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Hacking the Japanese Proficiency Test: How to Dissect Kanji

13 points by harisenbon 17y ago

redcap 17y ago
Of course there are exceptions, but a remarkable number of kanji share their on-yomi based on a common component. James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji I gives you the tools to write the kanji and assign an english meaning to it (same manner as suggesting that grass that makes you feel better is medicine), with volume II showing the readings in common. I've only gone through volume one, but that itself saves you a heck of a lot of time in that you can write characters without repeatedly practicing them - you just need to use some imagination in creating and remembering stories. I learned to read by reading. Once you have a large enough vocabulary you do pick up on the on-yomi patterns a lot better. Of course knowing this earlier did help - I studied radicals and their meanings before entering university and we hardly touched them there - it was more about brute force rote memorisation. So I can read Japanese (and write it to an extent), but still need more work in speaking it.
- harisenbon 17y ago
  I've actually never read any of Heisig's books, but have a number of friends who swear by his methods. Unfortunately whenever his name comes up in Japanese study forums, you can be sure of a flame war -- people either love him or hate him. While I have a large reading vocabulary, my written is horrible, largely due to the fact that my job requires me to use a computer all day, so the amount of physical writing I do compared to the amount of henkan I do is severely lacking. I've always wanted to sit down with Remembering the Kanji and try to get my writing skills back up to snuff. As someone who can read, but can't write, I wonder how much of a benefit Heisig would give me over some other methodology. I think the biggest detractor against Heisig are some of his followers, ;) A lot of people seem to think that the stories that Heisig gives you are not mnemonics, but rather "meanings," and that by reading the first book you can then simply infer the entirety of kanji just by putting the radicals together. I had a person on a forum I frequent say that even without knowing the meaning, he could infer that 社会 was "society" because it was "God, Meeting with the ground." I asked him then why 会社 didn't have the same meaning, and he was rather silent about that one. ;)
  - redcap 17y ago
    While you can try infer the meaning of words by knowing the english 'meanings' of the relevant characters, what's worked for me has been just learning a lot of vocabulary by rote and doing a lot of reading. I think the Heisig approach has let it sink in more - there have been a lot of "aha!" moments when I look up the actual english meaning of a compound and figure out the relation to the individual kanji meanings. In terms of actually writing the characters, Heisig effectively taught me how to write each individual component/radical, so I think my writing is pretty decent in that regard. If you are practicing heisig (book 1), you should also be practicing stroke order, or at least a way to compose the character that works for you.
    - harisenbon 17y ago
      My teacher in High School was very strict about stroke order, and I studied shuuji for about 2 years so stroke order is less of a problem for me than just remember what 篇, 旁, etc goes with what kanji. Also I get performance anxiety when people watch me write for some reason.. :/ One of the nice things about using the reading trick that I talk about in the article up there is that it impresses the bejesus out of native speakers when a hard-looking kanji like 状態遷移系 comes up, and you can use the 旁 to pronounce the whole thing (even if you have no idea what it means laugh )
      - donw 17y ago
        Heh. I could figure out the translation, but needed to Google for the meaning: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系 http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系
        harisenbon 17y ago
        Same here. Except for the fact that I didn't look up the meaning until just now when you linked me. ;) And I just finished an entire book based around 状態遷移系! (They explained it in the book, so while I knew what it was talking about, I had no idea what it meant in english. laugh
  - 17y ago
soc 17y ago
yea, I agree with remember the kanji by Heisig for kanji study and also lots of reading. Anyone taking the JLPT this year ? I'm skipping jlpt3 this year and hoping for 2 in the future. On a startup related note. This site http://www.japonin.com/ http://www.japonin.com/ has a really nice interactive chat for teaching. Will really improve your speaking. Would be nice to see other languages taking off using a similar design. Also seems the lots of new language related startups are doing quite well... lang-8, smartfm, and japanesepod101 to name a few.
- harisenbon 17y ago
  There are a lot of really good resources popping up recently (to my chagrin ;) with a lot of good information to be had. I do lament the lack of higher-level study materials though. Sites like Tae-Kim and studyJapanese, etc all seem to stop at passive form, with only a slight introduction to Keigo (about 3kyu or early 2kyu level) I find very few sites that have enough materials to take their users past 1kyuu, which is one of the reasons why I started my site (and still need to get more content up there). After taking 1kyuu, and starting to work at a Japanese company, I realized that 1kyuu is only the beginning. You really need a much higher level than that to fully participate in a Japanese work environment. Which is why my next sites are set on the JTest (used to be the Jetro).
  - basugasubaku 17y ago
    Is this your site? The majority of the "articles" (http://japanesetesting.com/articles http://japanesetesting.com/articles) are simply sections from Tae Kim's guide copied verbatim. Although at Tae Kim's guide is CCL'd and there is copyright notice at the end of each of the posts... it seems a bit wrong to have them in separate posts like this. Why not just link to Tae Kim's guide outright, once?
    - harisenbon 17y ago
      Yup, it is my site, and yeah, I have always felt odd about the Tae Kim guides thing, but as they are CCL'd, I put them in there (of course with attributions!) The main reasons they're there is: a) they are an amazing source of information for Japanese students. b) I'm currently in the process of creating testing and flashcard packs based around his methodology to supplement his site. c) they filled up space while I started getting original content up. ;) The articles section of my site were originally an "extra" feature, with the flashcards and testing information based on popular textbooks (without copyright infringing) was the main purpose of the site. Essentially 'Here's a bunch of study materials based on the textbook you're currently using.' Of course, as people sign up, and I get more feedback, that's been changing a lot. People are very interested in the testing features, but they also seem to want more articles than I originally anticipated. I'm currently in the process of releasing new articles, (like the Kanji one above), but you're right that having the Lesson articles in with the standard articles seems a bit strange. Perhaps I'll create a subcategory for textbook-based articles (like Tae Kim) and original articles. Thanks for the advice! I'm always looking for more feedback.
MikeMacMan 17y ago
I might have the minority opinion here, but I think there's no substitute for just grinding it out with rote memorization. It's true that after the first 500~600 kanji, you develop an intuition for how an unknown character might be pronounced (based on the radical or another constituent), but Japanese morphology is so maddeningly irregular that I'd rather spend the time on mindless repetition. There's only 1948 kanji, people, just git'r done!
bemmu 17y ago
Btw. if there are Japanese geniuses here who can also code, I am making some apps for Mixi.jp (they recently opened for developers) and could consider doing some projects together. I studied Japanese in Tokyo for 2 years and have been making apps for a while. My email is in my profile.

13 points by harisenbon 17y ago

Of course there are exceptions, but a remarkable number of kanji share their on-yomi based on a common component. James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji I gives you the tools to write the kanji and assign an english meaning to it (same manner as suggesting that grass that makes you feel better is medicine), with volume II showing the readings in common. I've only gone through volume one, but that itself saves you a heck of a lot of time in that you can write characters without repeatedly practicing them - you just need to use some imagination in creating and remembering stories. I learned to read by reading. Once you have a large enough vocabulary you do pick up on the on-yomi patterns a lot better. Of course knowing this earlier did help - I studied radicals and their meanings before entering university and we hardly touched them there - it was more about brute force rote memorisation. So I can read Japanese (and write it to an extent), but still need more work in speaking it.

harisenbon 17y ago
I've actually never read any of Heisig's books, but have a number of friends who swear by his methods. Unfortunately whenever his name comes up in Japanese study forums, you can be sure of a flame war -- people either love him or hate him. While I have a large reading vocabulary, my written is horrible, largely due to the fact that my job requires me to use a computer all day, so the amount of physical writing I do compared to the amount of henkan I do is severely lacking. I've always wanted to sit down with Remembering the Kanji and try to get my writing skills back up to snuff. As someone who can read, but can't write, I wonder how much of a benefit Heisig would give me over some other methodology. I think the biggest detractor against Heisig are some of his followers, ;) A lot of people seem to think that the stories that Heisig gives you are not mnemonics, but rather "meanings," and that by reading the first book you can then simply infer the entirety of kanji just by putting the radicals together. I had a person on a forum I frequent say that even without knowing the meaning, he could infer that 社会 was "society" because it was "God, Meeting with the ground." I asked him then why 会社 didn't have the same meaning, and he was rather silent about that one. ;)
- redcap 17y ago
  While you can try infer the meaning of words by knowing the english 'meanings' of the relevant characters, what's worked for me has been just learning a lot of vocabulary by rote and doing a lot of reading. I think the Heisig approach has let it sink in more - there have been a lot of "aha!" moments when I look up the actual english meaning of a compound and figure out the relation to the individual kanji meanings. In terms of actually writing the characters, Heisig effectively taught me how to write each individual component/radical, so I think my writing is pretty decent in that regard. If you are practicing heisig (book 1), you should also be practicing stroke order, or at least a way to compose the character that works for you.
  - harisenbon 17y ago
    My teacher in High School was very strict about stroke order, and I studied shuuji for about 2 years so stroke order is less of a problem for me than just remember what 篇, 旁, etc goes with what kanji. Also I get performance anxiety when people watch me write for some reason.. :/ One of the nice things about using the reading trick that I talk about in the article up there is that it impresses the bejesus out of native speakers when a hard-looking kanji like 状態遷移系 comes up, and you can use the 旁 to pronounce the whole thing (even if you have no idea what it means laugh )
    - donw 17y ago
      Heh. I could figure out the translation, but needed to Google for the meaning: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系 http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/状態遷移系
      - harisenbon 17y ago
        Same here. Except for the fact that I didn't look up the meaning until just now when you linked me. ;) And I just finished an entire book based around 状態遷移系! (They explained it in the book, so while I knew what it was talking about, I had no idea what it meant in english. laugh
- 17y ago

soc 17y ago

yea, I agree with remember the kanji by Heisig for kanji study and also lots of reading. Anyone taking the JLPT this year ? I'm skipping jlpt3 this year and hoping for 2 in the future. On a startup related note. This site http://www.japonin.com/ http://www.japonin.com/ has a really nice interactive chat for teaching. Will really improve your speaking. Would be nice to see other languages taking off using a similar design. Also seems the lots of new language related startups are doing quite well... lang-8, smartfm, and japanesepod101 to name a few.

harisenbon 17y ago
There are a lot of really good resources popping up recently (to my chagrin ;) with a lot of good information to be had. I do lament the lack of higher-level study materials though. Sites like Tae-Kim and studyJapanese, etc all seem to stop at passive form, with only a slight introduction to Keigo (about 3kyu or early 2kyu level) I find very few sites that have enough materials to take their users past 1kyuu, which is one of the reasons why I started my site (and still need to get more content up there). After taking 1kyuu, and starting to work at a Japanese company, I realized that 1kyuu is only the beginning. You really need a much higher level than that to fully participate in a Japanese work environment. Which is why my next sites are set on the JTest (used to be the Jetro).
- basugasubaku 17y ago
  Is this your site? The majority of the "articles" (http://japanesetesting.com/articles http://japanesetesting.com/articles) are simply sections from Tae Kim's guide copied verbatim. Although at Tae Kim's guide is CCL'd and there is copyright notice at the end of each of the posts... it seems a bit wrong to have them in separate posts like this. Why not just link to Tae Kim's guide outright, once?
  - harisenbon 17y ago
    Yup, it is my site, and yeah, I have always felt odd about the Tae Kim guides thing, but as they are CCL'd, I put them in there (of course with attributions!) The main reasons they're there is: a) they are an amazing source of information for Japanese students. b) I'm currently in the process of creating testing and flashcard packs based around his methodology to supplement his site. c) they filled up space while I started getting original content up. ;) The articles section of my site were originally an "extra" feature, with the flashcards and testing information based on popular textbooks (without copyright infringing) was the main purpose of the site. Essentially 'Here's a bunch of study materials based on the textbook you're currently using.' Of course, as people sign up, and I get more feedback, that's been changing a lot. People are very interested in the testing features, but they also seem to want more articles than I originally anticipated. I'm currently in the process of releasing new articles, (like the Kanji one above), but you're right that having the Lesson articles in with the standard articles seems a bit strange. Perhaps I'll create a subcategory for textbook-based articles (like Tae Kim) and original articles. Thanks for the advice! I'm always looking for more feedback.

MikeMacMan 17y ago

I might have the minority opinion here, but I think there's no substitute for just grinding it out with rote memorization. It's true that after the first 500~600 kanji, you develop an intuition for how an unknown character might be pronounced (based on the radical or another constituent), but Japanese morphology is so maddeningly irregular that I'd rather spend the time on mindless repetition. There's only 1948 kanji, people, just git'r done!

bemmu 17y ago

Btw. if there are Japanese geniuses here who can also code, I am making some apps for Mixi.jp (they recently opened for developers) and could consider doing some projects together. I studied Japanese in Tokyo for 2 years and have been making apps for a while. My email is in my profile.