WaniKani’s web app works well, and it has a beautifully-built unofficial iPhone app ( Tsurukame). New kanji are unlocked over time as you as you make progress so that you’re not overwhelmed all at once. Forget it at any given level and it’s demoted, giving you another chance to work it back up. Kanji advances levels from “apprentice” to “guru” to “master” to “enlightened” to “burned” as you’re able to successfully remember it after increasingly long periods of time. I’m using WaniKani, which uses a spaced repetition system combined with custom-built memory mnemonics for every single radical, kanji, and vocabulary word, to help drill literacy into the brain, willing or not. The only saving grace is that the tooling available these days is amazing. Yet another layer of difficulty in an already really, really difficult language. If not, it makes you want to douse your Japanese textbook in gasoline, light it on fire, and launch whatever survives directly into the blazing hellfire of the sun. If you’ve been reading kanji since age five, your brain makes this happen automatically. At some point, Japan decided that spaces were for losers, so when reading Japanese prose the mind operates like a regular expression engine, advancing as many characters as it can looking for a valid match, but not finding one, backtracking until matching a known word (even if the word is just one character). So far I’ve only been examining kanji vocabulary in clean, convenient, completely unrealistic isolation. Have fun with that gaijin.Īnd even if I’m able to build a decent kanji vocabulary, my next challenge would be actually reading it. And hey, for good measure it’s also sometimes just assigned a random alternative, like its use in “adult” (大人), read おとな (o-to-na) 1. Other times it gets rendaku’ed, so “people” 人々 (“々” is a “repeater” that duplicates the kanji before it) is read ひとびと (hi-to-bi-to). And not that normal on’yomi reading, the other on’yomi reading.)Īs an example, the kanji for “person” (人) is usually read as じん (ji-n) or にん (ni-n) when used in combination vocabulary, like 人口 (“population”, read じんこう or ji-n-ko-u) or 三人 (“three people”, read さんにん or sa-n-ni-n), but when it appears by itself as just “人” (again, meaning “person”), it’s read as ひと (hi-to). (It uses on’yomi reading usually for this, except that exceptional subset which uses kun’yomi instead, except for this exceptional-on-top-of-exceptional subsubset/word which goes back to on’yomi. As I’m studying, remembering what a kanji means is supremely easy compared to wracking my desperate, tortured brain for the alien sound associated with it when it’s surrounded by this or that other kanji/hiragana, often arbitrary-assigned to the point of cruelty. On top of that, special rules like rendaku morph readings depending on context, adding even more cognitive overhead. Readings are not close together – in almost all cases, they’re completely different sounds that bear no relation to each other. Most kanji have at least two “readings”, which means that depending on the context they appear in, they’re read differently. Of course it’s hard.īut I only learned recently that kanji is actually way harder than that. Coming from an alphabet of 26 characters, that’s a lot. ![]() At least a thousand characters on top of that are found in common everyday use, and many adults know a few thousand more. There isn’t a fixed number of characters a proficient Japanese speaker needs to learn, but a basic set of 2,136 jōyō kanji is considered the bare minimum for functional literacy. Like most people, I always knew in the abstract that kanji was hard. I’d managed to learn hiragana and katakana more easily than expected, with just a few weeks of effort, and in a moment of exuberant hubris, decided that my next project would be kanji. A few weeks ago I wrote about beginner Japanese.
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