Already fluent at Japanese, how to learn Kanji? Heisig?

Hello everyone,

I was brought up with Japanese, and hence at the moment I can speak the language fluently, however due to me being brought up in a western country I have a severe lack of recognition in kanji. I basically have around an early elementary school level of kanji recognition.

I have researched around many websites, and have a whole plethora of different methods concerning how to learn the recognition, writing and most importantly the remembering of kanji.

I have skimmed through and read up on James Heisig's "Remembering The Kanji", I even downloaded a copy of his first book. However, after realizing that you do not learn the real meaning of the kanji until after a somewhat 3-5 month period of going through the first book seemed pretty daunting. I was also under the impression that the book was targeted at non-native speakers of the language.

I'm basically looking for a good and productive way to learn kanji - if possible using my ability to speak the language fluently to any benefit.

Any help will be greatly appreciated,

Thank you.

Check out Macaronics, which is a site I created as a hobby, to help my own self-study.
It'll send you a regular translation assignment by email, with a sentence in Japanese to translate into English.
There's furigana for each word, and if you highlight a particular word or phrase with your mouse, it will look up its meaning for you in the same window.

Verbal said:

Hello everyone,
I was brought up with Japanese, and hence at the moment I can speak the language fluently, however due to me being brought up in a western country I have a severe lack of recognition in kanji. I basically have around an early elementary school level of kanji recognition.
I have researched around many websites, and have a whole plethora of different methods concerning how to learn the recognition, writing and most importantly the remembering of kanji.
I have skimmed through and read up on James Heisig's "Remembering The Kanji", I even downloaded a copy of his first book. However, after realizing that you do not learn the real meaning of the kanji until after a somewhat 3-5 month period of going through the first book seemed pretty daunting. I was also under the impression that the book was targeted at non-native speakers of the language.
I'm basically looking for a good and productive way to learn kanji - if possible using my ability to speak the language fluently to any benefit.
Any help will be greatly appreciated,
Thank you.

Click to expand...

Furigana really is a crutch. You'll just form a habit of glazing over the kanji if the furigana is visible. Try reading seinen mangas, even if you don't like anime. Coppelion is a real good one, that I would recommend. You can also read light novels, or "pocket books." The point is to increase your frequency of common usage words and move on to the more uncommon later.

If you prefer a more methodical approach, you can get a list, program, or card set for different kanji levels and study the On Yomi first. On Yomi are often the reading for a compound word, while the Kun Yomi are usually the kanji by itself (verbs and single character words). The advantage of this is there are often fewer On Yomi readings for each character. Also, if you don't know the word that you suspect is a Kun Yomi, you can type it into an electronic dictionary as On Yomi and just add the kana that follows.

Personally, I do both.

You can read online, like the poster above suggested, however, I would suggest finding a way that does not have furigana available in the reading.

You're right about furigana being a crutch, and I don't like the way it's traditionally done either (NHK Easy News is a good example of this).

At my site, all the hiragana is underneath for reference, in a different color. So it's there if you need to understand pronunciation, but nothing stops you from seeing the entire kanji phrase alone and as a whole.

Here's a screenshot example:



And looking up meanings is simple; just highlight any of the text, and its definition in English appears below:

BrianLewis said:

Furigana really is a crutch. You'll just form a habit of glazing over the kanji if the furigana is visible. Try reading seinen mangas, even if you don't like anime. Coppelion is a real good one, that I would recommend. You can also read light novels, or "pocket books." The point is to increase your frequency of common usage words and move on to the more uncommon later.
If you prefer a more methodical approach, you can get a list, program, or card set for different kanji levels and study the On Yomi first. On Yomi are often the reading for a compound word, while the Kun Yomi are usually the kanji by itself (verbs and single character words). The advantage of this is there are often fewer On Yomi readings for each character. Also, if you don't know the word that you suspect is a Kun Yomi, you can type it into an electronic dictionary as On Yomi and just add the kana that follows.
Personally, I do both.
You can read online, like the poster above suggested, however, I would suggest finding a way that does not have furigana available in the reading.

Click to expand...

The whole point of heisig is to associate new information with a mneumonic or story with an english keyword as a trigger for your memory. In other words, learning how to write before learning the readings.

Its basically a method built on breaking down the kanji into components/primitives/radicals to make it harder to forget.

if you already know the readings you could try to associate it with japanese vocabulary rather than an english trigger.....should be pretty easy really >_>


eg: a common mneumonic for 親 （おや、しん in ryoushin) is

parent standing (立) on a tree (木) looking (見) at his children.

where parent would be the english keyword suggested by heisig.....you could use oya or ryoushin instead? or a japanese sentence rather than an english story?


to consolidate the knowledge in your memory, you could use a flashcard program like Anki..... so you can write a character out once in a while rather then tens of times at once.


This site may be helpful

wrightak2


for more help search in the kanji koohii forum for japanese keywords or the japanese level up blog

eg
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=j...hrome&ie=UTF-8

there are a tonne of user generated stories on the kanji koohii forum many better than the heisig book so you can mold it to suit your knowledge I guess.

mnemonic

I'm sorry, I have a bee in my bonnet about the spelling of this word.