3 ms·
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
by 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 agoMy 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 agoHeh. 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 agoSame 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