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Howdy all,
I just got to the part of season two where we start learning kanji.
Eight kanji and I’m already lost?! I think I’m going to have to sit here and digest these evil beasts for a while before moving on.
Up until now, things have been a breeze. Hiragana was fun and easy; I’m by no means excellent at reading it, but I managed to do the drag n’ drop game in one minute forty seconds. The radicals were great; I just read through the page and I had them transported into my brain permanently.
Then, I get to these rotten little kanji. The on’yomi are fairly easy. Not as easy as the radicals, but alright. Then… then… … …then… …
Kunyomi.
GAH!!!! the HORROR!!! How on earth am I supposed to study or remember any of these things on anki when I have no clue which pronunciation is used in any given word?! It seems like every single word is a different pronunciation of the same symbol. I’ve read through the lesson and I still don’t understand! Is there any reason for the different pronunciations? is there any pattern at all? or are they completely arbitrary and random? Yes, I realize that all language is somewhat arbitrary to a certain extent, but most of the time there is some sort of order to it…
Another problem is the lack of worksheets for writing. I think part of the reason I found Hiragana so easy was the worksheets that let me write it out and have to recall it, not just recognize it. Are there any worksheets for writing these things out that maybe I’ve missed? If not, can someone direct me to something, anything, that would help?
Swamped,
Z-manIf it helps you could try Remembering The Kanji. I only got to 5 stroke kanji before I decided to give up and do RTK.
For me kanji are just shapes, with no meaning or sound in particular. So I just practice writing them on graph paper. I think if you want to learn meaning and pronunciation, the best thing to do is to study sentences.
Kun’yomi is often the same as how you would write the word in hiragana.
e.g. 犬’s kun’yomi ＝ いぬ (Dog)
There’s exceptions to this sometimes but once I noticed this learning kanji became a lot less daunting.
The readings can change a little when mixed with other kanji, but if you think about a word like 今日 this doesn’t even use the on’yomi or kun’yomi for either of the kanji (as far as I know!), it’s just the word きょう in kanji form. When you learn new vocab, if that word has a kanji associated to it then you can just write the vocab down and have it converted to kanji, it’s still pronounced the same. This is my understanding of things anyway and in practice it hasn’t caused me much grief yet.
It gets easier, I used to absolutely hate tackling even just 5 kanji, but now it’s 10-15 at a time and I’m getting through them quickly and remembering them well too.
@ Yggbert
That would only work for me if I knew the word (and how to pronounce it) to begin with. And by that time, I’d be so used to the Hiragana, that I think I’d have a hard time getting the Kanji to ‘stick’.
Yeah but in time you will know the words, and if you practice writing by using Lang-8 you’ll eventually get used to seeing the kanji version pop up on your IME, which is another way to learn the kanji for a word in a way. On Lang-8 people sometimes correct you by changing your hiragana stuff to kanji too, so that’s another way to remember the kanji for a given word or phrase.
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This reply was modified 13 years ago by
Luke.
Well, it will be a long while till I can use Lang-8, but until then I guess I’ll struggle through on the anki stuff. It’s getting a little easier for the ones I just learned, I’m starting to recognize them. I suppose I can just camp out here until I’m comfortable and then move on. Anyway, thanks for your advice. =)
You have 3 Months. Go!
http://kanji.koohii.com/Took me a year ;D
Kanji Damage is based off Heisig’s ideas (RTK), but it includes at least one ON reading in each mnemonic as well.
If all that sounds like gibberish, just go read the introduction on the website.
http://kanjidamage.com/introduction
You can also download a nice color coded Anki deck for KD to speed things along.
AnonymousOnyomi is the original Chinese reading. Kunyomi is the Japanese reading.
MOST of the time, if the kanji is by itself, it is the kunyomi reading. Also, if the kanji has a hiragana after it, and that counts as the whole meaning of the word (which you learn by experience), then it is also the kunyomi.
The kanji is onyomi when there is jukugo, or two kanji next to each other.
Now there are a few exceptions regarding this that you will learn, like how the kanji for ‘hand’ and the kanji for ‘direction’ strongly favor the kunyomi, even if there is jukugo.
There are also a few exceptions where, even though the kanji is alone, it uses the onyomi. Like I said, kanji usually use the kunyomi when alone. But, yes, there are exceptions. One notable example of this are numbers. If the kanji for the number ‘one’ is alone, you would normally use ‘hitotsu’ because it is the kunyomi, but since this is an exception, you use the onyomi ‘ichi’ for the kanji for one.-
This reply was modified 12 years, 8 months ago by
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RTK to learn how to write; vocab to learn how to read. Don’t worry about how a word *looks* like it *should* be read, just learn how it *is* read and everything should be fine. You’re probably not going to figure how to read 今日 on your own just from learning a few readings, so just learn it as a single entity. I’m not really sure why you find the on-yomi fine but the kun-yomi somehow much harder – if you took away the names “on” and “kun”, and just lumped them all under “pronunciations”, you’d still be learning the same things, nothing would change.
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This reply was modified 13 years ago by
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