Japanese Language Learners Unite!

Out of curiosity I just tried wanikani for a few minutes, and I can't really follow what it's trying to do. It seems to be devoted to the idea of learning radicals first and then building kanji knowledge on top, is that the idea?

Obviously not meaning to discourage anyone from it, but I've not heard of learning that way before (native speakers don't generally know the names or meanings of most radicals). Also some of the listed meanings are surprising - 也 "alligator", 各 "kiss", 歹 "yakuza" etc. Not sure where those are coming from.

I've only looked at the radical part; the site says I need to wait 90 minutes to try kanji.

I’m somewhere around the N3-N2, lagging in kanji and vocabulary after not really studying since my daughter was born. I can pretty much do what I want to do except consistently understand my father-in-law. He often goes off on rambling tangents and without knowing the context I’m pretty screwed.

For games I remember Dragon Quest 9 being very approachable, in particular because it has furigana for most of the kanji. Trying to recognise kanji on a low resolution display is the bane of playing those older games. I should consider checking out DQ11 (3DS) since it’s the game club game, if I can find a cheap copy.

fenomas wrote:

Out of curiosity I just tried wanikani for a few minutes, and I can't really follow what it's trying to do. It seems to be devoted to the idea of learning radicals first and then building kanji knowledge on top, is that the idea?

Obviously not meaning to discourage anyone from it, but I've not heard of learning that way before (native speakers don't generally know the names or meanings of most radicals). Also some of the listed meanings are surprising - 也 "alligator", 各 "kiss", 歹 "yakuza" etc. Not sure where those are coming from.

I've only looked at the radical part; the site says I need to wait 90 minutes to try kanji.

The whole process is explained in this Tofugu article. It's very long though (but I found it interesting enough when I read it to give WK a shot).

The gist of it is that the meaning of the radicals are just building blocks. They use these radicals to construct mnemonics to help users to remember both the meaning and the reading of the kanji itself. The method only teaches one reading with the kanji, the one reading that comes up more often, regardless of whether it's the on'yomi or the kun'yomi. The other readings are introduced when studying the vocabulary.

bobbywatson wrote:

The whole process is explained in this Tofugu article.

Hmm, thanks that makes things clear. But.... weird. Whatever works, I guess? If one needs to learn meanings in isolation then mnemonics make sense, but I always sort of assumed everyone learned kanji as part of vocabulary. I mean, there's lots of kanji that if you showed me the character on its own I'd be hard-pressed to say what it means, but I could easily read 10 or 20 words that contained it, you know? But to each their own.

----

That said, everyone knows that the best way to learn is with memes, so here's everyone's homework for today. Lots of useful phrases in here that you can use in everyday conversation:

Adjectives... so many of them sound alike to me.

JLPT N1 here. Not much I can offer re kanji since I barely squeaked by that section in my N1 test many moons ago—my studying was mainly done with flash cards using Mnemosyne. Working and having to read/write emails in a mainly Japanese speaking office for 5 years did much more for me kanji acquisition wise than studying for the test ever did. Still can’t write by hand worth a damn though.

Speaking/listening has always been my strong suit (I think I ended up getting the full 60/60 for that section on the test, actually). I credit this mainly to a youth spent watching way, way too much anime. By the time I took my first class I already had an ear for what sounded “right”, although I did tend to use 俺 rather than 私 for a while, which looking back on it was very cringe.

I believe it’s been mentioned both in this thread and elsewhere , but watching/reading media in Japanese you’re already familiar with in English (or whatever your native language is) is definitely an approach I advocate. Even if it’s not something you are already familiar with, so long as you are consistently engaging with it and approaching your engagement with a language learner mindset, I believe there’s a lot of progress that can be made even without more formal study.

Edit:

fenomas wrote:

I mean, there's lots of kanji that if you showed me the character on its own I'd be hard-pressed to say what it means, but I could easily read 10 or 20 words that contained it, you know? But to each their own.

This is the way.

fenomas wrote:

Hmm, thanks that makes things clear. But.... weird. Whatever works, I guess?

It's based on the same principle of the Memory Palace that can be used to memorise large amounts of relatively disconnected information. This is especially useful since we suck at remembering symbols, but are really, really good at remembering stupid images (which feeds into your meme suggestion!). Traditional teaching of Kanji is just brute force exposure and repetition, which works if you're living and working in Japanese culture with complete language immersion since you get it naturally. Not sure it's efficient to do that method with studying.

My own experience with WK (and the underlying principle, which I first found in Remembering the Kanji has been pretty positive. There are a relatively small number of elements that build any kanji, which allows for a minimum of brute, deliberate memorisation. From these, each kanji can be associated with a vivid image that incorporates those elements as an aid to both meaning *and* to how to pronounce it. Over time, of course, you're entirely correct that exposure via vocabulary and grammar as part of reading will eventually mean that the mnemonic is no longer required. WK isn't a ladder up the kanji cliff, but rather a bunch of climbing spikes and safety ropes to help you start the climb and not fall too far if you forget something.

Still, horses for courses and all that. Whatever works!

If you do want to truly master kanji, mnemonics is the only way. You're basically cramming the equivalent of the 9-10 years of intense kanji study that children do at school into, well, whatever time you can dedicate to it. An ideal mnemonic should encompass the radicals and the most common meanings. In terms of being able to write the kanji, if you can include the radicals in order they appear, well even better. Henshall's guide was a good start for me but, as it tells you I think, the best mnemonics are the ones you make yourself.

The vocabulary part is absolutely true as well. Whenever I've studied particular kanji, I've also included a bunch of vocab that encompass the common meanings/readings of those kanji in my vocab practice. At the time I used the flash card program Anki but that was some years ago, dunno what's popular now.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

If you do want to truly master kanji, mnemonics is the only way.

I think that would depend on what mastery means to you. The fastest I ever saw somebody achieve proficiency was a colleague who wrote a small Outlook plugin to generate a list of the words that appeared most frequently in his work emails, and he just did vocab and kanji flash cards in that order. He was really something -- he got transferred to JP for work, and like a year later he could read specifications and contracts and contribute in all-JP meetings. But I don't know whether he could have passed N5, and he definitely couldn't have followed the plot of an anime.

OTOH if for example somebody just wanted to learn kanji, as an end more than as a means, and didn't particularly intend to do a lot of reading or writing with it, then I'd suppose mnemonics would be the only approach.

One side note that gets left overlooked - I've known people who were conversationally fluent and could barely read kana, let alone kanji. Not knowing any kanji puts a low ceiling on how much vocab you can realistically remember, but apart from that you don't necessarily need it.

By mastery I mean tackle the kanji proficiency test. Or perhaps pass the higher N levels, I can't speak to them, never tried them. And having a good grounding of the most common 500-1000 kanji will wildly accelerate your vocabulary acquisition. It's somewhat true vice-versa but it's also easy to mistake similar kanji or get confused with meanings. And reading kanji names is a whole other thing.

fenomas wrote:

One side note that gets left overlooked - I've known people who were conversationally fluent and could barely read kana, let alone kanji. Not knowing any kanji puts a low ceiling on how much vocab you can realistically remember, but apart from that you don't necessarily need it.

I would certainly like to be conversationally fluent so that I can speak to my wife's family more easily. However, my primary goal is to be able to read Japanese novels and manga the way I do in English, so kanji knowledge is a major goal, and picking it up via vocabulary lists just doesn't seem to stick in my head. So I'm coming at it from the other direction: I learn the meaning and most common onyomi/kunyomi pronunciations of the most common kanji, and my vocabulary builds from there. Weirdly, it's perhaps the opposite of what you said earlier about not knowing individual kanji meanings, but can easily understand words containing them. I don't recognise many words, but if I know the meanings of the constituent kanji, I can often take a really solid stab at the word meaning and the pronunciation.

Coldstream wrote:

However, my primary goal is to be able to read Japanese novels and manga the way I do in English, so kanji knowledge is a major goal, and picking it up via vocabulary lists just doesn't seem to stick in my head.

I guess most of this is different approaches at different levels. I mean learning radicals is a great idea when starting out, no arguments there. And there are baselines where a kanji is a concrete noun by itself (火, 力..) or where certain radicals very reliably imply something about the meaning of characters they appear in (魚, 虫..), so it makes a lot of sense to learn them in isolation as building blocks.

But later I think one needs other methods - e.g. I'm pretty confident nobody should be reading 務 by decoding it into 矛+夂+力 and then using a mnemonic to translate those into a meaning. The end goal of fluency is to read the same way you do in English, after all (i.e. not by sounding out words or decoding Latin roots or the like). To reach that point one has to practice doing it, so that's what I was trying to say about learning kanji via vocabulary.

(Of course if you need to write 務 by hand, mnemonics might be a valid approach. Literally no idea there.)

Coldstream wrote:

Weirdly, it's perhaps the opposite of what you said earlier about not knowing individual kanji meanings, but can easily understand words containing them.

I may have phrased that badly. It's not that I'd see a lone kanji and have no idea what it meant, it's that complex kanji aren't used alone, so I don't learn or remember a meaning for them in isolation. E.g., offhand I have no particular idea of what 務 means. If you asked me I could answer, but it wouldn't be a thing I know, I'd be thinking of some words that use it and then saying a concept they have in common. Hope that makes sense.

Sorry if this has been asked, it's late and Im scrolling through. Is there an app of wanikani for android? I can only find some 3rd party ones... So far I've just been on the website.

If there isn't an official one, is there a recommended one? (@bobbywatson).
Arigatou!

emiru wrote:

Sorry if this has been asked, it's late and Im scrolling through. Is there an app of wanikani for android? I can only find some 3rd party ones... So far I've just been on the website.

If there isn't an official one, is there a recommended one? (@bobbywatson).
Arigatou!

They do not have an official app. The website itself works fine on my iPhone, and I assume it works fine on Android as well. I never used an app for it. I don't like typing the readings on my phone, as it is way more prone to typos.

どういたしまして!

Aside, but if you input JP text on your phone do try using a keyboard with "10-key" style input. Google's keyboard supports this on android, no idea about iphone. With a very little getting used to it's way faster and easier to type.

emiru wrote:

Sorry if this has been asked, it's late and Im scrolling through. Is there an app of wanikani for android? I can only find some 3rd party ones... So far I've just been on the website.

If there isn't an official one, is there a recommended one? (@bobbywatson).
Arigatou!

Actually, there's an app called Flaming Durtles that you can link to your Wanikani account via a token (the app itself and the forums can show you how). It will allow you to practice offline, and sync whenever you have a signal. I use it and recommend it!

After using it for a about two weeks, I have to say I am very impressed with Bunpro! I'm still going through the N5 grammar points, and it's kicking my ass (in a helpful way).

As I've noted in a previous post, it uses multiple sentences for every grammar point, varying the politeness level, which forces me to really look at the question to figure out what the correct answer is. It can also be gentle sometimes by telling the user 'this is almost correct, you need an extra particle in there somewhere' or 'please make this more polite', which I appreciate. I made me realize that I need to re-read the lessons on Godan verbs in Human Japanese Intermediate (and that I need to complete my OneNote summary table for all different verb terminations).

Also, it let me import the list of Kanji I already know (at least in theory) by linking with my Wanikani account. This has been useful, as it makes me realize that I've forgotten some of them, and it makes me review some of them I haven't seen in a while. I've actually un-burned a few kanji and vocab to move them back to my review queue. Extra kanji practice cannot hurt.

In short: Once my free pro trial expires, I will pay for it for at least a year, maybe more as they seem to be adding new grammar lessons over time (the list for N1 is pretty short at the moment).

I also took advantage of Satori Reader's new year discount, but I haven't used that as much yet. My plan is to take one article a week and really dig into it, and add the vocab I don't know to my Anki deck. I know Satori reader has a review mechanism, but at this point I'm already doing reviews in WaniKani, Bunpro, and Anki, adding an extra one is kind of overkill. It makes me think I should write an app to consolidate everything in one place.

Today's homework everybody:

Everyday phrase that will definitely be useful to learn:

「こっちはな・・ 世界の平和より、 明日の飯なんだよ」(0:25)

And here's today's inspiration. These guys have been playing together since middle school:

Piece of net slang that I found humorous:

自演リプ (jien ripu)
Sockpuppeting - i.e. replying to your own post from a different account

自演 refers to a performer starring in a work that they also wrote, while リプ is "reply". So the literal meaning is more or less: "post from somebody acting out their own screenplay".

Even if there was a way to know how much money I've spent over the years in Japanese learning material, I'm not sure I'd want to know.

I was reading volume 5 of よつばと yesterday and, thanks to a point of grammar I had learned a few days earlier in Human Japanese Intermediate (and then added to my Bunpro reviews, which I will try to do moving forward), I was able to get a joke and laughed out loud. The joke wasn't that funny but, somehow, I had the feeling that all that money had been well spent!

I was hoping to finish HJI in January but, due to circumstances, I'm only about halfway through. However, I'm getting much better at godan verbs conjugation (and I've built an Anki deck specifically for that, which I will start to use... any day now).

I wanted to pop in and say thanks especially to Fenomas for putting stuff into the thread. I've had some life/work stuff going on recently that has completely consumed my mental energy, but I'm hoping to get back on the wagon of formal studying (rather than listening to my wife's TV shows) this week!

Oh thanks! I kind of thought I was annoying everyone and killing the thread. If it's useful, I'll keep posting.

Here's my study material that was on that last OPM video:

Dialog:

ようやく見つけたぞ、サイタマ・・
今日は貴様を殺すためー
悪いけど、今忙しいからまた後でな
は?
この俺から 逃げられると思うのか?
あれ?今良く見てなかった・・
あいつの顔に切り込んだと思ったら、刀身が!
忙しいって・・ 言ってんだろ
イライラしてんだから 邪魔すんじゃねーよ
殴るぞ

Exegesis:

  • 悪いけど - common lead-in to any kind of negative statement
  • この俺 - the "この" makes it self-aggrandizing, with a nuance like "a person as important as me"
  • 見てなかった - formally 見てなかった, but in casual speech lots of characters get elided
  • と思ったら - the ~たら ending often means "if.." but here it's "just when.."
  • 忙しいって - casual/spoken for: 忙しい
  • 言ってんだろ - in rough speech, "te-form + iru" is often shortened to "ten". So the neutral version of this would be 言っているんだろ
  • してんだから - rough speech for: しているんだから
  • すんじゃねーよ - slangy/rough speech for: するんじゃないよ, which is a strong negative imperative.

As I said elsewhere, doing this kind of thing is basically how I learned all my Japanese - whenever I find source material that's interesting I pick it apart. Also when things have subtitles, I chew on why the translator said this or that, whether I'd have translated it differently, etc. I've never really been one for word lists, but I'm a big fan of active listening and the like.

I did that through about 17 volumes of this manga:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_To...

Very everyday settings and situations so I found it quite helpful for building up useful vocabulary. Much as I love hard sci-fi etc., they tend to be packed with esoteric words and phrases that are very situational.

Yeah, I think that applies to a lot of anime as well.

On the learn-from-TV side, for similar reasons I think dramas aren't very useful, as they tend to have stilted, unnatural dialog. OTOH variety shows are great learning material - not only is it natural speech, but variety shows tend to add overlayed text for like half of what's said. Following that text at speed is IMO great reading practice (assuming you've found a show interesting enough that you want to follow what's said).

A site listing the 777 most frequently appearing kanji, which they claim comprise 90% of the kanji in general text.

fenomas wrote:

A site listing the 777 most frequently appearing kanji, which they claim comprise 90% of the kanji in general text.

Isn't that the entire point of the Jōyō kanji list? To establish a literacy baseline that will get you through pretty much any daily written Japanese?

Still, 777 kanji is much less than 2136, so it's really cool to have a more defined knowledge target.

dup

Baron Of Hell wrote:

There is a video game called Learn Japanese to Survive, It is a RPG made in RPG Maker that teaches basic Japanese using the power of video games. Currently it is on sell on steam. Note if you die in the game you die in real life. I haven't played it yet so I'm not sure if that last part is true.