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My kanji study   

Hi everyone! Today I thought I'd tell you a little bit about how I'm studying Japanese. I've been learning Japanese for quite a long time now - about eight years - and I have reached the point where I can use my Japanese in daily situations with no problems, and read manga and most Japanese novels without a dictionary. However, there has been one part of Japanese that has always eluded me. You can probably guess what I'm talking about, and it's the same reason that Japanese is known as one of the hardest languages to learn. Yes, I'm talking about writing the kanji.

Now, Japanese schoolchildren generally learn the kanji over many years, starting in the first year of elementary school with a few basic glyphs and gradually learning more every year as they get older. The process never really finishes, but somewhere around high school or university most students can read and write almost all characters that appear in an average Japanese newspaper. That's somewhere around 12 or 15 years of study. This is a long time to spend learning an alphabet! Compare this to British schoolchildren who finish lessons on the alphabet in the first or second year of primary school.

So how is a learner of Japanese as a second language supposed to remember all these characters? Most students try to study the kanji the same way that Japanese schoolchildren learn them: by writing them hundreds and hundreds of times. Drilling with flashcards is also popular. The vast majority of these students give up after a few hundred characters. They find that they get confused between characters that look very similar, and that they forget parts of some characters when they write them (or add in extra ones). Japanese students don't get these things confused because they have so much time and so much experience that they get to know these subtle differences very well. They have time to get used to each kanji and compare and contrast it with any new kanji that they learn. Learners of Japanese as a second language rarely have this much time.

I have found a different way of doing things. Well, first I should say that it's not actually my way, but the way of a man called James Heisig, a retired professor from Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya. Heisig came to Japan from America back in the 70's, and at first was a full-time student of Japanese. All of his fellow students told him that the kanji were certainly the hardest thing to learn in Japanese, and that he should start studying them straight away. Back then there were not very many good dictionaries or textbooks for learners like Heisig, so he set out studying by himself. He came back to his teachers after two months, and they were amazed. In just two months, Heisig had learned how to write all 2000 kanji from memory, and it was very rare for him to make a mistake. After being urged by his fellow students, Heisig made a book of his method, which became "Remembering the Kanji: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters". Heisig finished this book only three months after having starting to learn Japanese.

The secret of Heisig's method is in mnemonics. You make a story for each character that you learn. Somewhere in your story will be the different parts of the kanji, and also the meaning of the kanji. For example, the character "消" means "extinguish". The three strokes on the left of the character mean "drops of water", and the shape on the right-hand-side "肖" means "sparks". (Of course, the original meaning of "肖" is more like "resemblance", but "sparks" is a lot easier to remember.) Now the story goes like this: there are sparks shooting out of a candle, and you need to extinguish them. In this story you have super powers, so you deal with the sparks the most efficient way - by shooting one drop of water at each spark and extinguishing them in mid-air. Of course, you could just pour water on the candle, but that wouldn't be so easy to remember.

Let's look at another example, this time the kanji "潮", meaning "tide". There's no need to separate this kanji into "drops of water","十", "日", "十", and "月". You can just separate it into "drops of water" and "朝". The story might be this: you go to the beach early in the morning to get the best sunbathing spot. You are still tired, so you lie down and close your eyes for a little while. Before you know it, you are woken up suddenly by feeling some drops of water on your arm. You open your eyes and you see the tide has already come in - you're almost in the sea and all your bags are wet!

So, you can see that the stories are very interesting, and because they are interesting they are easy to remember. I try and put as many interesting things in my stories as I can - characters from movies, games, and TV, places that I remember very well, and strange, funny or disgusting events. Using this I've already remembered more than 1000 characters, and I'm not stopping yet.

Another secret of Heisig's method is the order that you learn the kanji in. You never learn a kanji until you've learned all the different parts of that kanji. This is very efficient, and it stops you from learning a very complicated kanji only to find that it could have been a lot easier if you had learned the individual parts first. For example, "二" is kanji number 2, "小" is number 105, "示" is number 1086, "祭" is number 1102, "察" is number 1103, and "擦" is number 1104. Learning "擦" first would be a big waste of energy. Also, this system means that you often learn kanji that look similar at the same time. For example, here are characters 198-210: "桂", "柏", "枠", "梢", "棚", "杏", "桐", "植", "枯", "朴", "村", "相", and "机". This does mean that you don't learn some common characters until very late on - "馬" is kanji number 1978 - but the time it saves you with memorizing is more than worth it, I think.

You've probably noticed that this method doesn't deal at all with the readings of the kanji. That's because it's complicated enough trying to remember the meaning and the writing of each kanji. Both Heisig and I think that it's much better to learn the readings separately - but that's a topic for a different blog post. I've written enough for today, and I think it's time I got back to my kanji study. At the rate I'm going at now, I should reach 2000 characters by the middle of August. Wish me luck!

Jack

by chitchatcafe | 2010-07-27 16:14 | カフェ 英会話 札幌

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