Learning to Read

It's only fairly recently, that is to say, half a year ago, that I discovered the Holy Grail of secrets to learning to read in Japanese.
 Kanji's a monstrous bitch, man. Learning to recognize 2500 symbols with anywhere between 1 and 8 alternate readings is as difficult and tedious as it sounds, but there are different approaches one can take to get to the finish line faster. For my first 16 months in Japan, I opted for the school approach - starting with the very basics and slowly progressing through the Kanji that get the most usage on a daily basis, and drilling them into my head, repeatedly writing the same symbol down on notebook pages. I learned 500 symbols.
 And then I discovered the miracle that is Heisig and how to use it in conjunction with a Kanji dictionary and a simple flashcard software, Anki. I learned 600 symbols in the last 5 months, studying 10-20 minutes a day.
 The Heisig method is simple in concept. First, it introduces you to very basic, simple symbols, and shows you four, maybe five of them. Next, it mixes and matches every combination of those symbols into new symbols, and encourages you to think of a story as you put them together.

For example,
昭 is "shining" and is made of three basic symbols: 日- "Sun"刀 - "Sword"口 - "Mouth"

So for the first kanji, "shining" to make sense, I could break it down into the following story using its components: "The sun is shining off the edge of the sword as it is pulled out of the mouth of its sheath." And I thus remember how to recognize and write this symbol.

When learning Kanji in this order (by introducing one radical at a time and mixing them with what you already know), another thing comes to attention - many kanji with the same radicals have the same readings. For instance:

召　昭　照　招　詔　紹　沼 

These symbols all contain the same radicals (the sword+mouth combination) and can all be read the same way - shou. This is the case 60% of the time - kanji with the same radicals have a higher chance of being read the same way (which means it's not the case all the time, but most!)

So how do you put this into effect in learning your Kanji?

Step 1 - download "Anki"

Do it like this!

 The program is very light and exists for smartphone. It's basically just digital flashcards, but the beautiful thing is that, by telling the program how difficult it was for you to remember the last card, it will gauge when to show it to you again. For instance, if you said it was "hard", it will show you the card again in a few minutes, but if it was "easy" it will show you the card in 10 days, perhaps, and then 30 days if you say it's easy after those 10 days went by.

Step 2 - get the Heisig pack.
 I personally like this one.

Step 3 - use a dictionary.
This one is very good. The purpose of the dictionary is to get the readings of the card. Heisig by itself only teaches you the meaning of a symbol, but not how to read it. It's up to you to go the extra step.

Step 4 - pen everything down.
For quick reference. This'll help you study and also gives you a chance to compare similar symbols with one another. Write everything in a notebook - symbol, reading, and even its Heisig number, to help.

And voila. I hope that helped you as much as it helps me. A very technical post today, I know.

Interesting Tidbits: この言語は無理

I'm trying to teach myself to read Japanese. It's a long grueling process. I've been told that, in order to be able to read the newspaper here, I'd need to know approximately 2000 characters.
 But it's not even that simple. Setting aside the actual spoken language, the process of learning in reading and writing Japanese is similar to that of venturing into a never ending labyrinth, where knives lurk around every corner. It's just...tricky.
You see, there are 3 "alphabets" in Japanese. Technically, you could establish a (barely) similar comparison with roman letters; where we have 2 alphabets: 'UPPER CAPS' and 'lower caps.' Though there are 26 letters, there are actually 52 symbols to memorize. Upper caps and lower caps serve a different function, though these functions are quite simple to remember. The three Japanese alphabets are the following:


1: Hiragana - ひらがな - 48 symbols.
 Hiragana is the basic written Japanese. The baby shit, if you will. Each of the 48 symbols is a sound, such as ka, ki, ku, ke and ko. You can technically write everything in hiragana, but it'd just make shit confusing as hell, since a lot of Japanese words are homo-phonic and would be written in the exact same way. But this is the first form of writing you learn at school.

2: Katakana - カタカナ - 48 symbols.
 Same as hiragana, katakana is also associated with sounds. The same sounds, even. However, people use katakana to write words that aren't Japanese in origin, such as foreign names, or brands, or words that don't have a Japanese origin, such as "hamburger," the Japanese word for which is "hanba-ga."


3: Kanji - 漢字 - over 50,000 symbols.
 That's right. 50,000 motherfucking symbols; but to be fair, only 2000 to 3000 are in common use. Each symbol is a word, or a part of a word. See, this shit is confusing. Depending on how you combine these symbols together, they have entirely different and unrelated meanings to other combinations of the same god damn symbols. For example, 日本 reads "Ni/hon". It means "Japan."　本日 reads "Hon/jitsu." It means "This Day." You see what happened there?  Though 本 stayed the same in terms of its reading (Hon), 日appeared in both those words, but was read completely differently in each occasion, going from "Ni" to "Jitsu." That's because one symbol often has multiple readings. Often two, sometimes three. Or four. Or five. There's no quick way to learn this. You just have to drill them into your head. By the way, some of them have like, 20 strokes. They suck.


As of now, I know 200 kanji symbols. And I already get 'em mixed up sometimes. Shit.