Comment by bemmu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bemmu | Hacker News Reader

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Oh man, I wish I could advance at such a pace. Sometimes I doubt these fast-learner stories, but I guess different people just have different abilities.

I lived in Tokyo for 2 years, studying Japanese full-time, and completed several courses in Finland before that. Speaking came pretty easy and I am quite fluent in normal conversation, but learning kanji has proven to be a real time-sink and a source of frustration, although at the same time I love them for their beauty. Also reading Japanese feels different than reading languages in the Latin alphabet, as the characters have an extra layer of meaning (not a huge difference, but helps to distinguish homonyms + create new kinds of puns / emphasis).

There are roughly 2000 kanji that you should know to be a high-school level reader. The latest test I took (http://www.speedanki.com) shows I know about 800. Reading a newspaper is not possible currently, as I would have to constantly look up kanji, and often the important words are the rarer ones.

But I will learn them. At this point it's an obsession, I'm not even sure why I need to know them, except to prove to myself that I can.

So far the best source I found for learning kanji is http://smart.fm/. Fits very well with my way of learning, and is also great for vocabulary.

If you use Firefox, the gTranslate extension is pretty good for looking up words/phrases quickly. All you have to do is highlight the word, right click, and there's a translation menu item that has the translation. It might not be the best for individual characters, but it's quicker than going to the dictionary every five seconds.

http://www.rikai.com automatically displays popups for kanji as you hover your mouse over them. Here's a direct URL to browse the Japanese Slashdot with it: http://tr.im/ooJg

But what I really meant were dead-tree books and newspapers that I could read while not at the computer.

The peraperakun plug-in gives pop-ups for words and phrases and it was written specifically for students of Japanese and has been around for a long time.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3343

"Reading a newspaper is not possible currently..."

It may be painful, but it should be possible; yes, you'll have to look up the kanji, over and over -- writing them down as you look them up -- and it'll take you half an hour to read half of one article. But if you keep at it, and keep looking them up, every day, you will improve -- you will learn them! You just have to tolerate a lot of tedium on your way.

Have you tried using Heisig's Remembering the Kanji?

For those that don't know, the Heisig method is a very famous mnemonic method for remembering the kanji. According to some people with brains apparently wired differently than mine, you can learn all kanji in a few months with this method. The method starts with giving each compound part that appears in more complex characters an English language name. These names are then used to create stories that tie the more complex kanji together. After this you have English names for all characters. Then you go on to study their pronunciations.

Yes, I have seriously tried it. Maybe it works for some people. It's of course quite hard to recall why you really remember something, but in the 800 kanji I know according to the test, the vast majority I seemed to remember from seeing/using them in context while reading/writing Japanese. Mnemonics are an attractive thought, and I hope they do really work for some people. Personally I am a bit skeptical. My feeling now is that learning doesn't have to be brought up to conscious thought, but is something that happens naturally as you re-encounter things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

If you'd like, you can combine these two things too. http://kanji.koohii.com/learnmore.php

Mnemonic methods where you remember elaborate stories using your own language are actually kind of a bad idea, though the intent is good. The idea is that you remember a concept better when there are plenty of connections with other things in your head. This is true, and this is why mnemonic methods work very well for beginners, especially people who are getting nowhere on their own.

However, in order to become fluent in a language, you need to think in that language, which means you need to build up concept associations in that language. By teaching yourself e.g. English mnemonics when learning Japanese, you are irreversibly tying your Japanese knowledge to your English, and giving yourself a handicap in acquiring fluency.

If you instead remember a word by memorizing a specific use / context of that word in the target language (and add some visual imagery to that for good measure), then this gives you memory associations that will actually remain useful as you become a better speaker. This is why immersion works so well: your entire learning is grounded in the necessity of speaking with and understanding the culture you are living in. If you need to eat, you will develop a food vocabulary very rapidly.

Mind you, I speak about four languages, am fluent in three and grew up naturally speaking two, so maybe my brain is also wired differently than most.

The mnemonic method being referred to is aimed as specifically learning written Japanese. It is not about learning words. It's about learning kanji.

The problem is that Japanese has the most complicated written language in the world. It has two alphabets and a set of many thousands of symbols (kanji) borrowed from Chinese. Learning spoken Japanese is an entirely different undertaking than learning written Japanese.

You can be completely fluent in Japanese and still not be able to read a newspaper (this may actually be more common than not).

I learned Kanji (or Hanzi, as it were) by rote practice and careful attention to the calligraphy of each stroke. It turns out each stroke has a rhythm, and the sequence of strokes have a composite rhythm unique to the character.

Rhythm is an important mnemonic aid. The Homeric epics are poems because poetry has meter and rhyme, and people needed that to remember the whole thing. Same thing with Kanji.

A friend of mine used RtK and spaced repetition to learn those 2000 kanji. The key to his mind was to practice every day without any skips, otherwise he would backslide several days for every day missed. It seems to have been effective for him at least.

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