Hacking the Japanese Proficiency Test: How to Dissect Kanji

http://japanesetesting.com/articles/view/34/hacking-the-jlpt-kanji

by harisenbon • 17 years ago

13 18 17 years ago

redcap2• 17 years ago

Of course there are exceptions, but a remarkable number of kanji share their on-yomi based on a common component.

James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji I gives you the tools to write the kanji and assign an english meaning to it (same manner as suggesting that grass that makes you feel better is medicine), with volume II showing the readings in common.

I've only gone through volume one, but that itself saves you a heck of a lot of time in that you can write characters without repeatedly practicing them - you just need to use some imagination in creating and remembering stories.

I learned to read by reading. Once you have a large enough vocabulary you do pick up on the on-yomi patterns a lot better. Of course knowing this earlier did help - I studied radicals and their meanings before entering university and we hardly touched them there - it was more about brute force rote memorisation.

So I can read Japanese (and write it to an extent), but still need more work in speaking it.

harisenbon8• 17 years ago

I've actually never read any of Heisig's books, but have a number of friends who swear by his methods. Unfortunately whenever his name comes up in Japanese study forums, you can be sure of a flame war -- people either love him or hate him.

While I have a large reading vocabulary, my written is horrible, largely due to the fact that my job requires me to use a computer all day, so the amount of physical writing I do compared to the amount of henkan I do is severely lacking.

I've always wanted to sit down with Remembering the Kanji and try to get my writing skills back up to snuff. As someone who can read, but can't write, I wonder how much of a benefit Heisig would give me over some other methodology.

I think the biggest detractor against Heisig are some of his followers, ;) A lot of people seem to think that the stories that Heisig gives you are not mnemonics, but rather "meanings," and that by reading the first book you can then simply infer the entirety of kanji just by putting the radicals together.

I had a person on a forum I frequent say that even without knowing the meaning, he could infer that 社会 was "society" because it was "God, Meeting with the ground."

I asked him then why 会社 didn't have the same meaning, and he was rather silent about that one. ;)

redcap2• 17 years ago

While you can try infer the meaning of words by knowing the english 'meanings' of the relevant characters, what's worked for me has been just learning a lot of vocabulary by rote and doing a lot of reading. I think the Heisig approach has let it sink in more - there have been a lot of "aha!" moments when I look up the actual english meaning of a compound and figure out the relation to the individual kanji meanings.

In terms of actually writing the characters, Heisig effectively taught me how to write each individual component/radical, so I think my writing is pretty decent in that regard. If you are practicing heisig (book 1), you should also be practicing stroke order, or at least a way to compose the character that works for you.

donw3• 17 years ago

Aaah, ワプロ馬鹿... Both my girlfriend and I have the same problem, and she is Japanese. There's a writing game for the Nintendo DS that I've had some success with, but it's really hard to make time to practice writing. I've tried keeping some of my daily notepad-jotting in Japanese, but most of it is at too technical of a level for my lousy writing skills to keep up.

Let me know if you come up with anything good.

And I know exactly what you mean by people who think that RTK is the end-all be-all of learning kanji. While a lot of the stories and mnemonics might be useful, and knowing meanings is genuinely useful, it takes a lot more than that to master the language.

Do you work in Japan? I'm heading back to Tokyo in January, and would love to meet up with some HN people there.

soc• 17 years ago

yea, I agree with remember the kanji by Heisig for kanji study and also lots of reading.

Anyone taking the JLPT this year ? I'm skipping jlpt3 this year and hoping for 2 in the future.

On a startup related note. This site http://www.japonin.com/ has a really nice interactive chat for teaching. Will really improve your speaking. Would be nice to see other languages taking off using a similar design.

Also seems the lots of new language related startups are doing quite well... lang-8, smartfm, and japanesepod101 to name a few.

harisenbon8• 17 years ago

There are a lot of really good resources popping up recently (to my chagrin ;) with a lot of good information to be had.

I do lament the lack of higher-level study materials though. Sites like Tae-Kim and studyJapanese, etc all seem to stop at passive form, with only a slight introduction to Keigo (about 3kyu or early 2kyu level)

I find very few sites that have enough materials to take their users past 1kyuu, which is one of the reasons why I started my site (and still need to get more content up there).

After taking 1kyuu, and starting to work at a Japanese company, I realized that 1kyuu is only the beginning. You really need a much higher level than that to fully participate in a Japanese work environment.

Which is why my next sites are set on the JTest (used to be the Jetro).

basugasubaku2• 17 years ago

Is this your site?

The majority of the "articles" (http://japanesetesting.com/articles) are simply sections from Tae Kim's guide copied verbatim.

Although at Tae Kim's guide is CCL'd and there is copyright notice at the end of each of the posts... it seems a bit wrong to have them in separate posts like this. Why not just link to Tae Kim's guide outright, once?

donw3• 17 years ago

I'm doing the JLPT 2, but I average around 85% on the practice tests as of about a month ago, so I'm not worried about passing.

It'd be really nice to do the 1, but my scores on the practice tests were embarrassingly south of 50%, and I totally bombed the 1 last year, so I'm doing the 2 this year to at least have some sort of piece of paper that says I've got some Japanese ability.

For finding partners, you might also want to try http://language-exchanges.org/ -- it's not a for-pay site, and doesn't have experienced teachers, but I've found it to be a good way to connect up with people.

MikeMacMan• 17 years ago

I might have the minority opinion here, but I think there's no substitute for just grinding it out with rote memorization. It's true that after the first 500~600 kanji, you develop an intuition for how an unknown character might be pronounced (based on the radical or another constituent), but Japanese morphology is so maddeningly irregular that I'd rather spend the time on mindless repetition. There's only 1948 kanji, people, just git'r done!

bemmu• 17 years ago

Btw. if there are Japanese geniuses here who can also code, I am making some apps for Mixi.jp (they recently opened for developers) and could consider doing some projects together. I studied Japanese in Tokyo for 2 years and have been making apps for a while. My email is in my profile.

Hacking the Japanese Proficiency Test: How to Dissect Kanji

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