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:
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment