In a previous post I talked about James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji, Volume 1. (RTK1 from here on out.) It’s a really cool book, and I have drunk the Kool-Aid to become a believer in his approach to studying kanji.
Sort of.
First, I must dispel a myth.
Learning kanji is NOT HARD. It’s very do-able. It requires a little forethought, the right materials, and work. Seriously, 150 million people use kanji daily and have no problems with it at all. You have to put in the hours, and you have to be SMART about it.
The division of labor will set you free.
Juggling 3 balls is easier than juggling 7. RTK1 is all about getting you to reduce the number of balls you’re trying to juggle when you learn kanji. By getting one big chunk of learning out of the way, you’re making it easier for your brain to learn kanji.
RTK1 does something really cool. It puts you on the level of all of those Chinese kids who are trying to learn Japanese. When they learn Japanese, they only have 3 balls to juggle, compared to your 7 when tackling kanji.
They see those kanji characters, and in their language, they have a meaning in Chinese.
So for example, they’ll see 川 and think, “Oh hey, that’s the character for ’stream.’” Then they’ll find out that the Japanese pronounce it entirely differently. (In fact, in Japanese, you can take one character and pronounce it 3-4 different ways, depending on how it’s used. ) But they already have a mental hook, and that hook is “stream.”
They can recognize it, they can write it, and they can slot it in a spot in their brain and attach a rough meaning to it in their native language.
So really, all they’re stuck doing is learning how to pronounce it.
That’s what RTK1 does for you, you non-native Chinese language speaker! And that is pretty impressive, once you grasp that concept, because it does it for you for about 2,042 characters, if you keep your study habits up. And really, all you’re doing is just juggling the characters in your brain until you can assign Japanese readings to them full-time.
So when you approach kanji in the wild, all you have to learn are the readings.
That’s the huge deal. You’ve already got the other stuff down from RTK1. That’s why I drank the Kool-Aid.
Those English words you’re using to learn them will fade over time.
I finished RTK1 about 11 months ago. Finishing RTK1 takes a lot of effort, and a lot of people feel great when they’ve done it. Congratulations. You’ve achieved something.
Kind of.
You’ve prepared your brain to start learning Japanese kanji. BUT you haven’t actually learned any Japanese yet.
At this point, some people sit back and say, “Wow, I know a lot of kanji!” Well, yeah, kind of, but you don’t know any Japanese. Then they freak out when they realize that.
The rest of us realize that the easy part is over, and now we have to figure out how to learn all of those readings.
You may think, “Crap, what do I do now? I memorized all of these stupid keywords, now how should I learn the actual readings?”
You can get a bad case of paralysis by overanalysis. Why? Well, because you have so many options available to you now, simply because you’re done preparing yourself to learn.
First, you need to know something. Kanji have two readings, the onyomi, or the Chinese reading, and the kunyomi, or Japanese reading. Sounds confusing? It is at first.
Here’s the quick and dirty: you usually use Chinese readings when two or more kanji are hanging together to form a word, and you usually use the Japanese readings when a kanji stands alone, usually as a verb. Usually. Not always.
I’m bringing this up because it’s important.
Now, I’m assuming you’ve finished RTK1 by now, and you’re wondering what to do next. So here are some of your options. (Or at least some of the ones I considered.)
It’s a valid option. You could order Remembering the Kanji, Volume 2, and just proceed on your merry way. Heisig did something pretty smart for RTK2: he took kanji with similar readings and grouped them together when they had similar radicals.
It’s very handy, but… well… see, the thing is, it only works for some kanji, it only works for some readings, some of those readings are obscure (like 1% of the readings of a kanji), and it only works for the onyomi (those Chinese readings where two or more kanji are hanging out).
So its usefulness is limited. Also, the vocab he uses as examples are presented in isolation. There are no example sentences, so you don’t know how to use the words without having to look them up yourself.
Some of the vocab is obscure. We’re talking, stuff I can’t find in my dictionary obscure, because it’s ancient Buddhist stuff obscure.
His approach to kunyomi isn’t very helpful. He devotes one chapter to it, and after reading it 3-4 times, I still don’t get it. It’s way too complicated, in my opinion. It’s taking something simple and making it harder than it needs to be.
In the end, you’ll know a bunch of readings, but I’m not really sure how it’ll help you know any Japanese.
NOTE: If you get RTK2, make sure you download the errata.
Some people choose to do this. I see this as delaying the inevitable. If you jump ahead to RTK3, you can pick up the rest of the kanji, so you’ll have English meanings for 3,007 kanji. Great, but you still don’t know any Japanese. I would do this when you have those 2,042 kanji nailed in Japanese, but that’s me.
The other problem is that these kanji are mostly very obscure.
NOTE: If you get RTK3, make sure you download the errata.
Some people like this series. I’m not too keen on it, because I like lots of example sentences. I like to take those example sentences and dump them in my SRS, because then I have context. I thought Kanji in Context would give me context. Turns out I was only half-right. It gave me context for some, but not all of my kanji, and it was completely random about which kanji got context. Some did, others didn’t, and I never found out why. I felt a little ripped-off, given the price.
So maybe the title should be Some Kanji in Context, But Not All of Them, which is disappointing.
Okay, this series has a goofy name, but I have to admit it has what I want. Sort of. What CosCom did was take 2,001 kanji, put them in order of frequency, divide them up into 3 volumes, printed 2 of them, only made the third one available on CD-ROM, and then gave you 2 great volumes, with an awesome free workbook for the first volume available online.
A printed version of volume 3 is in the works, as is the workbook for volume 2.
I think it’s pretty darn nifty. Volume 1 covers 555 kanji, volume 2 covers another 555, for 1,110 total. Volume 3 comes on an overpriced CD with volumes 1 and 2, and picks up the rest, but it lacks example sentences. (Which leaves you on your own to find those in dictionaries or … somewhere…)
I really don’t like the CD version, because you can’t copy/paste into your SRS. I prefer the dead-tree editions. Just OCR what you need to.
But wait, you say, I was just bashing KiC above for not having all of its 2,000 kanji in sentences! Yes, but when Kanji Odyssey (KO) lists a kanji in volumes 1 and 2, it shows the kanji with a whopping three example sentences. KiC didn’t even come close to that number.
The other thing KO does is that it builds on its vocabulary, sentence after sentence. It’s not obvious at first, but over time, you start to see it kick in, and it’s impressive. The vocabulary is all common stuff you’ll see in newspapers and magazines. It’s not “Bob and Gina are exchange students!” crap, it’s “Our company exports auto parts overseas.” You know, stuff you might actually use if you work in Japan.
Downsides? Sure:
- You only get sentences for 1,110 kanji in 2 volumes. You’ll need to figure out what to do with the rest later.
- The sentences are weird sometimes, and dull at other times. Par for the course.
- The sentences are on the big side, which can make your cards long and unwieldy. Sometimes you may want to break them up.
- The grammar will be too hard for newbies, and too dull for advanced students. It’s a vocab book, not a grammar book.
- Not every single vocab word listed gets into the sentences. Every reading gets covered… usually… but not every vocab word that is listed on the side. What you do about it is up to you.
- The vocab learning curve is steep for a while. You’re going to get a LOT of vocab crammed down your throat. It tapers off eventually, but for the first 300-400 kanji, you’re going to be grumbling a lot. Also, the extra vocab in the sentences probably won’t be familiar to you, either.
- The sentences don’t always fit nicely into the concept of i+1, which I interpret as meaning, “Don’t put a bunch of new crap on your SRS card. One new fact per card, if you can. Two is pushing it.” To get around it, I had to add extra cards with extra sentences from dictionaries to cover the extra vocab. I found that that reinforced the extra vocab, too, because I saw it more often.
- The English translations are a little… odd.
- The sentences can be… weird.
In spite of the downsides, I think it’s the best compromise I’ve found. I don’t have to build any memory palaces or stuff like that. I just plug and chug into my SRS.
And if you don’t like the sentences, you can just follow the word order and find better sentences somewhere else, like in dictionaries or just doing blog searches.
This is an interesting series I’ve seen some people rave about. It’s a series of 4 books that will get you to the ~1,000 kanji mark. I don’t have any experience with it, though. It looks like it’s pretty thorough, but it’s pretty expensive, in the $30-$40 range per book. Each book goes over 250 kanji, with lots of drills and exercises. I would check out the pages at thejapanshop.com’s website, and click on the book’s image to see a preview of what each volume looks like.
Option 6. Useless Kanji Books
There are a ton of these out there. A lot of them are in English, and will have great titles, like Essential Kanji, and will look incredibly useful, when in reality, they are not anything remotely useful at all. They’re simply books that contain a list of kanji with their onyomi and kunyomi, a vocab word or two if you’re lucky, maybe a stroke order diagram, aaaand… that’s it. A waste of money and trees. You can get that info for free online. (No links provided for useless books!)
Other books similar to Essential Kanji are Kanji and Kana: A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System, and Henshall’s A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. Both of which are published by Tuttle.
To be fair, Henshall’s book isn’t without merit. He does provide some tangential etymological info about the kanji, and his own mnemonics. But if you’ve already done RTK1, it’s useless for you. Otherwise, it’s just another book listing kanji.
A lot of these books are notorious for something else– they have high ratings on Amazon.com. This should tell you something– most people who review books on Amazon don’t know squat.
Don’t ever buy a book simply based on its Amazon rating. It’s asking for a kick in the head.
It’s a pretty neat little site. It’s got a lot of fans these days. It’s free for now, and it has a pretty decent flash-based Japanese language learning setup based loosely on spaced repetition. You learn with its own modified version of an SRS, with audio and sentences and such. It’s very engaging and entertaining. The use of audio, pictures, and such try to engage as many senses as possible.
It lets you set the amount of kanji you want to tolerate in your sentences from none to full, which is really handy. It even tests against tip-of-the-tongue moments, by measuring the speed of your response. I’d say it’s a good option for building vocab if you don’t want to mess with building your own decks in Anki. The sentences come from a very good source, and the voices are all native speakers.
Many people have built a lot of new and interesting decks that are much better than the canned decks that come with it, too.
Anki has an import plugin that will grab sentences from smart.fm and import them into your Anki deck. Pretty spiffy.
Downsides? Sure. I don’t like the site’s multiple-guess approach. A good SRS should be fill-in-the-blank. Multiple-choice is bad, because it makes your brain lazy. Even if there are 10 answers to choose from (which there are), I don’t like it.
I don’t like its SRS spacing, either. It doesn’t feel very robust. It’s hard to explain, but it’s good for those first few short intervals, then it just kind of fades.
It’s not very customizable, either. I much prefer Anki in this regard. Anki lets me get away with a lot. (Especially when I bug the author.)
Then there’s the Sword of Damocles hanging over the whole operation, namely, what’s going to happen when the beta is over, and they need to start making money? That’s a good question, and I haven’t heard a good answer yet. Maybe it’ll be ads in the questions, maybe it’ll be ads in the flash app, maybe it’ll be pay for play. Who knows? That’s the troubling bit. I wouldn’t want to build a whole study regime on something that’s essentially a rug that could be pulled right out from under me at any moment.
It might be great for you, but have a backup plan.
I figured I would add this option to the list, since some folks like this book as well. It covers about 1,023 kanji which show up on the JLPT level 2 exam. It won’t get you all 2,042, but it is a good start. There aren’t any English translations, and you’re going to need to look up some of the words, simply because you don’t always get readings. It’s a bit odd in that respect.
Again, it’s not perfect, but it is good. You can buy it at BK1 here.
Option 9. Make up your own option 9
I’ve just thought of some of the general options off of the top of my head, and a few of the pitfalls. The reality is that everyone has to figure out what to do next on their own.
The cool thing is that finishing RTK1 will give you the ability to do whatever you want kanji-wise, because as long as you keep juggling those kanji-balls in your brain, you’ll be able to learn new kanji readings with ease.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter which option you pick. Just pick one, and stick with it. If you don’t like it, try something else.
I find I like studying sentences, because I like context. It makes it easier.
I also find I like studying both ways– from kana reading to produce kanji, and from reading kanji out loud to know what the kana are. Some people get more elaborate, and use text-to-speech software and create MP3s of their sentences, but that’s too much work for me, and it doesn’t work over my cell phone web browser.
Some people do even crazier stuff, which I’ll post about later. There’s some wild stuff you can do with Anki.
I like Kanji Odyssey, because I like the frequency approach. Someone pointed out that frequency shouldn’t matter, because you’ll learn them all in the end.
Yes and no. In the end I will learn them all, but along the way, knowing the more frequently used ones will let me enjoy a wider range of Japanese language material with greater ease.
More fun = more staying power.
