How to study Kanji - part 5

This is a fifth part of a number of posts on how to study Kanji.

In my previous posts I have written on how to study radicals first, the importance of getting a good text book for studying Kanji, and the way to get your brain to remember Kanji in an effective way. One important remaining question is: how many new Kanji should I try to remember every day?

I have written before how those "one Kanji a day" websites are not really effective for your Kanji study. Even if we assume that you want to memorize only the 1,945 Kanji "for common use", a pace of 1 per day means it will take you more than 5 years just to complete the list. This is not acceptable.

However, from my experience I can say that studying Kanji at a too high pace is not helping either. I studied in a Japanese language school in Tokyo for 6 months, and in our classes we would see up to 10 new Kanji per day. These were mainly Kanji from the JLPT1 level, some of them even Japanese would have difficulties to read. Most students (me included) would somehow manage to pump these Kanji into our brain for the Kanji test the next day, but a day later we would have forgotten all about them. Reviewing them for some longer time might have helped, but there was little time for that, since the next day we would have to remember 10 new Kanji again, and the next day again, and again, and again. The result was that especially the last few months of my time in the Japanese language school were ironically the months when I made the least progress in my Kanji study...

Even worse, I found that I often confuse the Kanji that I studied during those few months. This is very bad, because it takes a long time to "delete" such wrong information and replace it with the correct information.

To conclude, too slow is not getting you anywhere, but too fast is not much better, or even worse in the long run.

What I recommend is to keep a high pace, without going too far. Typically I would study 5 new Kanji per day, but whenever I noticed that that pace was too high, I took some days to review the Kanji I learned during the past days, without introducing new Kanji to my pack. This resulted in a typical pace of about 80 new Kanji per month, sometimes just 50 or 60, sometimes 120 or more. For comparison, "1 Kanji a day" plans will give you only about 30 Kanji per month, while the Japanese language school would try to force us in a pace of about 200 (!) new Kanji per month...

Notice that if you can keep up the pace of 80 Kanji per month, you will complete the set of about 2,000 Kanji for "common use" in 2 years time. I feel this is a good pace, leaving you with enough time to do other things, and not so high that you start hating your study which is never a good thing.

In conclusion I would recommend you to:

• study Kanji at a pace of 5 new Kanji per day
• take "days off" whenever you feel you can't keep up with the pace
• aim for about 80 new Kanji per month

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How to study Kanji - part 4

This is a fourth part of a number of posts on how to study Kanji.

So, you have had a look at radicals, you have your Kanji text book. What next? From now on, the battle begins: can you get your brain to remember about 2000 Kanji, within a reasonable time? Don't forget that you have to memorize not only the Kanji and their meaning, but also their pronunciation. This is an impossible task if you are just going to watch your text book. So, what to do?

Humans have a short term memory, and a long term memory. Things that are important are put into your long term memory so that you can remember them for a long time. On the other hand, information that you only need for a short amount of time is put into your short term memory.

The problem with your study of Kanji is that to your brain Kanji are not really important information. So, what happens is this: you read the Kanji you want to study, you can remember it for a few minutes or hours, and after that the Kanji is removed from your short term memory. You have forgotten all about it. You have made no progress.

The point is thus to force your brain into putting the Kanji information into your long term memory. This is not an easy task, as your brain does not regard Kanji as important information. So, the question is how to make your brain this Kanji are important, and make it put the information in your memory for long term storage?

There are several strategies that can be used for this. I can think of at least 3:

1. repeated exposure: expose your brian to the Kanji multiple times
2. active exposure: don't just passively read or watch the Kanji, but actively write it yourself
3. diverse exposure: don't limit yourself to 1 way of exposure: watch/read the Kanji, read out loud its pronunciations, focus on the radicals and components of the Kanji, make a story for the Kanji, and use flash cards.

There might be more scientifically correct names for the three strategies I mentioned. But anyway, I will try to explain the idea I have about each of them.

The first one is to expose your brain to the Kanji repeatedly. Allow your brain to store the Kanji in your short time memory and erase it again a number of times, and the chances that it will put the data in the long term memory will increase. This strategy is true for many kinds of information. Very few people can memorize for example a text in 1 time. But if they read the same text a number of times, memorizing and forgetting it a number of times, gradually the text is stored in their long term memory. This explains how 80 or 90 year-old people can still remember unimportant things like children songs even though they memorized them 70 or 80 years ago.

So, repeated exposure is one strategy. But it is relatively time-consuming if the exposure is limited to just a passive exposure like reading or watching the Kanji. You might have to watch each Kanji hundreds of times in order to be able to remember 2000 of them...

If you, on the other hand, do more active exposures, the transition from short term to long term memory becomes faster. So, instead of just watching the Kanji, write it yourself. Write it again and again. The next day, write it again. And so on.

Finally, diverse exposure. It is easier for our brain to remember things if we use different parts of the brain. So, by combining different ways of exposure, we can stimulate different parts of the brain, and thus speed up the process of memorization. In the case of Kanji, it is better to use a combination of ways to remember Kanji. Read them, write them. Read out loud their pronunciation, write them (again and again), study words containing them. This makes it easier to remember them. Study the radicals and components of the Kanji, and make connections between them and the meaning and pronunciation of the Kanji. Where necessary make a story from the components to help you remember the meaning of the Kanji. 

I have found that the best way to combine many ways of memorization is to make or buy flash cards. On one side of a flash card is the Kanji, on the other side its meaning and pronunciation, and perhaps some vocabulary using the Kanji. Decide a set of Kanji cards to study, read the cards, write out the Kanji on the cards, read out loud their pronunciation. Hide the Kanji side of the cards, and see if you can recall each of the Kanji. If yes, do things the reverse way: hide then meaning/pronunciation and see if you can recall them by watching the Kanji. If yes, see if you can write the Kanji when seeing its meaning. And so on.

Some time later (the next day of a few dys later) check what you learned. If you can still write out the Kanji without watching it, if you can still remember the pronunciations, put the card in your "memorized" stack. If not, study it again, and check again later on. The cards in your "memorized" stack to0 have to be reviewed after some longer time (a week, a month, etc). Each time make the time interval longer and longer, until you really have no need to review the Kanji again.

This flash card strategy combines the 3 points I mentioned: repeated exposure, active exposure, and diverse exposure. You can make your own flash cards (which is rather time consuming - I speak from experience), or you can buy them. The White Rabbit Press flash cards (for which you can find a banner on this site) are my recommendation, but there are other choices too.

This is the way I memorized about 2000 Kanji.

 

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Today's Japanese expression: 首が回らない

This is another one of those Japanese expressions where you really can't guess the meaning from the literal meaning of the words at first sight: 「首が回らない」.

Literally, 「首が回らない」 means something like "my neck doesn't turn", or "I can't turn my neck". Well, if you have troubles with your neck, you can actually use this in a literal way. However, there is another meaning too. This is an example of it's use: 

「借金で首が回らない」(しゃっきんでくびがまわらない), meaning "I can't make ends meet because of my debts". 「首が回らない」 thus means "having trouble making ends meet", or "having trouble getting by", and is often (always?) used in the sense of financial difficulties. I good translation might be "being up to your neck in debts", or "being up to your ears in debts".

The explanation behind this Japanese expression is that the financial difficulties are restricting your freedom in the sense that you can`t just to what you would like to do.

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How to study Kanji - part 3

This is a third part of a number of posts on how to study Kanji.

The point I want to stress out in this part is: buy a text book on Kanji. If your goal is to master just a few hundred Kanji (maybe JLPT3 level) then I think you might manage without a good book. But if you are aiming for a higher level you really should get yourself a text book solely for studying Kanji.

I know that a text book costs money, while there are some useful websites which are for free. I will try to explain why I prefer a text book over web sites. There are basically 2 reasons: 1) you need a plan, a structure to master over 2000 Kanji, and 2) you need useful information about each Kanji. On both points I think that most web sites fail, while many text books succeed (at least to some degree).

First of all, as I wrote above, in order to be able to master over 2000 Kanji, you need a strategy, a plan, a structure. My experience with websites is that they contain just the Kanji, a huge amount of data without much thought behind how they are presented. Many of them also do not contain information on stroke orders, example vocabulary using the main readings, and small tests to check whether yourself. Texts books, on the other hand, ofto do contain such features.

The books I used were 漢字マスター 3 2級漢字1000 for JLPT2 Kanji, and later on the book from the same series for JLPT1 (which I could not find on Amazon, it can be found on ther ARC website here). Kanji in these books are more or less grouped according to meaning (for example, Kanji for emotions are together in one chapter). For each Kanji the stroke order is shown, allong with its readings, and example vocabulary.

Below are some books that might be helpful for your study of Kanji. Notice how I did NOT include the books using the Heisig method. I will explain later why I didn't...








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How to study Kanji - part 2

This is a second part of a number of posts on how to study Kanji.

I remember very well how overwhelmed I was when I decided to start studying Japanese: so many characters, so many different pronunciations. I remember I didn't even get why they needed different Kanji with identical pronunciations. Wouldn't things be much easier to use 1 Kanji for each pronunciations? These might be questions many people have at first.

I didn't even know where 1 Kanji stopped and another started. Now I can read books, novels, websites in Japanese with little help of a dictionary, and I should (according to my JLPT1 certificate) know more than 2000 Kanji...

The first book I bought on Kanji was "Let's Learn Kanji: An Introduction to Radicals, Components and 250 Very Basic Kanji". I have to admit I bought this book (and not another one) because this was all they had in the book shops where I lived. But, notice the title: in includes radicals and components. And, even though this is a book on learning Kanji, the word Kanji comes at the end, AFTER radicals and components.

I consider myself very lucky that I bought this book, along with my other first text book (Japanese for Busy People I). The reason is that it forced me to start my study with radicals and components, and not immediately with Kanji.

I have to admit (again) that I don't remember the exact difference between radicals and components. It seems I am not the only one, see wikipedia for the difference and confusion between radicals and components. The important thing is that I learned from the very start the kinds of radicals and their placement, and their meaning.

There are several types and placements of radicals. For example there are 偏 (Hen) type radicals which are positioned at the left of a Kanji (for example the 木 radical in 林, 板, 松, and so on). There are 脚 (Ashi) radicals which come at the bottom of Kanji (for example 心 in 志, 悪, 恩, and so on). Learning things like this helps you understand the construction of Kanji later on, and helps you remember them. Moreover, this is also the way Japanese themselves learn Kanji and also the way they use it to explain Kanji to each other.

Secondly, the meaning of the radicals can help you remember the meaning of Kanji containing them. See the example above for 木 in 松. 木 means "tree" , and 松 is "pine tree". I don't have to point out that a pine tree is a ... tree, do I? Likewise, a lot of words I can think of that have a meaning related to trees or wood tend to contain this 木 component: 植, 樹, 杉, 材, 棒, 桜, 桃, etc. Learn the meaning of radicals, and they will often give you a hint about the meaning of other Kanji. Not always, but often.

Finally, a thing that is often forgotten: components of Kanji can not only give you a hint about their meaning, but also about their pronunciation. An example: 高 has kun-yomi "taka(i)", and on-yomi "kou". Likewise, the on-yomi of 稿 (which contains 高) is "kou". 兆 "chou", and 挑 (which contains 兆) is also pronounced "chou". 義 "gi", and 議　儀 (which both contain 義) are both also pronounced "gi". This is not a coincidence: some Kanji contain components indicating their pronunciation.

There are the reasons why I recommend learning radicals and components BEFORE starting on Kanji. Studying Kanji requires a plan, a strategy, a systematic approach. Sure, you want to get started on "real" Kanji right away. But you didn't learn to run before you could walk, did you? Get the basics right first, get a firm foundation: learn radicals and components first. You will catch up with the impatient ones who started on Kanji immediately within a few weeks time, and leave them behind you forever.


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Today's Japanese expression: 口が堅い

Two guys and a girl are sitting in a restaurant. The girl asks one of the guys whether or not he has a girlfriend. To that the other man says "It's no use to ask him about it", because 「あの人は口が堅いだから」.

Literally, 「口が堅い」 (くちがかたい） means "having a hard mouth". The proper meaning is "being tight-lipped", "being discreet", or "being able to keep a secret". So, in the conversation above, the one guy says "It's no use asking him about it, because he is tight-lipped, he won't speak about this subject".

How about the opposite of 「口が堅い」? You might expect "to have a soft mouth", 「口が柔らかい」（くちがやわらかい) but as far as I know there is no such expression. Instead they say 「口が軽い」(くちがかるい), which means literally "to have a light mouth", or in better English "to be talkative", "to have a loose tongue".


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Today's Japanese expression: 歯に衣着せない

I was watching a short documentary on television today, about some ice skater (I already forgot hist name...). The documentary mentioned that he was very popular: not only did he win many championships, but also: 「記者会見での歯に衣着せぬ発言で大人気でした」.

I have to admit that I did not know 歯に衣着せぬ (or 歯に衣着せない). Neither did I know how to pronounce it: はにきぬきせぬ. 衣（きぬ） is an old word for "clothes". Thus, literally this expression means something like "to not put clothes on ones teeth". A better translation is "to speak frankly" or "to speak bluntly".

So, the ice skater from the documentary was not only popular because of his successes on the ice, but also because he used to speak his mind outright during press conferences.

Another nice example: 「歯に衣着せずに言えば, あの人は男は愚か者だ」 - "To say things frankly, that man is a fool"


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How to study Kanji - part 1

This is the first part of a number of posts on how to study Kanji. See also part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6. Later more parts will come.

The first hurdle when studying Japanese is of course the characters used in written Japanese: Chinese characters (Kanji, 漢字), and Hiragana (ひらがな, 平仮名) and Katakana　(カタカナ, 片仮名).

Beginning (non-Chinese) students of Japanese are often overpowered by these three alphabets. Not only by the fact that they are completely different from the Roman alphabet, but mainly by their sheer number: there are 1,945 Kanji for common use (常用漢字) as determined by the Japanese Ministry of Education, in addition to 46 Hiragana and 46 Katakana. Oh, and even if you manage to master all of these, you will still be faced with Kanji not included in this list on a daily basis during your everyday life in Japan.

Hiragana and Katakana do not pose such a big problem. These can be mastered in a few weeks time (or even days). The main problem is the Kanji. Once a person has decided to start studying Japanese, a first question is thus in many cases: how to memorize all these characters, and secondly: how to do it in a reasonable amount of time? The internet has a number of websites or other services showing the users a "Kanji of the day", but please do not think you can EVER reach an even intermediate level of proficiency at that pace: 1,945 Kanji at a pace of 1 per day means it will take you more than 5 years just to complete the list.

There is thus need for a strategy to shorten the time to master these Kanji. Moreover, since many of these Kanji look rather similar there is also need for a way to memorize them in a way that you will not confuse between similar Kanji.

During the following few weeks I will tell you my experiences with studying Kanji, and give a number of tips that I have found improved the efficiency of my study.

The main points for me are:

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  Study radicals first. Most Kanji are build up from a number of smaller parts, referred to as radicals. These radicals have a meaning which can often help you remember the meaning of the Kanji they appear in. In addition to that, some radicals also form a hint for the pronunciation of the Kanji they appear in. In that sense I found it useful to study these radicals BEFORE starting to learn Kanji.
• 
  
  Buy a text book on Kanji. Do not rely on websites. Buy a text book, containing the Kanji, the way to write them, their pronunciations, their meaning, some examples of words containing the Kanji.
• 
  
  Use a combination of ways to remember Kanji. Read them out loud, write them (again and again), study words containing them. This makes it easier to remember them. Where necessary make story for the Kanji in order to help you remember it. Above all, make flash cards yourself (or buy them if it is too much work to make them yourself).
• 
  
  Keep a high pace, but not too high. As mentioned above, if you study only 1 Kanji a day, it will take you more than 5 years to study all Kanji for common use. This is too slow. On the other hand, I found that a too high pace results in not remembering anything. I recommend a pace of about 100 new Kanji per month.
• 
  
  Read as soon as you can, as much as you can. As soon as you feel it is possible to read Japanese without having to look up a Kanji every 2 sentences: start reading Japanese as often as possible. For me this meant mainly novels, for others it might be mainly Manga.

During the following weeks I will write in more detail about each of these point.

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Book review: Preparatory Course for the Japanese Language Profiency Test

Note: Throughout this post I will use "JLPT" to refer to the "Japanese Language Proficiency Test".

These are 2 books I want to recommend: 実力アップ!日本語能力試験2級 文法編 and 実力アップ!日本語能力試験1級 文法編 (note: I could not find an English link for the second book). I would like to recommend the entire series of these books, but especially the ones focusing on grammar for the JLPT2 and JLPT1.

In fact, I am not exaggerating when I say that it was these two books on grammar that got me through the JLPT2 just 3 months after coming to Japan, and through the JLPT1 a year later.

Look, studying grammar is pretty boring (at least to me it is), isn't it? You learn some grammar, use it a few times in an exercise, and the next day you have forgotten all about it. At least for me, this is the truth. Moreover, many grammatical structures in Japanese look alike. An easy example is 「～てから」 and 「～たから」. Every student of the Japanese has confused these 2 a lot of times during his or her study, I am sure of it.

Wouldn't it be great if a book told you "do not confuse this with...", or "this looks similar to ..., but it differs here and here" ?

The 2 books I want to recommend here made things a bit easier. For a number of grammatical structures (focusing on what you need to know to pass each level of the JLPT), they give some example sentences, and shortly explain the meaning of the structure. They also give some structures with a similar meaning, even warn you for cases where you could confuse it with other structures which look the same but have a different meaning, and explain cases which often use the structures in question.

Here and there in the books there are short tests to check if you remembered what you learned.

I also love the size of these books: small enough to take one with you wherever you go. Small enough to read even in very crowded trains. I read these books on the train everyday in the months before the JLPTs, maybe just 20 minutes a day. That taught me more about Japanese grammar than the Japanese language classes I was taking at the time. Now I am still using them as a reference every now and then, or to refresh my memory.

I love this series of text books. In total I have bought 7 of them, covering grammar, reading, and Kanji drills. (There are also books for listening exercises, but these I didn't buy so I can' evaluate them.)

Strongly recommended.

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Today's Japanese expression: 身を粉にして働く

Lately, I am taking the bus to work everyday. On the bus I am always reading some Japanese novel. What surprises me is that although the bus ride takes just about 10 minutes, the few pages that I can read always seem to contain some interesting expression. Like this one: 「身を粉にして働く」

It's a dialogue between two guys. One says he thinks that people nowadays don't seem to know what endeavour really is. He says everyone is doing nothing while complaining life is not fair. "I don't know", says the other guy, "僕の目で見れば皆がずいぶん身を粉にして働いているような印象を受けるけど」 ("At least to me it seems like everyone is working themselves to the bone").

Literally, 「身を粉にして働く」means "to work one's body to powder", on in proper English "to work oneself to the bone".

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Today's Japanese expression: ねじを巻く

In the Japanese novel I am reading now, a guy is impressed by the well-ordered life one of his friends is living. He himself is doing nothing with his spare time, yet he decides to do an effort from now on to live a more ordered life:
「僕も僕自身のねじを巻きます！」(ぼくもぼくじしんのねじをまきます).

「ねじを巻く」 normally means "to wind up", with 「ねじ」 being "screw" and 「巻く」"to wind". For example, "to wind up a clock" is 「時計のねじを巻く」. However, in the case of the sentence in the novel, is means something like "to pay attention not to slack or be lazy".

Another example: 「夏休みは普段は特に何もしないで過ごしてしまうので、でも今度はねじを巻いてやろう！」"Normally I spend my summer vacation doing nothing, but this time I will be careful not to slack around!"

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Today's Japanese Expression: 目が節穴

Okay, this one is a expression you will never find in any Japanese language text book. I am 100% sure of it. I was lucky enough to have a colleague who loved teaching me what he used to call "stylish Japanese". This is one of the many expressions he taught me.

「お前の目が節穴か」. Literally: "are your eyes knotholes?". Doesn't make much sense, right? 「節穴」 (ふしあな) means "knothole". The meaning of this expression is something like "you must be blind". I have to admit I don't know the origin of this expression, but if you don't know what a "knothole" is, just do a Google Image search for "節穴", it's not so easy to explain.

Another use is of course: 「私の目は節穴じゃないよ」, meaning "I am not blind, you know".

I love expressions like these. Use this in a conversation with any Japanese person and I can assure you they will be impressed.

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