I’ve learned that I’m a writing-based learner since beginning Genki. I began to master the kana only by writing and I self-study by writing down my response to the practice questions in the book. I’m wondering if I should skip straight to learning kanji to use in writing my responses in Genki 1 instead of using hiragana.
I learned Japanese numbers by reading about the board game 囲碁. I found myself just writing the number kanji instead of writing the hiragana. I got to writing lesson 3, numbers, and I looked ahead — there are so many kanji in the later lessons that I could have been writing the entire time. 私 is in lesson 5. the kanji to write 二年生 is in lessons 3, 6, and 10.
Did any other writing-based learners skip ahead and learn the kanji to use with the lessons? Is this going to help me learn faster? I fear that this could just be a diversion, wasting time that could be spent understanding the language. I will probably never be writing outside of learning. And when I used my phone keyboard the kanji is automatic.
By the way, I’m not talking about learning and writing every kanji in the book (like 映画, etc), just ones that come up all the time like 今日.
7 comments
If you’ve got your kana down, there’s no reason not to start learning kanji if that’s what you so desire.
IIRC Genki gives you 10-15 kanji per chapter. So you can pace it by doing 1 kanji/day (nice easy pace), then you can learn that right along with the chapter.
You can definitely start writing kanji soon. I recommend starting them before the start of the lesson and practicing them everyday.
There’s no “Skipping ahead” really, genki gives you a list of kanji to practice with every chapter.
The ones that come up all the time you’ll just passively learn anyway.
You can treat learning kanji as a separate task from learning how to speak. Just start practicing a few a day, independent of anything else. If you practice 10 a day, you will probably end up retaining 3 a day. You will end up adding useful vocabulary.
You can start with the N5 list, or the elementary school student list for first grade.
I always tried to learn all the kanji in the books, not just the ones in the kanji lists. Maybe I’m good with visuals because it actually made it easier to learn new words. That said, I did Heisig in parallel, I don’t think I would have been able to memorize many kanji without it.
Writing kana and kanji apparently helps cement them in your mind as you don’t just recognize them but you have to recall them all to reproduce them. I was going through the genki book but stopped. I have an online sensei to teach me grammar and I found a good website for learning Kanji. Now I basically just learn the most common kanji by writing them out with their meaning and readings.
There’s a list of kanji called the Jōyō Kanji which is the 2000 or so Kanji Japanese students are taught in school. You can apparently read most things knowing these. A good way to learn a kanji is to learn it’s meaning and common words that use the kanji with their readings. I use a website called Kanshudo for that.