Hi! I recently started Japanese classes and feel like I’ve watched enough anime and VTubers to get a good sense of sentence structure. Conversation is OK if I can find the right word, but I’m OK with the vocabulary coming with time.
The main problem I want to solve is how to connect the words I’ve heard back to written kanji. I wanted to get ideas on how to improve reading kanji naturally, such that it doesn’t feel like I’m going out of my way to rote learn and end up burning out. Here’s what I have so far:
* Installed the Japanese IO plugin on my browser
* Followed a bunch of JP Twitter accounts e.g. fan artists, blogs and will be trying to read them
* Gonna look for the JP lyrics of some of the songs I’ve always wondered about the lyrics for and try to translate them e.g. Gurenge, Narrative, Who What Who What and translate them from kanji.
* Maybe watch Hololive and try to follow the chat besides the strings of 草
* Install a Japanese game and navigate through it’s wikis to figure out how to play it well
Does anyone have other ideas?
6 comments
I think you’ll have to rote learn, basically. Try a method to learn kanji like RTK books (Heisig) or better, Wanikani. It’ll all slot into place once you know the meanings and readings of the characters. Good luck and have fun!! Slowly and surely wins the race.
I’d suggest:
Anki cards with sentences without furigana on the front, and the same sentence with furigana on the back. Having audio on the front is even better, so long as you also read the sentence along with it.
Reading with furigana. For all people seem to think you shouldn’t read kids’ books, the natural progression they have from books with full furigana and then slowly phasing them out from common words as you read up age groups is very useful for learning to associate words with their reading. You do probably need to scale your vocabulary up quite a big for this though.
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If Hololive chat is something you’d like to learn, dumping some of it into Anki might be worthwhile. Chat’s vocabulary isn’t exactly huge, so it wouldn’t take much to get started.
Learn the vocabulary in tandem with the kanji. This is the way. You can worry about learning the kanji individually later.
It sounds like you would like to have more intuition and increase the accessibility of kanji when you encounter them. More “ah-ha” moments. Also, you are taking classes. Lastly, you enjoy media. This means the rate at which you encounter kanji will be comparatively slow; that is, through a class that proceeds at a speed geared towards the lowest common denominator (catering to a group of ppl with varying ability vs. catering to you alone), and through random media sources whose focus is not on kanji acquisition.
That’s not meant to sound negative that’s just literally what it is.
The alternative for example would be self study for the JLPT, where you would be studying at your own personal top speed regardless of others’ abilities, and encountering kanji at a steady, structured rate as dictated by the curriculum.
Remembering the Kanji by Heisig is always going to be the best for either scenario. You learn how to read and write kanji with minimal, sometimes zero reference to Japanese. You remember them using mnemonic stories. It’s akin to being able to decipher hieroglyphics without having any knowledge of ancient Egyptian.
If you were to implement and complete Heisig’s RTK you would find that when you finally do encounter kanji in class or through social media it would make more sense to you on the spot and be easier to remember without having to do a lot of rote memorization.
c o n t e x t.
When we were babies, we needed *c o n t e x t*. Hear the word garbage and associate it with the garbage? Use it! Hear the word ‘fuck’ and associate it with something bad happening? Use it! See? It’s natural so we can decode it.
Once i started using the LingQ app it drastically increased my kanji knowledge. It focuses on reading and listening and has you learning words *in context*. The in context part being absolutely crucial.