I’m Chinese-American and I know enough Chinese and Mandarin to have maybe a 3rd-4th grade fluency in reading and writing. So I gave WaniKani a shot for 2 weeks and I have learned very little from whole process. It makes you learn radicals and kanji via mnemonic devices and none of it seems to click. I already know most of the most common use of these radicals and the general meaning of words, plus many of the Japanese-only simplifications are easy to decipher, so it feels like a waste of time.
My struggle is not remembering the word, it’s actually fighting with my brain to not immediately use the Mandarin pronunciation. Even during immersion with simple Slice-of-Life shows, I can’t get over doing this and consistently read pieces of subtitles in Mandarin. In fact, it feels like a handicap to learning because my brain will just refuse to learn the Japanese pronunciation with Furigana because it already more-or-less comprehended the sentence.
Does anyone have a better suggestion than WaniKani for learning/overriding Kanji for Chinese learners? It’s baffling to me, because I can read a sentence fully in French, but reading a Japanese sentence feels like a much bigger wall to climb.
5 comments
i recommend focusing on vocabulary instead of the kanji themselves. memorize how *words* are pronounced and you’ll pick up japanese kanji from there. (i.e., learn how to pronounce 聞く and what it means and how it works rather than 聞 in a vacuum.) use it in the context of japanese and it should stick in japanese. for some people, this is simply the most effective way to learn them anyhow, chinese knowledge or not.
in case you don’t know the common resources too well, anki is the front runner for flash cards and there are plenty of decks for learning vocab. jpdb is also pretty good, albeit with less user-made content. though, if you’re like me and hate flashcards, i recommend simply reading a lot and taking notes. that’ll help you with learning in context even more.
edit: and study with audio flashcards, use audio when you read, or just be sure to listen to audio of a word from a dictionary it something. the audio association may help japanese-specific pronunciations stick. listening to audio and mirroring that audio (repeating the word/sentence aloud) may also be of help.
I am an American who learned Chinese in Taiwan.
I have been using “LearnJapanese! Kanji” https://apps.apple.com/app/id1078107994 to learn the readings and Japanese simplifications of the characters, which may differ from Mainland simplification and Taiwan traditional.
I use it in combination with the Chinese dictionary app Pleico https://apps.apple.com/app/id341922306 and the “Nihongo” Japanese dictionary app https://apps.apple.com/app/id881697245
Pleico supports the Japanese variants, so I can look up a character and match it against the Chinese characters that I know and see how it may vary. Between Pleico and Nihongo, I get the meaning and etymology. It’s fairly common for Japanese to use a relatively unusual meaning, as it might have come in 1000 years ago.
I am generally pretty happy with “Learn Japanese”. Though the data has its quirks, it’s been a good match for my background.
Those mnemonics are there for people who literally are jumping into this business without having ever seen a kanji up close or tried to deciper its various parts. You’ve probably done all that and more and are likely intimately familiar with more kanji than you need. If WaniKani feels like a waste of time, it’s because it IS lol.
Just learn words and their pronounciations. Fortunately, you have a leg up in that department already given how much of the Japanese lexicon is taken from Chinese, and any confusion with Chinese readings are benign and will go away with time and practice.
Cantonese speaker here. I totally understand this issue. I haven’t fully overcome this problem yet but when I read Japanese novels, I look up any frequent kanji words that I don’t know their readings even if I can infer their meaning. I may have to look up more than a few times before I can memorize the readings. Also, I tried to vocalize the Japanese readings of the kanji instead of the Chinese pronunciation in my mind as much as possible when I read. And I also try to guess the onyomi readings of kanji compound words based on their Cantonese pronunciation before looking them up. I have become pretty good at it now. I think reading novels really help me resolve this issue due to the sheer amount of words in novels and they are more likely to use some words repetitively.
Edit: the key is, you don’t need to memorize the kanji readings all at once. Just a few at a time is enough.
Maybe it’s time for us, as a planet, to get rid of these hieroglyphics altogether.