Questions about kanji

Glenn> To be sure, it does boil down to personality and personal learning styles. The things you mentioned about noticing the radicals and stuff, came about naturally to me through pattern recognition as I was reading. I just kind of picked it up as I went along that Kanjis with similar parts often times have similar readings, and this made it easy for me to look them up. Basically I did not mind stopping and writing down new words (once I discovered the miracle of the electronic dictionary).

As far as meanings goes, when I started to set out on my own I already had a base for kanji and knew the English meanings of, as I said, about 3-400 kanji that I had learned formally in class. For the rest, I basically just started to infer their meanings by taking note of the patterns of words they would often be used in. I knew one kanji was used in one word, so many times when reading a new word I could just guess the meaning of the new word from the other word(s) that I already knew.

Basically we accomplished the same ends I think, but just by different means. To me it just seemed too painstaking and ineffective for my mind, to sit with a Kanji book writing them and memorizing the meanings, I need more action and I wanted to use the language doing fun things, like playing video games.

Half-n-Half said:

Just out of curiosity, once you learned the meanings behind each kanji, how did you then learn their readings? Rote memorization plus lots of reading?

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I had a bit of a phonetic vocabulary, I guess you could call it, for the 音読み. I got pretty good at guessing them pretty early, because there are some fairly obvious patterns. For instance, if you see 尃, there's a pretty good chance you're looking at a ハク, or something similar. In fact, 博, 薄, 搏, and 膊 all have the reading of ハク. 簿 is an exception (ボ), as is 縛 (バク). I don't actually know 膊, but 搏 I learned in はばたく (羽搏く) and never bothered looking further into it. 訓読み I picked up by just looking up words (as well as some of the tricky 音読み), and then putting them in the SRS in the later stages. The earlier stages would be by reading things and looking up the words and just waiting for them to stick, or looking at them and saying them over and over again (which I actually still do from time to time).

By the way, it should be noted that the above 尃 is different, and should not be confused with 専, which was originally 專 but later simplified. It's 音読み, セン, isn't always a huge help but is similar in the characters 轉 and 傳 (テン and デン, nowadays simplified to 転 and 伝), and as a result the above-mentioned 囀 was easy to get a reading of テン out of because of 轉. Its 訓読み, by the way, is さえず・る.

ha apparently i still need to learn english, definitely did not know what morphemes was.

Chidoriashi said:

Glenn> To be sure, it does boil down to personality and personal learning styles. The things you mentioned about noticing the radicals and stuff, came about naturally to me through pattern recognition as I was reading. I just kind of picked it up as I went along that Kanjis with similar parts often times have similar readings, and this made it easy for me to look them up. Basically I did not mind stopping and writing down new words (once I discovered the miracle of the electronic dictionary).

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The thing about that was that I would see parts come up a few times, but I didn't have any means to find out what they meant, so it was just "that shape again". The great thing about Heisig is that he puts a meaning to all of the parts, so that I didn't have to go hunting them down in the rarer cases. The stories can be fun to make at times too, although many times it's frustrating and seems impossible. Again, that's if you want to get the writings down. Probably not so much a factor if you just want reading proficiency.

The electronic dictionary certainly is a miracle. Especially the ones with 手書きパネル. I don't know how people got by without them and the internet.

colorado723 said:

ha apparently i still need to learn english, definitely did not know what morphemes was.

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Now that I wouldn't sweat. It's a specialized linguistic term. I'm sure you've never heard of an unvoiced unaspirated bilabial stop or a voiced glottal fricative, either.

Glenn said:

The electronic dictionary certainly is a miracle. Especially the ones with 手書きパネル. I don't know how people got by without them and the internet.

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Haha, amen to that.

colorado723 said:

well my only concern with learning just kanji, is that if i am studying random kanji from my book in the order they have them, (which they are apparently 'systematically arranged') and they dont use them commonly, i feel like ill forget a ton.
but i suppose that goes with anything, if you reinforce, you probably wont remember.
whats probably the hardest part is starting from the complete beginning. i can properly pronounce hiragana and spell what i hear, i suppose thats a start.

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You are going to forget virtually everything initially no matter how you practice. Learning and re-learning is the inevitable cycle. Japanese is said to be more challenging to read and write than most languages. On the other hand, for most people to understand any spoken second language is harder than reading it. Kanji are a necessary evil if you want to learn how to read, but can at least be memorized.

Real, spontaneous, total mastery of appropriate and natural Japanese, even practical conversation skill, takes immersion. Studying grammar books is not going to help with correctness. Talk to friends, watch movies, come to forum sites like this. You should be fine as long as you make it a point to speak it at least 10-20% of the time.

Even the Chinese need to study Kanji (they call it Hanzi) the hard way. So there is actually no painless method to get around this obstacle.