hello! I just started, i already know how to read and write the kanas and im wondering if i should… - Feed Post by chino_sleep
hello! I just started, i already know how to read and write the kanas and im wondering if i should learn vocabulary first or kanji?
posted by chino_sleep
Comments 12
Do both at once. I recommend you start with a really fundamental course book, like Minna no Nihongo (download from torrents). Then try some free courses at memrise (Minna is there, too). So, do a few words a day and a few kanji a day that will be necessary to write these words. Follow the book, you'll spend a few weeks on the first chapter only. Proceed slowly, learn the basics, learn the tools. Try memrise, Anki, subs2srs for anki, jisho.org, wanikani (really good source for kanji memorization).
That's the ticket right there.
I recommend that you learn vocabulary with the kanji. It's much easier to learn 2000 kanji if you know vocabulary for it.- one more thing, get a few notebooks. Don't be scared to write a lot in them (I usually write on the right side, leaving space for a lot of kanji practice on the left). When I finish a notebook, I start rewriting the most important things I didn't remember yet into another notebook and so on. So, do a lot of writing. Plus, practice writing kanji non-stop at school or at work - you can just take a sheet and fill it all and then another one - so scribble whenever you can.
- if your hand doesn't go numb, your not doing it right : )
@kseniakagan, How do you choose which kanji to draw when you are practising them? Do have them listed on another sheet to copy from, or do you do it completely from memory?
I learned hiragana and katakana through drawing them. But there is an easy system for those: "the fifty sounds table". Simply need to remember the order of the five columns (a,i,u,e,o) and ten rows (_,k,s,t,n,h,m,y,r,w), and then try to write as many of them as I could remember from memory. Nice and simple. Can practise anywhere you have a paper and pen.
But there is nothing like this for kanji. If all you have is a blank bit of paper and a pen, there's no system to follow to know which kanji to draw next. So I ended up not practising to write kanji by hand much at all, even though it worked very well for learning kana.- Yeah I've had remembering the kanji for a few years now and I'm only about half way through it. It's a tall order for sure, but if I put forth the effort I can now memorize the kanji's english translation with relative ease, but then you have the On, kunyomi, different meanings, and word associations to memorize which can be pretty daunting at times. There a lot easier to read then to write, but at least the stroke order is simple enough. I'm out on a work related injury right now so I got some time to commit to it.
- That's the mistake I made in the beginning - not drawing them. As I mentioned, I write a lot in my notebook while I study the books. Then, I practice on the left all the kanji I wrote out on the right. When the left side is fully filled, I take another sheet and write out in a row all the new kanji I have in one notebook so far and start rewriting them endlessly - when the sheet ends, I take a new one - be it at home, at work or in a subway. Also, Wanikani is a big help with memorizing the kun and on pronunciations and meanings. Same goes for ANKI. But, they don't teach you to write - you have to do the writing to remember the kanji fully. Wanikanify is a cool chrome add-on that inserts kanji, learned on Wanikani, instead of English words and reminds you of the ones you're supposed to know. In time, you'll be able to guess the meaning of kanji from its elements. Don't despair - after about 300 kanji you get the point and you'll just do it automatically. Make sure to keep it up non-stop for say a year.
I don't think that 300 Kanji will make any difference. There are minimum 2300 Kanji and many of them are pretty different.
I think 300 kanji is a great start though.
BTW! If you have AnkiDroid on your phone, you can turn on blackboard mode, which allows you to practice writing the kanji. It works really well for me.- I mastered nearly all NLPT N5, N4 and N3 Kanji. And didn't get any big success. But I must say, I didn't try to write them. Just recognise. I have AnkiApp, maybe this is something similar to AnkiDroid. But I haven't heard about blackboard!
