So to reiterate the main point of my previous post on this subject: focus on pronunciation – i.e. mapping the graphical form of a character to its pronunciation. Ok, unfortunately – due to the complexity of kanji – I guess we have to make that pronunciations. But I think it’s best to focus on one main pronunciation. Usually that’s an on pronunciation, but it can sometimes be a kun one as well for some characters. The important thing is that you choose one as the main one, but also try to remember the other ones as well. Now, I’d like to present three simple tricks for learning kanji:

This seems easy when you say it, but it is also easy to do, if you just do it. First of all get some books. Any book with kanji is pretty fine actually, but as I wrote in my previous post, I like “A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters” by Kenneth G. Henshall. Get a Japanese dictionary, and flip through it as much as possible. One of my personal favorites on the toilet. Before going to sleep, during lunch, on the train, when there’s nothing fun on the tv, basically just spend some time with your books that contain kanji, any chance you have.

I’ll leave the topic of how to most efficiently gain knowledge from books for later – the most important thing is that you just open and read your book. If your Japanese skill is good enough to read (even haltingly) real Japanese literature, then that’s so much better, because I for one prefer reading real books over “textbooks” etc. Anyway, as long as it contains real Japanese (i.e. hardcore kanji).

The Japanese Wikipedia is a superb source of reading material! It is very hardcore both when it comes to kanji and formal grammar/vocabulary (relevant for JLPT1!), and since cross-referencing is central to the idea of a wiki, you can just keep reading and looking up concepts that you don’t understand. In fact, I strongly recommend reading the Japanese Wikipedia for improving any aspect of your Japanese – not to mention general knowledge. And you can read it at work while your code is compiling!

There are a few gazillion permutations of the order in which you can study kanji. Like they do in Japanese elementary school, the order they appear on increasing levels of the JLPT tests, any kind of arbitrary order, or – the gods forbid – Remembering the Kanji order. Anyway that doesn’t matter much. What I think does matter is that you study “series” of characters that you think have something in common. The number of characters in a series can be basically whatever is suits you, but for me it’s usually between a quarter of a dozen to one and a half dozen characters.

When I say “series”, I mean something like this: 激撤徹微徴懲 – these characters used to look very similar to me and when I saw one of them I used to go like “oh, one of those characters”. 哀衰衷褒喪畏 would be another example. Or maybe they don’t look similar, but their meanings/usages conceptually overlap, like 悼慨恨悔 vs 愉悦 etc.

Whatever trick you use to remember these is mostly up to you I think. For me they just seem to stick after a while. But the important thing is to make sure you don’t forget them and can still distinguish between them. I print them out (I suppose you can write them by hand too if that’s your thing) and put them on the partitions (walls are equally usable if you are lucky enough to have that) at my office desk, and on my iGoogle sticky note, and in text files on my computer, etc. Anywhere where you’re bound to see them a lot. That way you’ll immediately notice if when you see the note, you can no longer recall the details about a character. That’s when it’s time review.

I’ve seen it recommended on forums, web sites, and even books (do I even need to mention my arch nemesis any more?): learn the kanji then learn Japanese, or learn the meanings of kanji then learn vocabulary, or learn stupid keywords for all the kanji then learn their pronunciations (remember that pronunciation is the very core of each character!).

First of all: that to me that would be really boring. Don’t encourage yourself to give up – have fun! Secondly: as I mentioned in the previous entry: kanji is the character set used to write Japanese. So don’t study kanji without studying Japanese, and vice versa!

When I say “read a lot of kanji” and “practice series of kanji” above I don’t mean just learn the pronunciation and meaning of each kanji and remember that like some damn parrot. What I’m talking about is to learn not only pronunciation(s) and meaning(s), but also words the kanji is used in – at least one, possibly many – the history/evolution of that character (if it’s interesting, and it often is), and try to read texts containing that character (often you’d go from finding a character frequently used in a text to actively studying that character; I don’t mean you have to find texts that match every character you want to study). Associate that character to other similar characters through “series” of characters.

Here again finding good reading material is essential. Besides Wikipedia, newspapers (i.e. news websites) are extremely good. The kanji in newspapers are definitely hardcore. A nice trick is to try and read the same kind of articles every day. Say you’re interested – or just pretend you’re interested – in economy – the stock markets, even. Then read some stock market articles every day. The first few days you’ll find that the kanji and words used are extremely hard. But after a week or two you’ll find that the same kanji and even the same words reoccur all the time. That’s when you know which kanji you have to learn, and you’ve already got a great source of texts for putting them in context. I’d arbitrarily recommend Asahi Shimbun for a dose of daily reading practice.

Lastly I’ve been recommended and lately seen a lot of recommendations on forums etc on using software/services for studying kanji. Programs such as Anki and Mnemosyne come to mind. I even saw some dude recommend using something called a “kanji box” or something for you Facebook. Now, I don’t have a Facebook account, but I don’t think being logged in to Facebook is going to do any good at all for your kanji studies, even with your fancy kanji box on your profile page. You’re much more likely to spend hours randomly clicking around and not doing much intellectually challenging activities at all.

Color me old-fashioned, but if anything I’d recommend ordinary paper flash cards. But it’s really boring to construct those… so I just keep my kanji and vocabulary in text files on the computer and print them out every once in a while and review those lists a few times. And since I’m surrounding myself with study material – always keeping a book within arm’s reach, a kanji series on the wall, a computer that runs in Japanese, an rss feed with news in Japanese, etc – there’s constant repetition, all the time. If you know you need to learn a certain kanji character, you’ll active take notice every time it pops up. Just make sure to you maximize the chances of it popping up!

Furthermore, my sock stock is growing obsolete. I am sure there are items at least 5 years old in there. I soon realized solving this problem required a radical, new approach. Some might say – a paradigm shift.

So I threw away all my old socks and bought new ones: 15 pairs of the same model of sock. The implication is huge: my socks will now invariably pair themselves up neatly, by the simple process of randomly choosing two socks from a pile. (And it’s a nice model of sock – black and nifty enough to be worn with a suit.)

But I also need to establish a maintenance process. This model will go out of sale. Strange as it may seem, sock vendors do not provide End Of Service agreements even for small-enterprise customers such as myself, so you never know when this will be. It’s safest to assume that once the items have been acquired, replacements are no longer available on the market.

So what I’m thinking is that when I’m – due to wear-and-tear, lossage, etc – down to, say, 12 pairs, I’ll buy 15 new pairs of some other model. This of course will mean that the automatic pairing property breaks, but it will still be extremely simple to manually match the socks into two piles, for both of which the property holds.

Once one stock falls to, say, 9 pairs, then that model will be brought out of circulation – they will probably be approaching their natural end-of-life date by then anyway and already written off. So then I’ll purchase a new set of 15 pairs. Again, a new model can be chosen to offset changes in taste over the life cycle period.

This means that there will never be more than two models in circulation simultaneously, thus the amount of manual sorting required will be kept at a minimum. And, once in the loop, there will always be at least 24 and at most 27 pairs in circulation, using the numbers I’ve conjectured above. These numbers will be tweaked based on gathered real-world usage data.

Of course, the exact number of socks in circulation at a given time will have to be estimated from observed data, which will be imperfect because of socks’ other intrinsic property of showing up at indeterministic locations. If, due to inconsistency, an older generation model of sock – one already taken out of service – is suddenly found, it will have to be immediately disposed of.

This should solve all my sock problems.

After having spent last year mostly away from language studies, doing web technology stuff and other programming projects, this year I find myself spending much of my spare time on improving my Japanese. My goal is to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) level 1 – the highest level – this year. And not only pass it, but pass it with a good margin, or I’m not satisfied.

Two years ago, in 2006, I decided early during the year to take JLPT level 2. I didn’t think I’d pass and neither did my Japanese teacher, but study I did and pass it I did with a score of 81% (60% is necessary to pass). This year I am aiming for over 80% again, preferably closer to 90% (for level 1, 70% is necessary to pass).

But this time I’m using different methods than I did in 2006 to pass JLPT level 2. Back then, I spent time studying kanji, memorizing grammatical patterns, and doing reading exercises from a course book featuring the same kind of texts and questions that appear on the actual test, and also a similar course book for listening. I used the UNICOM books targeting JLPT2, and found the reading and listening books very good, albeit short. I also bought the grammar and vocabulary books, but they were not good. For grammar and vocabulary, I found two books called 日本語総まとめ問題集 grammar (文法編) and vocabulary (語彙編) that were very good. Pictures and fun all over.

For reference, my strong point then was writing/vocabulary, and the weak point was listening. People say if you live in Japan, listening is easy because you hear Japanese all day, but it wasn’t for me. After the test I bought a TV, mostly to improve my listening.

This year I’ve also got the Unicom books, and the Kanzen master grammar and kanji/vocabulary books. As before, I think the Unicom reading book is great, but still short. I haven’t tried the listening book yet. As I wrote I was using different methods. Except for the reading comprehension, but that doesn’t take you very far since the book is so short. The theme for learning Japanese this year is having fun doing it.

I’m not studying kanji this year. One reason is that kanji is no longer a problem (relatively, of course). The other is that I think I will pick up enough kanji from increased reading. Also if you get dwelling on all the peculiarities of kanji, you risk spending too much time on that. At least I do, since I find the peculiarities interesting.

Grammar: I’m no longer memorizing patterns and functions, I’m copying all the example sentences from the Kanzen master book to flash cards and drilling them. Writing the flash cards is tedious, but drilling them is not (particularly). I’m writing on average about 4 example sentences for around 200 grammatical patterns. I plan to finish next month… I go through some of these flash cards on average a few times every day.

My thinking is that instead of, like I did on the JLPT 2 test, analyzing the grammatical structure of the sentence and remembering how the four alternative answers fit into that structure, this year my brain will do all pattern matching work for me. Like “this reminds me of that sentence, so that answer it is”. On top of that, it’s great for learnign vocabulary and expressions as well!

But that’s all old school – the core of this poodle consists of something entirely different! The first one is reading books. Real books, in Japanese. When you get to JLPT1 level that is very much possible. I was planning to start reading books this summer, hoping to have picked up enough grammar and vocabulary by then. But then my workmate told me he’s been reading the Harry Potter series in Japanese and recommended them for simple reading. So I borrowed the first book from him and started reading it – and now I’m hooked. Not hooked on Harry Potter, but on reading books in Japanese.

Harry Potter is really good, since it includes furigana for pretty much all kanji. One could argue this is not good for learning kanji, but I think it is. I don’t want to learn incorrect readings – I might think I know the reading when in fact I have just made it up myself, and anyway as I mentioned before I’m not focusing on kanji – I think that will come by itself. Harry Potter is also good because it’s a Western book. That makes it easier to read when even when you don’t have 100% comprehension – at least you don’t have to struggle with cultural understanding. The story isn’t very complicated either.

So that’s one thing: reading books in Japanese. Grammar, vocabulary, expressions, and reading speed all at once, and it’s fun. The other revolutionary idea came from the same coworker. He had an old, analog radio on his desk at work for a while. I work in a high tech software company targeting the next, successor of the next, successor of the successor of the next, and successor of the successor of the successor of the next series Japanese mobile phones. Having an analog radio on your desk is weird. Initially I just thought it eccentric. But then it hit me: how much time I’ve spent looking for good Japanese podcasts, online radio, and just about any piece of spoken Japanese on the web. A cheap-ass analog radio is actually all that you need! Free (if you avoid paying the NHK fee), simple access to spoken Japanese blurted out like there’s no tomorrow, any time of the day, on any subject you can think of.

So I got myself a small portable radio for 2,000 yen at the local electronics store in the alley. It’s great! I can get on average around 2 hours of listening every work day. At work! It makes both learning Japanese and working fun. I think the radio is what will make the difference between a good score and a great score on the JLPT in December. For anyone in Japan who’s above JLPT2 level I’d really recommend it. This year the listening section will be a breeze.

If only one could get some licensing agreement set up to broadcast all Japanese radio on the web for all the people struggling to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test who are not in Japan, that would be great. But probably unfeasible.