Hacker News Reader

Comment by antiterra | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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?

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).

> 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.

> However, it's disingenuous to say that writing is a lot harder.

You quoted me wrong, and frankly 'disingenuous' sounds like an objectively incorrect vocab choice. Apart from that I confess that I speak from experience gained with a small sample size (around 1), and things may differ with each person.

What's more, I assume neither you nor I have done any rigid testing in this matter. 1500 kanji in 60 days does sound a lot, so good for you. However you cannot say with confidence what the future retention rate will be, nor do you (strictly speaking) know how you would have fared with any other approach. Also consider recognition of kanji (and their correct readings) in actual texts and recognition of artistic, calligraphic, handwriting styles; no idea where I'm standing on those but I do feel I have some kind of grip. Training for the latter does include looking at lots of calligraphic samples, and I do repetitively write some of those, too; it's hard to gauge how much either of these activities contribute to the learning effort.

> You quoted me wrong

I'm sorry, you're right about that, and yes, I don't know how good other approaches would have done it for me.

> However you cannot say with confidence what the future retention rate will be

At the time I studied, I stopped doing Japanese whatsoever, so retention dropped as it should. But I think if I have continued reading texts, I would have retained the meanings of kanji, just like it works with other languages I managed to stick with.

You have a fair point, I think we could conclude that both methods have its odds and cons and it's up to each to decide if they want to use it, so long as no rigid testing is provided, as you say.

I agree. There's not much use in writing, and I find muscle memory arguments fairly strange, considering the time it takes to invest to learn this way, as opposed to just do mnemonics and understand the kanji enough. If you're learning to drive, why spend time building cars?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com