Around January I began to study Japanese. I got through Genki chapter 2 and all that vocab and it was killing me. Whenever a string of kana 5+ popped up it’d be such a pain to memorize, and killed off all joy I had instantaneously.
Fast forward to now, I’ve come to the great idea of memorizing a bunch of Kanji for vocab, and then I plan to run through Genki later on when I’ve amassed a huge repertoire of vocab. Memorizing Kanji honestly comes pretty easy to me and is actually fun. Is this a bad idea?
ありがとう！
11 comments
Memorizing kanji is alright, but I find memorizing hiragana better; you can learn kanji along the way with furigana but if you can’t read lots of hiragana then you’ll have trouble with casual Japanese where people use hiragana instead of kanji for things like たとえば or for most/nearly all grammar. Also, I think a lot of keigo is taught with hiragana in Genki.
do core2.3k, read tae kims grammar guide, install yomichan, use ttu ereader to read epubs, or read vns for a couple hours a day, look up grammar when you don’t understand it and slowly swap over to monolingual definitions and explanations for things u don’t understand
bam you’re chillin
If you’re getting a good mix of motivation and progress, you’re probably fine. Productive hours is the name of the game.
If i recall correctly, chapter 3 is where kanji starts appearing. Rather than taking the time off, would suggest to follow into the next Genki chapter.
Strategies are great, but the most important thing is to just keep studying. People will come here and scoff at others for studying Japanese through Jpop or anime as though it will destroy your chances of ever communicating. If you’re going to go at it by getting some kanji or a huge list of vocab down before spreading into something else, that’s a perfectly acceptable plan.
You can’t learn to read Japanese while brushing off the kana. Japanese uses Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji together to form their writing system. Ignoring any one of them will leave you deficient. Genki also starts introducing kanji in chapter 3 so you gave up too early.
I recommend getting a strong command of both hiragana and katakana and just moving through grammar lessons and vocab lessons.
It may be frustrating reading long words or sentences, but it’s just going to be a reality that I think you have to accept. Learning vocab alone also I think has a lot of problems; you don’t get a good example of how these words are used in sentences and by reading actual sentences in context, you naturally learn vocab much faster because you force yourself to use them. You can design your lessons to your liking, but there isn’t really a shortcut method to learning; you’re going to have to face the challenging parts at some point, and frankly knowing a lot of vocab doesn’t suddenly make reading and comprehension that much easier.
Has conniptions in Anki
I think this is a good start – but just a little warning – your brain (at least in my case) starts to rely on the shape of the kanji, to remember the meaning of a word. That means that I sort of forget what words mean, unless I see the kanji.
As an example, a word like 太平洋 – the Pacific ocean. I can read the kanji, I know what it means and how to read it – I can then pronounce the word – たいへいよう。 But – if I just see たいへいよう without the kanji, or if someone says that word to me – I can read the hiragana/hear the sound, so I know the sound of the word, but I have a hard time connecting that sound to a meaning – I think because my brain learned that word as a combination of the meanings of the individual kanji, not the sound.
This is a bit weird and I don’t know if I explained it properly, but I know I am not the only one with this issue.
In conclusion – remember to learn reading hiragana as well, and to connect the kanji’s meaning to sound, not mainly shape + meaning.
What I’ve found out is that when you stumble on pain points in whatever study tools and materials you are using, it gives a huge motivation boost when you find out something else that does not have that same pain point or that feels better in some way. Changing your study regiment when you feel like it is very much recommended. It has worked for me multiple times already and I choose to believe that it works for you.
When you feel you are making progress every day in any aspect of the language, you are going definitely forward in your studies. Remember that learning Japanese is a marathon. It will take couple of thousands of hours to learn this language (if your target is fluency), so spending tens of hours in trying out new study methods that you don’t know if it is either a good or bad method, is really nothing in the big picture. If the new method feels better than what you are currently doing, I’d say go for it, full speed ahead!
kanji memorization is only useful to the degree it helps with vocabulary memorization, as ultimately you read words not kanji
you can do it all you like if it’s fun, but it’s not the thing that will get you to the next level of reading comprehension
as for putting off all grammar until you have a ton of vocab… again, you can do anything you like, but siloing things like this is not helpful in the long run
vocabulary also means different things in different situations – usage is critical. rote memorization of large blocks of contextless words only goes so far if you can’t use them in sentences. also: using them properly in sentences is what makes them stick, otherwise they are forgotten far easier and you’ve wasted your time
i recommend moving forward on all fronts more or less evenly, not fixating on one small corner of knowledge. everything reinforces everything else, and locking off large blocks of inter-subject experience is more a hindrance than a help