Chanel
How do you memorize kanji? Of the three japanese alphabets, kanji is the one I don't quite understand. When do you use kanji rather than hiragana/katakana? Why do you use kanji? and how do you memorize it quickly?
Jul 3, 2014 5:58 AM
Answers · 4
1
I learn kanjis occasionally when I find new words. It will be never enough for native Japanese and , I think, for Chinese people too. Since we learn and read them everyday, we can at least read most kanjis used frequently in everyday life. Once you reach some level and gain vocabularies with your patient studies, you will start to find less trouble in reading Japanese readings. I could imagine that kanjis is a biggest obstacle to foreign Japanese learners. So, I would like to give you some secret. Calligraphy usually delights people's writing skills and also makes them familiar with many kanjis. Although you do no write in the classic style, knowing in which order the character is written not only makes your writing nice and neat but also could help you feel less allergic to them. You might rather find some joy to write just one single character in the discipline. My friend likes to write his English name in kanjis. The writing could give you some fascination. Having fun or finding some value in the study is a key. It is better to begin to practice with simple characters like numbers, dates, simple things around you. I would not recommend to read books with many kanjis. Good luck^^
July 3, 2014
One of the currently featured iTalki articles is one titled "3 pieces of advice for Beginning Kanji" http://www.italki.com/article/188/3-pieces-of-advice-for-beginning-kanji#.U7V4GfldV8E
July 3, 2014
The Japanese people had originally no writing system of their own, so when they came into contact with China, they imported the Chinese letters (together with Chinese culture and a large number of Chinese words). Both Hiragana and Katakana are actually abbreviations and simplifications of certain Kanji used as a sort of shorthand (in the same way Latin letters are simplification of the Egyptian hieroglyphs via several stages, e.g. Phoenician and Greek); in the beginning everything was written with Kanji. Japanese phonetics are also a lot simpler than Chinese phonetics, so you end up with a lot of homonyms for words of Chinese origin. That makes it impractical to write them with Hiragana, because it's a lot easier and faster to recognize them if you write with Kanji. I don't think there's a way to memorize them quickly. :-) It needs a lot of studying, and there's probably no way around that. Everyone learns differently, but what works for me is to learn the parts (sometimes called roots) first, and treat the more complex Kanji as sum of their parts (sometimes modified). You can make up keywords or stories to help with that. There are several books that do it that way; Heisig is probably the most widely known; but you can also make up your own. An App like Anki (http://ankisrs.net/) helps. Japanese children learn Kanji in a different order, because they already know the spoken language, but as young children they don't know difficult words yet. As a consequence, they sometimes learn more complex Kanji first. That works for children who are better a memorization, but it doesn't work so well for adults.
July 3, 2014
HI Chanel, have you ever heard the name of the book 'Remembering the Kanji' by James Heisig? It provides a fantastic method to learn Kanjis just like an alphabet. First, he defines some basic elements and tries to make a story for each one of them. The number of these basic elements are limited so that you can learn other kanjis by putting together those elements and again creating a story for each of them. I have tried this method and I'm really satisfied. YOU HAVE TO TRY IT!!!
July 3, 2014
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