@Viexi

Totally unrelated but have you gone to any of Perfume’s concerts while they were here?

Do you still have that tutor?

Hey, welcome to Textfugu and congratulations on embarking on your journey to learn Japanese! I hear that students in Denmark get paid to attend school so I find it interesting that you don’t feel satisfied with your education system.

So the thing with learning through vocab, while I do point it out that you are learning kanji meanings and readings through vocabulary, the effort is more concentrated on learning vocab words which entails usually a meaning of a word and how that specific word is read. And as you’re doing that, as a side effect you just start to pick up on trends through realization after knowing a ton of words (“oh I’m beginning to think this kanji means this”, “this kanji is most likely read as this”).

But to get back to your question, yes it is very possible to start learning readings through this method. Either way, people who do Heisig tend to study vocab after completing Heisig and get the revelation of being able to pick up on readings through vocab anyway.

Now the problem I have with that is I came up with the same conclusion and results but without the whole doing Heisig for 3~? months and I feel like I can help people save an incredible amount of time which is why I try to tell people about the vocab and experience thing. Also, if you’ll end up doing the same thing in the end, why go through this tedious process?

BUT the fact of the matter is that Heisig seems to help people out for reasons that are beyond my understanding so don’t feel pressured by me or some other person to do a certain method. The best method is to try all the methods and to spend some time thinking about the meta stuff – “How much did I achieve and can I optimize what I’m doing now?”, “Is the current method working for me right now and can I optimize that, or do I need to try something else?”.

@MisterM2402 Please excuse my untidy hair in that video. I should have gotten a haircut when I had the chance. I’m working as a Junior Full Stack Software Engineer contractor on a project for a startup in which if I were to divulge that information, I would have to kill you. And then commit sudoku. I’m primarily a Rails dev (because that’s all I know…so far at least). I am however, rebuilding my personal website so that it’s a Rails app which may very closely resemble Danny Choo’s website in layout so that its not a goddam static single scrolling page.

@michicachan999 Unfortunately, I don’t normally make Youtube videos, but when I do, it’s stuff like this. Anyway it’s basically the reverse of what you said earlier: “…in knowing what a kanji sounds like you can get a gist of whatever vocab comes your way?”. Learn a ton of vocabulary, then you will naturally start to pick up the readings for kanji because you will start to see trends. If there’s a word with an irregular reading, then just straight up learn that word’s irregular reading and remember that its read differently. And then by knowing kanji readings by learning a ton of words, you can more or less guess like 75% of the time how to read a word even if you encounter a word you haven’t seen before. If you read this article from Tofugu , I am heavily opinionated towards the “Vocabulary & Experience” Camp and my video is an attempt to explain that within my 5 minute constraint. Koichi argues that the latter, (the bit after: “You can see the logic there, and why this actually does end up working. But, I’d like to argue that it’s better to go the other direction.”) is the better way, but I argue that this way is better because the way that Koichi describes presents a kind of n+1 problem, you will do something like as memorize meanings and then readings for kanji separately which is a bit redundant and can slow you down whereas you do something a little bit more complex by compressing that all together by learning words since you can learn both meanings and readings through learning vocab AND you have usable knowledge which makes this way is more efficient. Also even after you go and learn all the meanings and readings of kanji, you still end up having to learn vocab anyway.

n+1 problem doesn’t make sense to the layman so let me use a bit of contrived numbers.

The amount of 常用漢字 you need to learn is about 2200. That is 2200 meanings or more, but let’s just say 1 meaning per 漢字, so 2200. Then you need to learn the readings, let’s assume that half of 漢字 has one reading and the other half has 2 readings. 1100 + 4400 = 5500. Then you go through the process of learning vocab. Let’s say that was 10,000.

So that’s:
2200(漢字の意味) +
5500（漢字の読み） +
10,000（語彙） =
17,700 items you need to learn.

As opposed to:

10,000（語彙）=
10,000 items you need to learn.

So why go through 7,700 items first before going into the meat of the 10,000 useful items when you can go straight to the 10,000 useful items and you’ll pick up the other 7,700 items along the way.

NOW I UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS A BIT OF A CONTRIVED EXAMPLE AS THERE ARE MANY HOLES TO THE NUMERICAL EXAMPLE, but this is the best way I can explain it’s efficiency at 2:30am in the morning. I also like how explaining methodology turned into me debating instead of explaining so I apologize for that. I do hope though that it was a little bit more understandable. Also @MisterM2402 will help me out with this.

tl;dr for everyone: vocab – efficient. heisig – inefficient

tl;dr for Developers, Software Engineers etc. : Heisig approach = N+1 problem, learning vocab = eager loading.

To wrap up, an unrelated video. Speaking of Tokyo Girls Style, anyone going to JPOP Summit this weekend in San Francisco? We can totally meet up if you want. Or if you’re in LA and want to talk about Japanese learning (OR MAYBE IDOLS ALSO..!??!??!) in person, I’m here until the beginning of August. Just go to my website which I linked in the beginning of this post and let me know.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 5 months ago by  missingno15. Reason: since when do href tags need absolute paths

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http://lang-8.com/123987