memorization, with maybe a little bit of mnemonics to help you get started. Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictograms. Once you get into the 500-1,000 character range, you’ll be making guesses at character meanings from context and radicals. Coming up with better mnemonics, or better ways to introduce mnemonics, is a low-value activity. You can go through an entire book of mnemonics that teaches you 1,000 Chinese characters and retain none of it. What you want is a curriculum that exposes you to kanji incrementally, with plenty of sample text that you can practice reading (and answer questions about!). The sample text should have a high percentage of characters you know from previous lessons, use a few new characters, and occasionally toss in a character (with furigana) that you have to figure out from context.
- _hao 5y ago
  > I see a lot mnemonic tricks, apps, etc. for foreign language learning. For some reason, a lot of focus on Japanese, specifically (never seen a post about learning Spanish on Hacker News). My opinion of these apps and techniques is, by and large, very low. If you want to be proficient, you should be reading and writing as much material as possible, and you can remember Chinese characters mostly with rote memorization, with maybe a little bit of mnemonics to help you get started. Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictograms. Once you get into the 500-1,000 character range, you’ll be making guesses at character meanings from context and radicals. > Coming up with better mnemonics, or better ways to introduce mnemonics, is a low-value activity. You can go through an entire book of mnemonics that teaches you 1,000 Chinese characters and retain none of it. That's not my experience at all. Please see my link detailing my own experience with the Heisig method.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    > That's not my experience at all. Please see my link detailing my own experience with the Heisig method. Did you forget to post the link? Heisig’s approach to break down the characters into components is indeed useful, I just doubt the usefulness of the “stories” that Heisig provides.
    - _hao 5y ago
      Sorry, I posted the link in a top level comment before answering you. In any case here it is again - https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-characters-in-a-month-heisig-method-review/ https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-char... His stories weren't really useful to me either and I made my own since that's what the method is based upon. The stories he provides are a guideline for the method, but making your own stories is the key. I've done that over a year ago and I've finished the second tome too since then (albeit with a slower pace than what I did for the first).
      - klodolph 5y ago
        How well are you able to read? It looks like the article is about memorizing characters, which is useful, but I’d imagine that the end goal is reading comprehension.
_hao 5y ago
Shameless plug on my own experience with Heisig for Chinese characters - https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-characters-in-a-month-heisig-method-review/ https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-char...
Kelamir 5y ago
It's not new, and the article seems to state superfluous inventions of their own to generate some income.
- antiterra 5y ago
  It’s frustrating because, on HN, people often miss the key novelty that makes something better and different and unfairly dismiss it. But, in this case, it’s genuinely nothing new.
- DemocracyFTW 5y ago
  I find the concept of their 'jars' and the classification into u/ru/i-verbs and na/no-nouns and so on novel, interesting, and also at least not wrong on the intuitive level.
antiterra 5y ago
I don’t understand what is new here, mnemonics sometimes work but if you really want to learn kanji properly you also need to learn stroke order. In some cases mnemonics work, in others, simply knowing the components works. Sometimes both concepts combine, such as in 木 (tree), 林(woods) and 森(forest). Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, often with kanji compounds, and you just have to memorize it and the various cases for different readings. Knowing that 悪 (evil, bad, hate) is a weight or i-beam crushing a 心 (heart) only takes you so far. It won’t tell you if it’s aku, o, or waru. You’ve gotta learn it and use it.
- arrakeen 5y ago
  > if you really want to learn kanji properly you also need to learn stroke order i think this depends on what your goals are. for example, if i only wanted to be able to read and type japanese, why would i care about stroke order?
  - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
    You need proper stroke order to write Kanji with a pen. You want to write Japanese with a pen a lot if you want to learn to read written Japanese because it builds 'muscle memory', i.e. an intimate, up-close-and-personal knowledge of the structure of the components of Kanji. This helps learning to read, a lot. Learning to read Japanese just by staring at printed characters is a lot harder; it's totally doable but it really gets hard beyond a few frequent and graphically salient characters. If you want your handwriting to look acceptable, then proper stroke order is an absolute must. When you go further and learn cursive and grass script, then you'll get to learn multiple stroke orders per character (and hundreds of conventionalized doodles for components and whole characters).
    - Kelamir 5y ago
      > Learning to read Japanese just by staring at printed characters is a lot harder; it's totally doable but it really gets hard beyond a few frequent and graphically salient characters. It might be your personal experience, and I understand that mnemonics don't work out with everyone and some have better muscle memory and worse imagination. However, it's disingenuous to say that writing is a lot harder. I had no problem whatsoever learning meanings of 1500 kanji in 60 days, 2 hours a day. Other people have success too.
canjobear 5y ago
You just have to memorize them. There is no shortcut. Millions of schoolchildren have done this. It's not too hard. Eventually you will start noticing patterns in the characters, which will make it easier, but you will still have to memorize each new character.
- astrobe_ 5y ago
  > It's not too hard. It takes 6 years to Japanese children, who are totally immersed in and had prior exposure to this writing system. I think western children are done learning to read in 1 or 2 years. It is freaking hard.
  - canjobear 5y ago
    And yet they basically all learn it. Japan’s literacy is very high. It’s not hard, it’s just tedious and time-consuming.
eska 5y ago
Protip: if you keep looking for a new technique to learn kanji, you’re procrastinating. There’s a common mistake people make when studying in general: they don’t actually practice recall. As long as you try to recall instead of looking at kanji all day and trying to come up with smart techniques or mnemonics or whatever you’ll do just fine.

13 points by sova 5y ago

ranger_danger 5y ago

> I propose a method called and orthographic gradient typo

AkshayPrabhu 5y ago

How does this differ from existing stuff like Wanikani?

zaik 5y ago

I learned my kanji with Wanikani. Beyond level 30 I found myself ditching the mnemonics and basically "brute force" the learning process. If I had to start all over again I would choose Anki and example sentences (my current learning routine). I don't think there's really a way around learning by example sentences (either through Anki, reading a lot, ...) so you might as well start from there.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

klodolph 5y ago

“We can imagine many little tongues, a 千housand specifically, to help us recall this kanji and how to draw it.” Well, first of all, my teachers would take issue with “drawing” kanji. You write Chinese characters, just like you write letters in English. Second of all, my teachers would encourage you to not rely much on mnemonic devices. There is a large body of research about how effective mnemonics are for learning. From https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full > On the basis of the literature reviewed above, we rate the keyword mnemonic as low utility. We cannot recommend that the keyword mnemonic be widely adopted. It does show promise for keyword-friendly materials, but it is not highly efficient (in terms of time needed for training and keyword generation), and it may not produce durable learning. (Note that the paper specifically discusses learning foreign language vocabulary.) The thing is… it should not take you long to learn Chinese characters. You can just put in the time to memorize it by going over it again and again, and trying to read aloud passages written in Japanese, or answering questions about the content. Really engaging with the material and using it in the same way you intend to use it in the future. I see a lot mnemonic tricks, apps, etc. for foreign language learning. For some reason, a lot of focus on Japanese, specifically (never seen a post about learning Spanish on Hacker News). My opinion of these apps and techniques is, by and large, very low. If you want to be proficient, you should be reading and writing as much material as possible, and you can remember Chinese characters mostly with rote memorization, with maybe a little bit of mnemonics to help you get started. Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictograms. Once you get into the 500-1,000 character range, you’ll be making guesses at character meanings from context and radicals. Coming up with better mnemonics, or better ways to introduce mnemonics, is a low-value activity. You can go through an entire book of mnemonics that teaches you 1,000 Chinese characters and retain none of it. What you want is a curriculum that exposes you to kanji incrementally, with plenty of sample text that you can practice reading (and answer questions about!). The sample text should have a high percentage of characters you know from previous lessons, use a few new characters, and occasionally toss in a character (with furigana) that you have to figure out from context.

_hao 5y ago
> I see a lot mnemonic tricks, apps, etc. for foreign language learning. For some reason, a lot of focus on Japanese, specifically (never seen a post about learning Spanish on Hacker News). My opinion of these apps and techniques is, by and large, very low. If you want to be proficient, you should be reading and writing as much material as possible, and you can remember Chinese characters mostly with rote memorization, with maybe a little bit of mnemonics to help you get started. Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictograms. Once you get into the 500-1,000 character range, you’ll be making guesses at character meanings from context and radicals. > Coming up with better mnemonics, or better ways to introduce mnemonics, is a low-value activity. You can go through an entire book of mnemonics that teaches you 1,000 Chinese characters and retain none of it. That's not my experience at all. Please see my link detailing my own experience with the Heisig method.
- klodolph 5y ago
  > That's not my experience at all. Please see my link detailing my own experience with the Heisig method. Did you forget to post the link? Heisig’s approach to break down the characters into components is indeed useful, I just doubt the usefulness of the “stories” that Heisig provides.
  - _hao 5y ago
    Sorry, I posted the link in a top level comment before answering you. In any case here it is again - https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-characters-in-a-month-heisig-method-review/ https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-char... His stories weren't really useful to me either and I made my own since that's what the method is based upon. The stories he provides are a guideline for the method, but making your own stories is the key. I've done that over a year ago and I've finished the second tome too since then (albeit with a slower pace than what I did for the first).
    - klodolph 5y ago
      How well are you able to read? It looks like the article is about memorizing characters, which is useful, but I’d imagine that the end goal is reading comprehension.

_hao 5y ago

Shameless plug on my own experience with Heisig for Chinese characters - https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-characters-in-a-month-heisig-method-review/ https://underscorehao.net/2020/05/learning-1500-chinese-char...

Kelamir 5y ago

It's not new, and the article seems to state superfluous inventions of their own to generate some income.

antiterra 5y ago
It’s frustrating because, on HN, people often miss the key novelty that makes something better and different and unfairly dismiss it. But, in this case, it’s genuinely nothing new.
DemocracyFTW 5y ago
I find the concept of their 'jars' and the classification into u/ru/i-verbs and na/no-nouns and so on novel, interesting, and also at least not wrong on the intuitive level.

antiterra 5y ago

I don’t understand what is new here, mnemonics sometimes work but if you really want to learn kanji properly you also need to learn stroke order. In some cases mnemonics work, in others, simply knowing the components works. Sometimes both concepts combine, such as in 木 (tree), 林(woods) and 森(forest). Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, often with kanji compounds, and you just have to memorize it and the various cases for different readings. Knowing that 悪 (evil, bad, hate) is a weight or i-beam crushing a 心 (heart) only takes you so far. It won’t tell you if it’s aku, o, or waru. You’ve gotta learn it and use it.

arrakeen 5y ago
> if you really want to learn kanji properly you also need to learn stroke order i think this depends on what your goals are. for example, if i only wanted to be able to read and type japanese, why would i care about stroke order?
- DemocracyFTW 5y ago
  You need proper stroke order to write Kanji with a pen. You want to write Japanese with a pen a lot if you want to learn to read written Japanese because it builds 'muscle memory', i.e. an intimate, up-close-and-personal knowledge of the structure of the components of Kanji. This helps learning to read, a lot. Learning to read Japanese just by staring at printed characters is a lot harder; it's totally doable but it really gets hard beyond a few frequent and graphically salient characters. If you want your handwriting to look acceptable, then proper stroke order is an absolute must. When you go further and learn cursive and grass script, then you'll get to learn multiple stroke orders per character (and hundreds of conventionalized doodles for components and whole characters).
  - Kelamir 5y ago
    > Learning to read Japanese just by staring at printed characters is a lot harder; it's totally doable but it really gets hard beyond a few frequent and graphically salient characters. It might be your personal experience, and I understand that mnemonics don't work out with everyone and some have better muscle memory and worse imagination. However, it's disingenuous to say that writing is a lot harder. I had no problem whatsoever learning meanings of 1500 kanji in 60 days, 2 hours a day. Other people have success too.

canjobear 5y ago

You just have to memorize them. There is no shortcut. Millions of schoolchildren have done this. It's not too hard. Eventually you will start noticing patterns in the characters, which will make it easier, but you will still have to memorize each new character.

astrobe_ 5y ago
> It's not too hard. It takes 6 years to Japanese children, who are totally immersed in and had prior exposure to this writing system. I think western children are done learning to read in 1 or 2 years. It is freaking hard.
- canjobear 5y ago
  And yet they basically all learn it. Japan’s literacy is very high. It’s not hard, it’s just tedious and time-consuming.

eska 5y ago

Protip: if you keep looking for a new technique to learn kanji, you’re procrastinating. There’s a common mistake people make when studying in general: they don’t actually practice recall. As long as you try to recall instead of looking at kanji all day and trying to come up with smart techniques or mnemonics or whatever you’ll do just fine.