Kanji seems hopeless to me :( any advice ? - Feed Post by sutefuan
Kanji seems hopeless to me :( any advice ?
posted by sutefuan
Comments 6
you can practice writing by printing out the kanji worksheet from the lesson page.
Use mnemonics, don't just try to learn them "stroke by stroke". You can make this in a FEW cases(like me) but in all is CRAZY. Search for remembering the kanji(is not is the best thing ever, but is pretty good and the mistakes are acceptable, because some kanji have many meanings). Search also for "ANKI" and kanji koohii(based in heisig's books,but include also comuty's mnemonics, what improves the process A LOT!!!
So, the first thing you need to know is that all kanji use a square to fit one. Ok. So you can fit TWO kanji in one square, but now you have a DIFFERENT kanji. For example, sun and moon are used in the kanji for "bright", but shell/shellfish is used in the kanji for selling so sometimes is easy to associate, sometimes you need to be more creative. You can also search fr kanji damage - they have mnemonics for a loooooot of kanji, so you just need to copy and paste in the search of their website(it's free. I never paid or made an account, at least).
So, kanjis are made of blocks, some of them make very sense and are easy to associate, some you'll need to be more creative!
Hope it help :)
Tks for the advices. I also saw a video on youtube by kanadajin3 that recommend you learn it just like the japanese do, by learning first what kids in first grade learn and so on. Makes sense to me, if a 6 years old can do it so should I...lol- The problem is, since (I think this, but I'm not right) they learn stroke by stroke, they finish kanji more or less at the end of high school. Logical, they actually already know a lot of kanji that they are expected to learn just in highschool, but this take such a huge time! So, radicals are a good way to start. Nihongo Shark's blog is really good and have awesome tips; also now have some tips in "snacks" group that the owner of blog have made. Some people also finish all the ~2100 basic kanjis using radicals in less than one year, and they really learn, just not a simple "oh, I can recognize". Also some kanjis are similar and have more or less the same number of strokes(like motsu(have) e matsu(wait), wich I can differenciate because their left radical is different).
Get some Biore and start rubbin
