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I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you,

by timr 1y ago

I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore. It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards. As a partial aside, the Heisig anecdote that leads off this piece is painful: > Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations. Going from "Japanese people learn the spoken language first" to "you should spend a big chunk of time learning characters before learning sounds, words or grammar" is a pretty remarkable mental backflip. The author says he spent eleven months doing this before devoting any time to the spoken language. If I could put the "head exploding" emoji here, I would do it. I spent only slightly more time than that at language school, and came out conversational.

lyall 1y ago
Yeah I agree. I way over-indexed on learning kanji (via WaniKani) at the beginning of my Japanese learning journey. I got about halfway through before realizing it was silly that I could read 健忘症 but didn't know many very basic hiragana-only words. It wasn't timed wasted but it probably wasn't the most efficient approach. In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up. Like most things in life, a balanced approach is probably the right one. But you have to know what your goal is. Our brains are lazy, they only get better at what we make them get better at. If your goal is to just read kanji, practice reading kanji. If your goal is to understand and speak the language, practice listening to and speaking the language. But if you want to have a balanced language ability, you'll need to practice it all.
- timr 1y ago
  WaniKani at least teaches words. Spending almost a year of your life doing nothing other than learning "meanings" of individual Kanji is...well, I guess some people just really get addicted to that mechanical feeling of progress? Reading is definitely helpful, but I've found the relative importance of reading, listening and speaking goes in cycles, and especially at the early stages, listening and speaking are far more motivating than anything else. And I'm an introvert!
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up. There is no connection between these two sentences. You can learn to read and write in Japanese without ever learning a single kanji, and that's what everybody does do. Kana serve the purpose flawlessly.
  - Macha 1y ago
    With 0 kanji, it's such a small subset that it's hard to call that a finished job of learning to read or write as you'll be limited to material like kids books or NHK news easy.
    - Cyan488 1y ago
      Yes, I ignored Kanji completely while learning Japanese. I only learned words in hiragana and katakana from my SRS decks. I regret it because it locked me out of a lot of comprehensible input I could have used to actually progress in ways apart from learning the sounds of lots of words (even the sounds I learned were often wrong because I never heard anyone speak the words I was learning).
      - CamperBob2 1y ago
        Am I the only one reading this thread and thinking, "Gee, this sounds like a job for AI?" Why in the world should any human not from Japan devote limited time and brain capacity learning to read and write Japanese? It's literally a robot's job, at this point.
pm215 1y ago
Yes, I agree that trying to learn kanji upfront is a silly idea. Heisig says in the introduction to RTK I that he learned 1900 characters "before the month was out". If like him you can do the whole set in a month and then have no further need of formal review or study beyond using them as they turn up, then I can see it not being a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, almost nobody has a mind that works like Heisig's does: people seem to need longer and to rely more on review via an SRS like Anki. Personally I found my problem with RTK was that I successfully memorised "English keyword to write the character" for 2000 kanji, but this was not at all linked to my actual use of the language, so I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji...
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji... If you didn't know what べんきょう meant, how did you know it was what you wanted to write?
  - pm215 1y ago
    I knew the word (including how it is spoken and what it means), so I would have no difficulty of understanding if it was said to me in conversation, I could read the word whether in kanji or hiragana, I could compose sentences in my head which used it and use it when speaking, I just didn't always remember how to write it in kanji... (Here べんきょう is just an example: the same issue applies to essentially every word.)
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    The characters you copy pasted are in a phonetic script called hiragana, conceptually similar to the English alphabet as each character denotes a sound. The kanji are pictographic characters that often have different pronunciations in different contexts. The kanji for べんきょう are 勉強 (meaning "to study").
thaumasiotes 1y ago
Well, I can say that I've spent more than eleven months learning common characters before learning any Japanese sounds, words, or grammar. But the reason for that is that I was learning Chinese. I spent zero effort on learning any characters preliminary to that. There is no reason you'd need or want character knowledge. My character knowledge is decent now, because eventually my learning method became "talk with Chinese people over Wechat", and if you do that you will necessarily learn common characters.
raincole 1y ago
The idea that one should learn kanji first just to start learning Japanese is utterly nonsense. The author has Stockholm syndrome. If one's mother tongue isn't Chinese/Japanese, I guarantee you that's impossible to understand kanji/hanzi as deeply as a native speaker does just by spending 17 months on memorizing how to write them. It simply never happens. Languages come first and writing systems come later no matter which target language you're trying to acquire. Even native speakers get confused about their own writing systems. It's vs its. Should've vs should of. Doppelganger vs doppleganger. Being able to wield the writing system like a wordmaster is a big plus and a praiseworthy effort. But it really isn't the essence of language acquisition.
jimbokun 1y ago
The time to grind Kanji is when you're ready to really push the breadth of your vocabulary. While you're still picking up grammar it makes more sense to just pick up kanji here and there as you encounter them.
anigbrowl 1y ago
Indeed. I thought the Heisig approach was garbage on the same basis. I did get a kanji reference book that was a bit more focused on learning the Joyo kanji (ie the 2000 or so you need to graduate high school or pass N1) but I did not stick with it because it also used mnemonics as a learning tool and I found them distracting and obnoxious (in the sense that the author kept injecting his personality into them - sorry dude, I came here to learn kanji, not to learn your opinions on things). In general I just do not get the mnemonic approach. It's literally another layer of stuff to recall that frequently doesn't have anything to do with the meaning, and the book I had even connected mnemonics in simpler characters to build into more complex ones. Worst of all, you're learning to identify characters with a bunch of word association in English. Instead of treating chinese characters as a bunch of "tangled squiggles" that you have to memorize or make up stories about you could just ...learn the radicals (called bushi in Japanese). There are around 230 of them, and they are fundamentally pictographic, so the meaning and appearance are linked. Every kanji character is either a radical itself or made up of other radicals, like a word spelled in two dimensions. Some are used much more than others so most of the time you'll be combining the same 32 simple ones. Once you get familiar with them kanji become much easier to remember; a character that is made up of 10 strokes like 勉 is actually made up of just 4 parts which are just a few strokes each. In some cases you can even guess the meaning of a kanji character you've never seen before by looking at the components, but even where you can't, being able to see a complex character as just a collection of familiar simpler chunks makes everything way easier. You can find a kanji radicals deck on Ankiweb and it's small enough to do alongside your vocabulary or listening practice without being a burden. It will induce a little cognitive dissonance because a few very familiar characters have different meanings in their radical form but you will get over that soon enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_freq... is a great reference, both for the frequency and the simpler table of stroke count. The individual radical pages have additional detail tracing each one back to bone script (the oldest system of writing, etching characters on bones) which make the pictorial evolution very clear. By the way, a book I do recommend is the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary by Jack Halperin. This too uses its own schema for looking things up, but it's a simple one, based on the shape (left-right/ top/bottom/ nested/ freestanding) and the number of strokes, which makes looking things up fast. It also contains indexes to look up kanji by radical or pronunciation (eg if you have the furigana) so you are not locked into one way of understanding them like mnemonics. It also has common vocabulary that uses the kanji, stroke order, and all that good stuff. And it has a good reference on the rules of stroke order. There are only 8 of them and (like radicals) once you understand the underlying principle you can look at a new kanji you've never seen before and have a pretty good idea of how to write it. You should still check while you're learning, but the more you write the easier it gets. jisho.org is also incredibly useful, because you can dig into any word to find the kanji within, and then dig into individual kanji to see which radicals they're composed of, as well as looking things up by radical.

by timr 1y ago

lyall 1y ago

Yeah I agree. I way over-indexed on learning kanji (via WaniKani) at the beginning of my Japanese learning journey. I got about halfway through before realizing it was silly that I could read 健忘症 but didn't know many very basic hiragana-only words. It wasn't timed wasted but it probably wasn't the most efficient approach. In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up. Like most things in life, a balanced approach is probably the right one. But you have to know what your goal is. Our brains are lazy, they only get better at what we make them get better at. If your goal is to just read kanji, practice reading kanji. If your goal is to understand and speak the language, practice listening to and speaking the language. But if you want to have a balanced language ability, you'll need to practice it all.

timr 1y ago
WaniKani at least teaches words. Spending almost a year of your life doing nothing other than learning "meanings" of individual Kanji is...well, I guess some people just really get addicted to that mechanical feeling of progress? Reading is definitely helpful, but I've found the relative importance of reading, listening and speaking goes in cycles, and especially at the early stages, listening and speaking are far more motivating than anything else. And I'm an introvert!
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up. There is no connection between these two sentences. You can learn to read and write in Japanese without ever learning a single kanji, and that's what everybody does do. Kana serve the purpose flawlessly.
- Macha 1y ago
  With 0 kanji, it's such a small subset that it's hard to call that a finished job of learning to read or write as you'll be limited to material like kids books or NHK news easy.
  - Cyan488 1y ago
    Yes, I ignored Kanji completely while learning Japanese. I only learned words in hiragana and katakana from my SRS decks. I regret it because it locked me out of a lot of comprehensible input I could have used to actually progress in ways apart from learning the sounds of lots of words (even the sounds I learned were often wrong because I never heard anyone speak the words I was learning).
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      Am I the only one reading this thread and thinking, "Gee, this sounds like a job for AI?" Why in the world should any human not from Japan devote limited time and brain capacity learning to read and write Japanese? It's literally a robot's job, at this point.

pm215 1y ago

Yes, I agree that trying to learn kanji upfront is a silly idea. Heisig says in the introduction to RTK I that he learned 1900 characters "before the month was out". If like him you can do the whole set in a month and then have no further need of formal review or study beyond using them as they turn up, then I can see it not being a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, almost nobody has a mind that works like Heisig's does: people seem to need longer and to rely more on review via an SRS like Anki. Personally I found my problem with RTK was that I successfully memorised "English keyword to write the character" for 2000 kanji, but this was not at all linked to my actual use of the language, so I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji...

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji... If you didn't know what べんきょう meant, how did you know it was what you wanted to write?
- pm215 1y ago
  I knew the word (including how it is spoken and what it means), so I would have no difficulty of understanding if it was said to me in conversation, I could read the word whether in kanji or hiragana, I could compose sentences in my head which used it and use it when speaking, I just didn't always remember how to write it in kanji... (Here べんきょう is just an example: the same issue applies to essentially every word.)
- jimbokun 1y ago
  The characters you copy pasted are in a phonetic script called hiragana, conceptually similar to the English alphabet as each character denotes a sound. The kanji are pictographic characters that often have different pronunciations in different contexts. The kanji for べんきょう are 勉強 (meaning "to study").

thaumasiotes 1y ago

Well, I can say that I've spent more than eleven months learning common characters before learning any Japanese sounds, words, or grammar. But the reason for that is that I was learning Chinese. I spent zero effort on learning any characters preliminary to that. There is no reason you'd need or want character knowledge. My character knowledge is decent now, because eventually my learning method became "talk with Chinese people over Wechat", and if you do that you will necessarily learn common characters.

raincole 1y ago

The idea that one should learn kanji first just to start learning Japanese is utterly nonsense. The author has Stockholm syndrome. If one's mother tongue isn't Chinese/Japanese, I guarantee you that's impossible to understand kanji/hanzi as deeply as a native speaker does just by spending 17 months on memorizing how to write them. It simply never happens. Languages come first and writing systems come later no matter which target language you're trying to acquire. Even native speakers get confused about their own writing systems. It's vs its. Should've vs should of. Doppelganger vs doppleganger. Being able to wield the writing system like a wordmaster is a big plus and a praiseworthy effort. But it really isn't the essence of language acquisition.

jimbokun 1y ago

The time to grind Kanji is when you're ready to really push the breadth of your vocabulary. While you're still picking up grammar it makes more sense to just pick up kanji here and there as you encounter them.

anigbrowl 1y ago

Indeed. I thought the Heisig approach was garbage on the same basis. I did get a kanji reference book that was a bit more focused on learning the Joyo kanji (ie the 2000 or so you need to graduate high school or pass N1) but I did not stick with it because it also used mnemonics as a learning tool and I found them distracting and obnoxious (in the sense that the author kept injecting his personality into them - sorry dude, I came here to learn kanji, not to learn your opinions on things). In general I just do not get the mnemonic approach. It's literally another layer of stuff to recall that frequently doesn't have anything to do with the meaning, and the book I had even connected mnemonics in simpler characters to build into more complex ones. Worst of all, you're learning to identify characters with a bunch of word association in English. Instead of treating chinese characters as a bunch of "tangled squiggles" that you have to memorize or make up stories about you could just ...learn the radicals (called bushi in Japanese). There are around 230 of them, and they are fundamentally pictographic, so the meaning and appearance are linked. Every kanji character is either a radical itself or made up of other radicals, like a word spelled in two dimensions. Some are used much more than others so most of the time you'll be combining the same 32 simple ones. Once you get familiar with them kanji become much easier to remember; a character that is made up of 10 strokes like 勉 is actually made up of just 4 parts which are just a few strokes each. In some cases you can even guess the meaning of a kanji character you've never seen before by looking at the components, but even where you can't, being able to see a complex character as just a collection of familiar simpler chunks makes everything way easier. You can find a kanji radicals deck on Ankiweb and it's small enough to do alongside your vocabulary or listening practice without being a burden. It will induce a little cognitive dissonance because a few very familiar characters have different meanings in their radical form but you will get over that soon enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_freq... is a great reference, both for the frequency and the simpler table of stroke count. The individual radical pages have additional detail tracing each one back to bone script (the oldest system of writing, etching characters on bones) which make the pictorial evolution very clear. By the way, a book I do recommend is the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary by Jack Halperin. This too uses its own schema for looking things up, but it's a simple one, based on the shape (left-right/ top/bottom/ nested/ freestanding) and the number of strokes, which makes looking things up fast. It also contains indexes to look up kanji by radical or pronunciation (eg if you have the furigana) so you are not locked into one way of understanding them like mnemonics. It also has common vocabulary that uses the kanji, stroke order, and all that good stuff. And it has a good reference on the rules of stroke order. There are only 8 of them and (like radicals) once you understand the underlying principle you can look at a new kanji you've never seen before and have a pretty good idea of how to write it. You should still check while you're learning, but the more you write the easier it gets. jisho.org is also incredibly useful, because you can dig into any word to find the kanji within, and then dig into individual kanji to see which radicals they're composed of, as well as looking things up by radical.