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How I study Kanji

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Keith (Moderator) 2009-03-26, 19:50
Member since Mar 2007 · 21 posts · Location: Tokyo
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It's been 2 years now since I started this thread. I never did finish that book! After a few weeks, I found I couldn't write for 50 minutes anymore. My hand would hurt.

Maybe I should start it again. I don't know.
Admin (Administrator) 2007-09-15, 23:45
Member since Feb 2007 · 72 posts · Location: Tokyo
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Subject: How to study Hiragana
I suggest to you to practice reading everyday. It won't take long before you will be able to quickly recognize the character and be able to trust yourself.

When I first studied hiragana and katakana, I used a computer program that would drill me on them.
You could use any kind of flashcards just the same.

Practice each day with flashcards, going over them until you make no mistakes. Over night you may kind of forget a few. Just run through your flashcards until you've got them all again. Each day should get much quicker.

When you're pretty much able to read them from your flashcards, then work on some reading material. It will be painfully slow at first, but each day you will get better and quicker. You can find reading material that is only in kana.

Then when you can read decently enough, start practicing to write each and every day. You can use Japanese people's names for this. You can make out a list in romaji of about 10 or 15 names or words. Then you will have to write it in hiragana. This is all you need to do each day. 10 or 15. Change the list. Add new words or names, but you only need to practice writing 10 to 15.

When you've got hiragana covered, then practice writing the same lists in katakana. Just 10 or so. There's no need to write a single character hundreds of times.

If you make a habit of spending 10 minutes a day on kana, you'll be able to master them. There are only about 46 shapes in each set, so it doesn't take long.  A little practice each day keeps the doctor away. The important thing is to make it a daily habit.

There is some good material to get you started here:
http://www.coscom.co.jp/freematerials/yomimono/index.html
Just select an article and then press the "kana" button.

がんばれ！
MWS09 2007-09-15, 11:49
Member since Sep 2007 · 2 posts
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I wanted to ask you guys what other ways do you study your Hiragana? I have all of them memorize but when I read something I have to go through that row of hiragana in my head to know what it is and the same when writing something into it. Does anyone know what I should do to improve this? Should I write each Hiragana a couple of hundred times again? Thanks.
Keith (Moderator) 2007-08-23, 08:31
Member since Mar 2007 · 21 posts · Location: Tokyo
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Subject: Reading Japanese
I have used that book too! Although, I didn't practice writing with it. I only practiced reading. Reading that book a lot was the beginning of my ability to read kana quicker. Before all that practice, I was still really slow.

When I started Reading Japanese, I already knew the kana and about 100 Kanji. So the first 100 were not hard for me but I was able to reinforce my knowledge. Then I was able to learn the next 100 really well. After that, the vocabulary and grammar were a bit above my knoweldge and so it got harder for me. I only made it through around the 300th Kanji.

It's a really great book because it only uses Kanji that have been introduced and it has lots of reading practice. The major downside is that it contains ony 425 Kanji. To date, there still hasn't been a better Kanji book published.
Caitlan (Guest) 2007-08-23, 03:34
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I have Reading Japanese and I start by writing each kanji over and over for half a page. Then I make flashcards and group them by appearance, for example putting "see" with "eye" with "moon" with "day" with "ear" and test to make sure I can tell similar kanji apart. Then I read the chapter passages once allowing myself to look things up, then once without and then I write it down in english and the next day I try to annotate the english version with the character equivalents. I'm only 3 chapters into the kanji part (the first 9 chapters are hiragana and katakana)
Keith (Moderator) 2007-03-25, 23:10
Member since Mar 2007 · 21 posts · Location: Tokyo
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Subject: How I study Kanji
I am currently using a book called 完全マスター漢字 日本語能力試験２級レベル to practice writing Kanji. It comes with an audio CD. The first 14 lessons have about 7 sentences each. After that, the lessons have about 2 or 3 sentences on the CD. Every day I am listening to as many as 28 sentences and writing them out. I spend up to 50 minutes on this task.

Basically, I will repeat 1/4 of the sentences for 16 days. But every 4 days, I stop doing the oldest 1/4 and start on a new 1/4. That gives me 4 days to get the new sentences perfect before I add more new sentences.

So, as an example it goes like this:
Monday~Thursday Lessons 1~4
Friday~Monday Lessons 2~5
Tuesday~Friday Lessons 3~6
Saturday~Tuesday Lessons 4~7
Wednesday~Saturday Lessons 5~8

In the example above, you can see I kept doing lesson 4 for 16 days before I finally stopped doing it. Once I finish the book, I'm going to repeat it again but at a quicker pace.

I think I'll use this method with some other material I have. After that, I'd like to use it with audiobooks.

I'm going to use this method also with Chinese once I get to that point.

How do you study Kanji?
Current time: 2010-09-06, 00:04:50 (UTC +09:00)