I’ve been learning Japanese for a few months, and here’s what I’ve understood about kanji so far:
Imagine that I have an awful phone contract which charges me 10c per letter but only 1c per emoji in text messages. A picture is worth a thousand words, so I can substitute emojis into words for meaning and still have full grammatically correct sentences if I differentiate them with just a few letters on the end:
Food = 🍛
Dish = 🍛 (differentiate by context if needed)
Meal = 🍛al
Eat/ate = 🍛t/🍛te
Obviously, if someone else wanted to learn my language, they would have to learn the actual *words* first, and then after that at the next stage of learning they’re able to slot in the emojis appropriately as well into each one for texting.
So why in all the seven hells do I keep coming across beginner kanji learning “resources” that do this:
🍛: [various food related terms]
Onyomi: me, ea, a
Kunyomi: food, dish
Memorise these, and now Quiz: list all the onyomi!
How is this not the dumbest, most ass-backwards, blindly brute-force learning method designed explicitly to frustrate people? Who thinks this is at all useful for beginners?? Where does this repeated emphasis on memorising disconnected readings out of a dictionary list come from??? Unless I’m missing something, the only conclusion I can make is that there’s a lot of people out there who don’t understand how languages *or* learning work trying to teach others.
4 comments
I think that depends on where you are looking. All resources I used/came in contact with went towards the RTK-type route: Learn a rough English meaning first, readings through learning words later.
Which is why I prefer using a core anki deck for kanji
>So why in all the seven hells do I keep coming across beginner kanji learning “resources” that do this:
Because that’s reference material. It’s meant to be looked at as needed. The list of “meanings” is meant to give you a rough idea of what kind of words that character is related to. The readings are given so you can try to guess how to read (or type) a word.
>Memorise these, and now Quiz: list all the onyomi!
I agree that’s dumb, which is why you just read something and do lookups as needed. Not too different from any other language, with the exception that learning to write your vocabulary is a separate process.
For kun-yomi they usually form words on their own, so you you go, say, 言う(いう to say). For on-yomi just find words for each reading that look interesting to you. e.g. 言語(げんご language), 過言(かごん exaggeration). This will usually prove useful to read words you haven’t encountered yet (e.g. 宣言(せんげん)), which is one part of the puzzle.
For the other part, namely, studying the words themselves (collocations, nuances, relevant context, usage, etc.), that’s a separate thing and it’s done the same way as with any other language (i.e. find out the contexts in which the word is used, find example sentences, textbook exercises, quizzes, dictionary lookups, usage dictionaries, ask people, etc.).
Just learn vocab and you’ll learn the kanji as an extension of that. Any other “method” is flawed.