The other day I wrote a somewhat obstinate piece on why learning kanji thoroughly is important for the learner of the Japanese language, accidentally calling myself, and possibly you – my apologies for that – a dumbass in the process. Now that I’ve gotten that off my heart, I’d like to touch upon the much more difficult and substantial topic of how to learn those kanji. I do not mean this to be a definite and final guide in any way, but rather I hope to share my experience and thoughts regarding the most efficient way(s) to kanji fluency.
First of all: my kanji level is already pretty high. I can read books and (somewhat) newspapers in Japanese. Secondly: I find kanji quite easy to learn. I know a lot of people who think studying kanji is worse than being eaten alive by killer ants (I just saw the movie “The Hive”, so please excuse the analogy), but for me learning kanji has always been very enjoyable. Intelligence tests have shown (as I already suspected) that my intellect is based around spatial/visual understanding of concepts, and perhaps kanji just happen to be my calling in this world… Or maybe I’ve found fun interesting and stumulating ways of studying kanji, which I hope – and actually think – is the case, because that means you can find it just as fun as I do!
Thirdly: I still have a lot of learning to do. I estimate I know about two thirds of the kanji I need to know now. So there’s still a lot “in it” for myself to refine my study methods as well.
Anyway nuf of me jabberin bout myself. Please let me tell you what I think is the poodle’s core of kanji, and the key to the successful learning of which:
It’s true! Kanji, to the Japanese, is just the character set you use to write Japanese. Japanese is a natural language and thus it’s primarily spoken. Kanji might not be the most efficient way of transcribing spoken word into writing, but it is nevertheless how it’s done in Japanese. And efficiency aside – it’s a very charismatic method!
Now, there are people - such as my arch nemesis Dr. Heisig - who want you to believe stories such as: Japanese is very easy for Chinese people to learn because they already “know” the characters, so the best way for a Western fatass such as myself to learn kanji must be to first remember their shapes and compositions and associate them to some stupid keyword. Then I’ll be on a par with the Chinese and can start learning the Japanese readings and the words they’re used in – not to mention trying to forget all the erroneous and stupid keywords I was made to believe to be actually useful.
Well people, I don’t want to go through the process of becoming Chinese in order to become Japanese, nor do I want to spend substantial time memorizing misinformation, as the keywords are often not very related to the actual usage of the kanji. I want to learn Japanese kanji; their meanings, writings, usages, and – most of all – pronunciations.
Kanji are the characters used to write words, and thus it is essential to learn their phonetic values as well as practical usages in writing vocabulary words. Concepts such as “meanings” or “keywords” for kanji are constructed and construed.
I do believe kanji have meanings though, and I’d like to recommend a good book for learning them. It’s the book called “A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters” by Kenneth G. Henshall. First of all I’d like to raise my two major complaints about that book, that are essentially the same: the title and the “mnemonics” thing. I will go ahead and blame that -again! – mainly on my arch nemesis Dr. Heisig. It’s all Heisig’s fault! Everyone seems to think you need some magic mnemonic formula to magically “remember” the kanji… It makes me sick!
But Henshall’s book – besides the name and the stupid “mnemonics” thing attached to each entry – is actually nothing more and nothing less than a simple etymological kanji dictionary! There are many of these in Japanese, and I strongly recommend you to upgrade to a Japanese one as soon as you’re fairly comfortable with it, but until then Henshall’s book is superb.
Anyway, no book is the solution to learning the kanji. I believe everyday practical tricks are the key to that. More about that in the next post…
Hello Henrik,
enjoying your take on japanese language learning.
I know I'm not going to bring you round to Heisig, but, having found a nice man somewhere on a language forum who gave me a cross referenced database of the Heisig numbers with the white rabbit flash card numbers, I managed to order the white rabbit JLPT-2 flash cards in order of appearance in Heisig with little hassle. In a typical study session I check out Heisig's way of remembering the elements in the kanji (more or less in his beloved order, except skipping the higher level JLPT-1 kanji) and at the same time research the readings, and the necessary vocabulary associated with the kanji from white rabbit flash cards.
Additionally, if I check rikai-chan for Firefox for that particular kanji, it comes up with the nelson number and I can then reference than in my nelson dictionary which probably has all the major word combinations you are likely to need.
On occasion I find some of Heisig's memory games need more imagination or literary references than I happen to know but on the whole his method is helping as part of an integrated approach. As for the key words, 幅 recently came up, his key word is 'hanging scroll' but you are more likely to see it in
Photoshop where width would be in English, seemingly illustrating your point. However, check Nelson and it actually does mean hanging scroll, or counter for scrolls. The key words seem to be, as far as I can tell, based on etymology but often from a bygone era and meaning.
Having said all this, you are far advanced than I, and maybe I too will come to throw his book out with the moeru gomi.
Take care,
Hi Louise, thank you for the comment. I guess in the end the important thing is that one actually studies, more than what method one chooses. But if you're checking out readings and vocabulary then you're not really doing it the Heisig way anyway – a good thing.
I read an interesting book recently (in Japanese, of course) written by a psychology professor that had some interesting remarks that immediately made me think it kind of explained partly why Heisig's method is suboptimal (to me, at least). I think I'll write a post about it soon…
I also have those flash cards.
Although I haven't used them for 2-3 years. I think they did have some value for my studies.
Hey, nice post, but I just want to say that learning kanji via etymology is absolutely a fool's errand. I recommend looking up any modern-use kanji with more than four primitives on here to see what I mean:
http://www.kanjinetworks.com/index.cfm
Kanji etymology is a mysterious labyrinth the japanese learner is best not stepping into for the purpose of learning, save for a few characters with very interesting etymologies that are relevant to their modern meanings (the etymology for 県 gave me a solid mnemonic I never needed to tool with).