漢字 Kanji

[Bokusenou]

Jembru That's pretty neat!
I took a class on Japanese art in college (not majorly interested in it, but it fulfilled a requirement, and at least it was about Japan), and we went on a class field trip to an art museum at one point. I loved looking at the old bone script kanji on the side of the paintings. They look so different from the modern ones!

Also, welcome to the club.^^ I didn't expect to find kanji interesting at first, but when I got the kanji bug hit, I never looked at them the same way again.

[Jembru]

Wow.. this thread has been amazing to read back over. What a difference a year makes (well closer to 2 years)! ^^ I actually popped by to update on my last ditch effort to get the initial learning of the kanji over and done with so I can get on with learning vocab.

Although I won't start my next year's study plan until April now, to reflect the Japanese school year, I still wanted to have all the jouyou memorised by Jan, so I could spend the last few months cramming vocab with my kanji game and anki decks.

Unfortunately, I still have a few hundred kanji left to learn. I have 2 choices then. I either a) rush to the end, knowing they probably won't really stick, but hoping that I can re-learn them as I encounter them during the next phase of my study, or b) continue at my current pace and accept that I'll probably run into Jan or Feb (if Feb, then at least I can say it took me a full 12 months to learn them all! ^^)

I've decided to go for the latter BUT increase my daily reviews of the kanji I already know! So I'm doing extra reviews on memrise and adding compounds of trickier characters to anki to get used to seeing them in context.

Saying as the initial study of the kanji will run into the vocab building stage of my plan, I've decided to just start that right away. I was going to use pre-built anki decks for this, but have since changed my mind. Instead, I'm currently adding jukugo from the various study sources I've used so far. This means that the words I'm adding all use elementary school kanji, which I've practiced writing so know well (and still include a small handful of kanji not encountered in RTK yet; 馬, 駅, 送, 関, 態 < admittedly very few now).

I've added just over 100 such words in 48 hours, although I've set that particular deck as limited to just 20 new words per day and 50 reviews.

My hope is that if I continue in this way, I'll somewhat mimic the method Bokusenou used to study. Albeit in a very different order and at a different stage in my studies (I know, I know.. I should never have put off kanji for so long).

Wish me luck everyone! I wish you all luck with your own personal learning goals too! 

xx

[Jembru]

So erm... I decided that I'd like to at least try to get to the end of the memrise deck by Jan. There are still loads of characters that haven't quite stuck, but they're at least vaguely familiar to me, so I'm hoping their meanings and readings will become clearer as I meet them in various words next year.

What I didn't bank on is RTK leaving some of the harder characters to the end. Coming up with vivid enough mnemonics is proving pretty tricky. I've practised every character now, but then when they pop up on memrise I'm left scratching my head and thinking 'this was in the book??'. If I complete this memrise course by Jan 1st it will be a miracle!

In addition to adding compounds to anki of kanji I've been practicing, I've also started using two new memrise decks. They're both based on the estimated JLPT vocabulary lists. Now that the core vocabulary decks are gone from anki, I thought this would be another good way to mop up core words that I've missed, as well as learn how familiar words are written using the kanji I've just learnt over the last year. Words I didn't know at all are, of course, added to anki.

Mind you, I'm way behind with anki. I'm only completing a full days reviews about once a week at the minute. It's killing me, but it can't be helped I guess. Completing RTK is demanding such a large proportion of my limited study time. Even my precious kokugo textbook hasn't been opened for over 2 weeks, while I use that time to practice writing kanji instead. I'm soo ready for this leg of my journey to be over now!

Hopefully next time I update here will be to tell you I finally got to the end of the memrise course!

[Bokusenou]

頑張って! You can do it! If you ever need help with stories, I could try to give you some ideas. You're almost done!

[Jembru]

I came by a cool little quiz in the kanji drill book I'm working through. I really enjoyed doing it so thought you lot might be interested too.
It's like the puzzles we have in English some times where you get clues like 'day', 'burn' 'glasses' and have to give the answer 'sun', only the missing kanji can be the first or second character in the word (as indicated by the arrows). 

(I really need to get a scanner don't I? ^^)
 

Dec 23, 2015 2:52:53 GMT Bokusenou said:

頑張って! You can do it! If you ever need help with stories, I could try to give you some ideas. You're almost done!

Actually there is a kanji I'm struggling with. I've tried a few stories and none of them have been strong enough. It's '籍’. It's that darned Christmas tree! 

[Bokusenou]

Ooh, nice puzzle! Those kanji puzzles are always fun.

Also, for 籍 I imagined a children's story that went something like "Once upon a time there was a little bamboo sprout who wanted to be a Christmas tree. He wished and wished but knew that as long as he hadn't gone to Christmas tree school, he would never learn to be a real Christmas tree. To enroll in Christmas tree school he put Christmas lights and ornaments on himself and traveled to the North Pole Christmas Tree School, pretending to be a fir tree. He looked kind of sadly pathetic. Thus on arrival he was immediately found out, but Santa liked his courage, made him an honorary Christmas Tree School enrollee, and put him on the mantlepiece as an example for every Christmas tree who enrolled in the school to gaze upon.".

My first version ended with Santa burning him for firewood, but I kind of felt bad afterwards re-reading it, and then changed it to a happier ending.^-^;

[Jembru]

Okay, I'll see if that one sticks better. Thanks! I don't even remember my first story, but my last one was something about someone enrolling on a history course and learning that people used to use bamboo as Christmas trees. I tended to see the image of people decorating bamboo with tinsel and lights, but there was too weak a link with enrollment.

Actually, I stumbled by an article the other day while trying to find a list of all the elements and keywords from the book. It explained that the reason some of the keywords are hard to remember is that the book was written so long ago that Helsing was probably used to different vocabulary and was drawing from the world around him, which is quite far removed from the world many of us now know. The article suggested just ignoring such keywords and giving them your own. That wasn't an option when I was working through it because I was using the memrise course (although some of the keywords were changed, which was a bit annoying at the time). So now I'm done with the memrise course, I'm going to start renaming the more stubborn characters to see if I can come up with more creative mnemonics for them!

[Bokusenou]

No prob! Also,about the obscure keywords,that makes sense! Since I started studying Classical Japanese recently, it's really interesting for me to see how much Japanese has changed, but I haven't really thought about how much English has changed with time. Even in the 70s I'm sure there was different words for some things. I remember watching an older movie with my Dad and being baffled as to what certain things were...a slide rule, a telex...all tools which have been replaced by more advanced tools. I'm sure certain things were common knowledge then which aren't now. Making your own keywords is a good idea! If I ever do RTK 3 I'll probably replace or supplement everything with Japanese keywords.