Hypron, if you honestly, sincerely had a hard time with the N5 and you think you might barely pass, you need to work harder. The 80 kanji they ask you to memorize are literally what a kid would learn in first grade, right after kindergarten. The listening part I've never tried, but I imagine the clips are all very short, loud, clear and overenunciated. N5 really shouldn't take you much effort to completely crush. Like, perfect score. Even N4 is kind of a formality.
With that said, I hope you're just being pessimistic and you actually aced it. And don't let what I said discourage you. Maybe you didn't have time and/or you have your blind spots, like everyone else - I suck at reading. Just trying to give you some perspective.
Hypron, if you honestly, sincerely had a hard time with the N5 and you think you might barely pass, you need to work harder. The 80 kanji they ask you to memorize are literally what a kid would learn in first grade, right after kindergarten. The listening part I've never tried, but I imagine the clips are all very short, loud, clear and overenunciated. N5 really shouldn't take you much effort to completely crush. Like, perfect score. Even N4 is kind of a formality.
With that said, I hope you're just being pessimistic and you actually aced it. And don't let what I said discourage you. Maybe you didn't have time and/or you have your blind spots, like everyone else - I suck at reading. Just trying to give you some perspective.
I only had a hard time with the listening, the written stuff was easy (e.g. I know a lot more vocab and kanji than what was needed).
Idk, I'm spending between 2 and 5 hours learning the language every day, I've just been spending almost all of it in Anki or reading simple articles online.
I have absolutely no excuses for having issues with the listening and need to work a lot more on that aspect, but it's not like I've just been messing around either haha
What Kilrogg is saying is N5-4 and are literally just cash grabs for the test makers. You could pull a random person off the street and just from filing in random answers they could probably pass. The needed knowledge for N5 can be attained in a weekend of light study.
If you're really putting in hours a day, which is excellent, you should for sure be aiming for minimum N3 (to be honest, N2) because anything else is just a waste of time and money and at that point why even bother with the JLPT. Just keep studying at your own pace and feel comfortable with your own level. You can easily piece together enough free material on the internet to confirm that you are N3ish range, no need to sit for the test.
I knew the higher levels are essentially useless, I guess I just thought they would make for good motivation. Actually, scratch that, to be really truthful I thought they'd make for good ego-boosts, which obviously hasn't turned out that way. Like, I know that I know everything that was asked in the test, so not acing it is just making me feel like shit.
Although, it did function as sort of a wake-up call to get me to spend more time on listening, so it was not all a waste.
And yeah, it's true that at this point studying is an integral part to my days and I don't actually need the motivation or the ego-boost. Might has well just keep on trucking along until I feel ready for N2 I guess.
I just hope you've stepped out of the tiny bubble that the area around Tokyo can unsuspectingly trap you in. Probably think you have the world at your finger tips but have you biked the Shimanami or gone to Yuki Matsuri or bathed in Beppu? At the very least hope you've been to the railway museum or had a Torihei from Gunma.
edit: actually I forgot you haven't been here for a year yet, you can still make yuki matsuri this feb! but you wont have much accommodation if you havent booked anything yet.
BRO its not even 11pm dont tell me youre done gafing
I only had a hard time with the listening, the written stuff was easy (e.g. I know a lot more vocab and kanji than what was needed).
Idk, I'm spending between 2 and 5 hours learning the language every day, I've just been spending almost all of it in Anki or reading simple articles online.
I have absolutely no excuses for having issues with the listening and need to work a lot more on that aspect, but it's not like I've just been messing around either haha
Gotcha. Then you now know that listening is your personal blind spot, so if the N5 taught you that, it wasn't a complete waste of money. And to be fair, with the way Japanese sentences work, I can totally understand why you'd struggle with listening comprehension. Probably my second biggest weak spot.
If you're putting 2-5 hours a day, then you're putting in much more effort than I was back in the day. I passed the N4 (well, N3 back in the day, old format) while studying at an extremely leisurely pace. I'm talking literally years of "studying" before taking it because I was so slow and lazy. With your diligence, you'll be there in no time, but there might be something inefficient about the way you're studying if you didn't pass. Still, note that I'm an expert is obviously full of crap for telling you you could be ready for the N5 in "a weekend of light study", but that's just I'm an expert, he's got a weird perception of time . That, or his idea of "light" is "8 hours a day". But he knows nothing about j-go, so... Right, expert-chan?
so today i was browsing my twitter Nippon Pro Baseball list and ran across a tweet from a Fighters' farm club mascot. he usually tweets in these god awful kana walls with no kanji, but for whatever reason, today he used kanji for his main message like a normal person.
i breezed through reading the whole thing, felt super good about myself
then i remember the reason he normally tweets in kana is that his audience is like 7 years old. D:
I need some help with deciphering a kanji. Usually, I'm able to find it on my own. However, this one give me an headache. Here's a screenshot of the sentence I'm looking at.
The fifth kanji from the left gives me trouble. I can't decipher any radical from it and its stroke count, unless mistaken, is 15 (or 16).
I need that copy kanji so I can copy and paste. I can't actually read them personally. I've been using tools like Rikaichan (and its dictionaries) in firefox, with Capture2text windows software, plus this page to help me out. I know my hiragana and somewhat katakna pretty well though.
I take the time to answer your pm at 530am and you apparently couldn't wait lol. But at least you did what I told you to do anyway. As for your comment about not being able to decipher radicals, which I also included in my pm, that just means you're unfamiliar with certain writing styles and fonts in this case.
I take the time to answer your pm at 530am and you apparently couldn't wait lol. But at least you did what I told you to do anyway. As for your comment about not being able to decipher radicals, which I also included in my pm, that just means you're unfamiliar with certain writing styles and fonts in this case.
I need some help with deciphering a kanji. Usually, I'm able to find it on my own. However, this one give me an headache. Here's a screenshot of the sentence I'm looking at.
The fifth kanji from the left gives me trouble. I can't decipher any radical from it and its stroke count, unless mistaken, is 15 (or 16).
I need that copy kanji so I can copy and paste. I can't actually read them personally. I've been using tools like Rikaichan (and its dictionaries) in firefox, with Capture2text windows software, plus this page to help me out. I know my hiragana and somewhat katakna pretty well though.
さんぜじっぽうたぎるエナジー じゃあくを　Need some context to really give a translation. It's something about endless energy welling up/overflowing. The last two kanji mean wickedness/evil and it's the direct object of some verb.
So just a tip from 1999, in case you couldn't get that radical, as long as you can decipher one radical, you can begin your quest. So looking at that kanji you should immediately see 亠
Now..I realize not everyone will have this skill, but if you know how to write kanji, you can instantly look up any kanji with just a radical like that and the stroke count - something you just instantly see from knowing how to write kanji. In this case, knowing the kanji contains 亠 and is 14 strokes you look it up in any radical dictionary, or my usual free advertising- http://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?1R
edit: i actually only just realized you edited your post from your pm and basically know all this. good on you man. stroke counting is just something youll get as a natural skill if you practice writing
さんぜじっぽうたぎるエナジー じゃあくを　Need some context to really give a translation. It's something about endless energy welling up/overflowing. The last two kanji mean wickedness/evil and it's the direct object of some verb.
Thanks. Ther est of the line is actually in english:
三世十方滾るエナジー邪悪を never forgive
but the whole paragraph is:
宇宙が刻む律動に呼吸合わせたら
諸天の神が動き出す
三世十方滾るエナジー邪悪を never forgive
Uchuu ga kizamu ritsudou ni kokyuu awasetara
Shoten no kami ga ugokidasu
Sanzejippou dagiru ENERGY jaaku wo NEVER FORGIVE
Thanks Rikaichan Firefox addon.
Anyway, I usually translate the english words written in katakana as it makes more sense to me than writing "enajii". I also prefer wapuro over Hepburn in most cases. I hate macrons coz my keyboard layout can't naturally type it and not writing it is a mistake so, I just go to the next correct thing: write the "u" or extra vowel. I know that I shouldn't be doing that and I'm aware.
I just hope you've stepped out of the tiny bubble that the area around Tokyo can unsuspectingly trap you in. Probably think you have the world at your finger tips but have you biked the Shimanami or gone to Yuki Matsuri or bathed in Beppu? At the very least hope you've been to the railway museum or had a Torihei from Gunma.
edit: actually I forgot you haven't been here for a year yet, you can still make yuki matsuri this feb! but you wont have much accommodation if you havent booked anything yet.
BRO its not even 11pm dont tell me youre done gafing
I haven't taken any time off school duties during term, so I haven't done those things. This summer I was catching up on studying and doing stuff round Yokohama, and this winter break I'm heading back home to see my family. I''m going to do a little tour on my own in March. Maybe an east to west trip, see my friend in Nagoya and head back home. A big triangle. I'm all ears for suggestions.
I'm still working away at Genki not as much as I'd like because of other classes, but I haven't given up. My next semester won't start for a few more weeks, so I'm going to figure out how to work Japanese into my schedule so I can still do it every day once everything picks up again.
I do have two questions, though.
Genki translates そうですね as both "That's right" and "Let me see," but Jisho only defines it as a conversational form of agreement/confirmation. I know J-E dictionaries have their blind spots compared to J-J dictionaries. So is this another case of the dictionaries not keeping up with how it's used in actual Japanese, or is Genki wrong?
I recently found a YouTuber named Dogen, who mostly does Japanese and English language comedy bits, but now he's doing a series on Japanese phonetics. You can check out his free episodes (1, 2, 3, 7), but his main point is that most Japanese language teaching doesn't help with pronunciation that much. It might give you the basic syllables and mention pitch accent in passing. But then it leaves you to figure out everything else yourself, or not, in most cases, and be stuck sounding like a stilted foreigner. He even goes so far as to suggest dialing back on reading and writing, and starting with learning pitch accent forms (8m36s if timestamp doesn't work), so you don't form any bad speaking habits. His pronunciation sounds pretty good to my foreign ears, but I wanted to see if what he's saying makes sense to anyone else.
like, you might hear an interview where the questioner asks something, and the person responding says "そうですね", thinks a second, and then responds (my favorite player for the Nippon Ham Fighters does this to the point that one of the popular foreign players on the team does it for laughs in his hero interviews). And then someone might just say a general fact about the weather and someone responds そうですね.
「そうですね」 with the meaning "Let me see..." is used more like a filler. Basically the more sophisticated way of saying "Uhmmm...." or 「え～っと・・・」
Sometimes you'd even hear people say 「え～っとですね・・・」
I'm still working away at Genki not as much as I'd like because of other classes, but I haven't given up. My next semester won't start for a few more weeks, so I'm going to figure out how to work Japanese into my schedule so I can still do it every day once everything picks up again.
I do have two questions, though.
Genki translates そうですね as both "That's right" and "Let me see," but Jisho only defines it as a conversational form of agreement/confirmation. I know J-E dictionaries have their blind spots compared to J-J dictionaries. So is this another case of the dictionaries not keeping up with how it's used in actual Japanese, or is Genki wrong?
I recently found a YouTuber named Dogen, who mostly does Japanese and English language comedy bits, but now he's doing a series on Japanese phonetics. You can check out his free episodes (1, 2, 3, 7), but his main point is that most Japanese language teaching doesn't help with pronunciation that much. It might give you the basic syllables and mention pitch accent in passing. But then it leaves you to figure out everything else yourself, or not, in most cases, and be stuck sounding like a stilted foreigner. He even goes so far as to suggest dialing back on reading and writing, and starting with learning pitch accent forms (8m36s if timestamp doesn't work), so you don't form any bad speaking habits. His pronunciation sounds pretty good to my foreign ears, but I wanted to see if what he's saying makes sense to anyone else.
As others have said 「そうですね」 can mean both. It just depends on the intonation you give it.
That channel looks interesting, nice find! His r's and ru's are a bit weird, but other than he's dead on. More pitch accent awareness is always a good thing. It's just too bad that most of his videos are behind a paywall, but I can't fault him for trying to make a living off of it.
Gotcha. Then you now know that listening is your personal blind spot, so if the N5 taught you that, it wasn't a complete waste of money. And to be fair, with the way Japanese sentences work, I can totally understand why you'd struggle with listening comprehension. Probably my second biggest weak spot.
If you're putting 2-5 hours a day, then you're putting in much more effort than I was back in the day. I passed the N4 (well, N3 back in the day, old format) while studying at an extremely leisurely pace. I'm talking literally years of "studying" before taking it because I was so slow and lazy. With your diligence, you'll be there in no time, but there might be something inefficient about the way you're studying if you didn't pass. Still, note that I'm an expert is obviously full of crap for telling you you could be ready for the N5 in "a weekend of light study", but that's just I'm an expert, he's got a weird perception of time . That, or his idea of "light" is "8 hours a day". But he knows nothing about j-go, so... Right, expert-chan?
Yep. I'd be very surprised if I failed (I'm confident about more than 30% of my listening answers and had at least a hunch for most of them...) but yeah, just the fact that there is a non-zero probability is too much haha.
I actually just received this in the mail today (after spending 2 hours walking to different post offices and calling them to find out what had happened to the parcel... Fun times):
I probably could have found something similar for free online, but it was decently cheap so I though why not. Hopefully doing that diligently (and continuing to Skype with another gaffer once a week) will improve my listening skills.
I'm also going on holidays with the family in a couple of days.
3 weeks in a bach with little access to the internet (3G on a shit plan essentially), without having to worry about uni... Should be perfect to put some serious hours in.
I obviously can't comment on the accent due to my level, but I've been following this guy's videos for a few weeks now and found them really enjoyable. His normal stuff is entertaining and those couple of educational videos were really interesting to listen to. I won't join the Patreon but I might buy the videos when he finishes the series and makes it available.
like, you might hear an interview where the questioner asks something, and the person responding says "そうですね", thinks a second, and then responds (my favorite player for the Nippon Ham Fighters does this to the point that one of the popular foreign players on the team does it for laughs in his hero interviews). And then someone might just say a general fact about the weather and someone responds そうですね.
「そうですね」 with the meaning "Let me see..." is used more like a filler. Basically the more sophisticated way of saying "Uhmmm...." or 「え～っと・・・」
Sometimes you'd even hear people say 「え～っとですね・・・」
As others have said 「そうですね」 can mean both. It just depends on the intonation you give it.
That channel looks interesting, nice find! His r's and ru's are a bit weird, but other than he's dead on. More pitch accent awareness is always a good thing. It's just too bad that most of his videos are behind a paywall, but I can't fault him for trying to make a living off of it.
Yeah, that makes sense. The problem with the Genki listing is that it just gives the "Let me see" translation without any other context. I thought that might be it, but I wasn't sure and couldn't find much more about it.
I know, I'm just trying to map the Japanese phrase to the broadest notion I can, instead of squaring it to one rote English phrase. I think it helps me, not only because I'm interested in hobbyist translation, but because it'll provide against doing the whole "thinking in English and then translating to Japanese" thing. I'm making my own Anki cards, and for each conversational term, I try to make 57 translations for it, minimum.
So I started using wanikani and I'm a bit confused on how it works. I'm currently learning the particles. I take a quiz, and I then have to wait like an hour. Took it again; 4 hours. Again; 12 hours. Again; 24 hours. Last time and it I can't review it for another 7 days. How is this suppose to help me? Everything else is greyed out. I'm getting 100% of the particles correct and I'm currently in "guru" with these particles. Help?
So I started using wanikani and I'm a bit confused on how it works. I'm currently learning the particles. I take a quiz, and I then have to wait like an hour. Took it again; 4 hours. Again; 12 hours. Again; 24 hours. Last time and it I can't review it for another 7 days. How is this suppose to help me? Everything else is greyed out. I'm getting 100% of the particles correct and I'm currently in "guru" with these particles. Help?
It's using a spaced repetition system (SRS). It only asks you to review things/flash cards you are about to forget. It starts out pretty slow, but don't worry, after 2 weeks or so you'll have plenty of things to review. Once 90% of the new things you get at the beginning of each level are in guru status, you'll level up and get new radicals, kanji, and vocab.
Using a SRS reduces how much time you need to study. However you need to be cautious about how many new flash cards you go through each day because if you go overboard the list of cards you need to review everyday will grow out of control. Wanikani takes care of that by deliberately throttling you. But keep in mind that even with that throttling, you'll get to a point where you need to spend more than an hour on it per day.
If it's still too slow for you, you can go the Anki way. There's a tool out there to download all the Wanikani content as Anki flashcards, or you could create your own deck of cards (which I did). Anki is also a SRS system, but it's a lot more customizable. It's not as flashy as Wanikani though.
So I started using wanikani and I'm a bit confused on how it works. I'm currently learning the particles. I take a quiz, and I then have to wait like an hour. Took it again; 4 hours. Again; 12 hours. Again; 24 hours. Last time and it I can't review it for another 7 days. How is this suppose to help me? Everything else is greyed out. I'm getting 100% of the particles correct and I'm currently in "guru" with these particles. Help?
Pretty much yeah. I skipped like 5 days because I had a busy week and whoops...:
Enjoy the slow pace while you still can, because Wanikani will become brutal later. There's a reason levels 1-10 are called "Pleasant" and levels beyond that are called "Painful", "Death" and "Hell".
I get that you're impatient and you don't feel the need to wait this long between reviews, but it's a necessary evil to make the SRS work its magic. Trust me, I was complaining about the same thing back when I started.
I ordered a Kindle Voyage a few days ago, should receive it tomorrow. My old Kindle doesn't have an option for a Japanese dictionary, so this is gonna be awesome for reading Japanese. I used to think only Japanese Kindles would have it, but no, even a European Kindle has it, along with a bunch of other language dictionaries. Can't wait!
It's using a spaced repetition system (SRS). It only asks you to review things/flash cards you are about to forget. It starts out pretty slow, but don't worry, after 2 weeks or so you'll have plenty of things to review. Once 90% of the new things you get at the beginning of each level are in guru status, you'll level up and get new radicals, kanji, and vocab.
Using a SRS reduces how much time you need to study. However you need to be cautious about how many new flash cards you go through each day because if you go overboard the list of cards you need to review everyday will grow out of control. Wanikani takes care of that by deliberately throttling you. But keep in mind that even with that throttling, you'll get to a point where you need to spend more than an hour on it per day.
If it's still too slow for you, you can go the Anki way. There's a tool out there to download all the Wanikani content as Anki flashcards, or you could create your own deck of cards (which I did). Anki is also a SRS system, but it's a lot more customizable. It's not as flashy as Wanikani though.
Pretty much yeah. I skipped like 5 days because I had a busy week and whoops...:
Enjoy the slow pace while you still can, because Wanikani will become brutal later. There's a reason levels 1-10 are called "Pleasant" and levels beyond that are called "Painful", "Death" and "Hell".
I get that you're impatient and you don't feel the need to wait this long between reviews, but it's a necessary evil to make the SRS work its magic. Trust me, I was complaining about the same thing back when I started.
I've just got my new Kindle Voyage in the hopes of finally being able to buy ebooks on Amazon Japan. For those of you who don't know, all current Kindles give you access to free JP-JP and JP-EN dictionaries for easy word lookup.
Problem is: I bought mine from Amazon.fr, and while there is some degree of unification between Amazon in European countries and Amazon US (e.g. amazon.com), there's no such thing with Amazon.co.jp. So, basically, I thought "well, I'm fucked, shoulda my Kindle through Amazon JP I guess, now I can't buy ebooks on Amazon JP" (which btw is impossible since, last time I checked, you can't import a Kindle from Japan).
But after fiddling around with it a bit it turns out that, yes, you can, actually. No matter where you bought your Kindle, you can link it to a Japanese account and start buying Japanese books directly from Amazon Japan! It even works with non-Japanese credit cards. All you gotta is, when you start your Kindle for the first time, set it to Japanese, then it'll ask you to link it to your Amazon account (or to create a new one). If you set the language to Japanese, it'll automatically link you to the Japanese store, and voilà. If you've already set it to another language, fear not. You just need to reset it through the settings and do the procedure again.
A couple caveats though:
- AFAIK you need a physical address in Japan. Doesn't matter if it's fake. Just use one those package redirection services like Tenso, they'll give you an address for free. Me personally? I used my old address, back when I was doing a 留学. The very building I used to live in was leveled a couple years later, so my Japanese address can't get any faker than this :lol.
- again, no unification between Amazon JP and other Amazons. In other words, if your Kindle is registered on Amazon Japan, you can't use it on other Amazon stores, and you can't use whatever ebooks you bought on other Amazon stores. You'll be stuck with the JP store and your JP library. Kind of a bummer.
I guess I'll keep my older model for European/American content, and use the new one for JP content exclusively. Still, it's great.
Now, if only I could buy MurakamI Haruki novels aside from Sputnik Sweetheart -__-.
[EDIT]
tl;dr: Any current Kindle can be set to use the Japanese store. You don't need to buy it from Japan or be physically in Japan to use it. However, it's a bit of a hassle to set up, and your Kindle will be linked to that store and that library only.
You should be able to swap freely between accounts. Just log out from your one account and log in with the other. I have books from my US Amazon account on my Kindle along with my currently logged-in JP account books.
You don't specify region when logging in, just enter the appropriate email and password and it auto-detects what region it's from. If, by chance, your Amazon accounts share the same email AND password, it may default to the current language or just decide randomly or something. Change one of the passwords to something different and everything should clear up.
You should be able to swap freely between accounts. Just log out from your one account and log in with the other. I have books from my US Amazon account on my Kindle along with my currently logged-in JP account books.
You don't specify region when logging in, just enter the appropriate email and password and it auto-detects what region it's from. If, by chance, your Amazon accounts share the same email AND password, it may default to the current language or just decide randomly or something. Change one of the passwords to something different and everything should clear up.
You're right, the problem was probably that I have the same address and password for both accounts. Thanks.
Still, it's kind of a pain to switch between accounts. I'll just keep my old Kindle and manually import my non-Japanese libraries every now and then. So far it seems to be working just fine.
I might need to change how I'm learning kanji. At the moment I have Anki flash cards with English meaning on the front side and Japanese word (in kanji) on the back side, and I write all the words down before flipping the cards. It makes them stick well in my memory, but it's pretty slow.
I already spent ~165 hours on this (going through about 2,100 flash cards) and I just calculated it'd take me another 600-650 hours to finish the deck (doing all the daily reviews + going through another 7900 new flash cards).
The crux of the issue is the speed at which I review cards. Over the past month my speed has been averaging at a bit less than 3 cards per minute. In comparison, my review speed for my Genki vocab deck (where I don't write things down) was a bit more than 8 cards/minute.
I don't remember things as well that way... But I only get things wrong about 10% more often. So with that in mind I could still probably go through the entire kanji deck in literally half the time.
I really want to know how to write Japanese by hand, but I'm starting to think that my time would be better used going through that deck "quickly" in ~ 300-350 hours and then spending the difference (300 hours) reading things in Japanese, and maybe doing some practice writing (maybe going through those kanji kentei books in order?).
It seems to me that my Japanese would be much better at the end of the day doing things this way, even if my writing ability won't be as good.
I'll modify my cards to [word in Kanji] on the front and [English meaning] on the back for a few days to see how well that works.
that seems like a lot. are you doing more than the official list to start?
english to japanese seems like a bad way to go unless you're doing heisig keywords (which, speaking from experience, you shouldn't). i did heisig, and now i'm going through learning readings for all of them. so 2200 cards. kanji on front, with a word for each reading. readings on the back, with english definitions.
go at your own pace.
also consider divorcing "learning to write" from learning each kanji, because there's a logic to writing kanji that you can learn very quickly and apply in most every situation. if you've done that many flashcards you probably already know the rules.
whiteboard method. i dont like to dick wave but if writing kanji by hand is the test, i guarantee id probably run laps around you guys. 80% of that is still remnants of the method all these years later, the other 20 is actually writing notes and such daily for years.
that seems like a lot. are you doing more than the official list to start?
english to japanese seems like a bad way to go unless you're doing heisig keywords (which, speaking from experience, you shouldn't). i did heisig, and now i'm going through learning readings for all of them. so 2200 cards. kanji on front, with a word for each reading. readings on the back, with english definitions.
go at your own pace.
also consider divorcing "learning to write" from learning each kanji, because there's a logic to writing kanji that you can learn very quickly and apply in most every situation. if you've done that many flashcards you probably already know the rules.
The 10,000 cards are made up of 2,300 cards with 1 kanji on the front and an associated word on the back (e.g. front: 図, back: 「図書館」の「図」 and 7,700 vocabulary cards (900 from Genki I & II and the rest from the Kodansha Kanji Learner's course).
I went with English on the front because I wanted to be able to produce all the kanji from scratch (I essentially just kept doing what I was doing doing with the whiteboard method, except on Anki).
But yeah it's true, I've been writing words everyday for months and I can pick up new stroke orders pretty much instantly at this point... But developing writing skills takes more than just knowing how to write individual kanji I guess. But yeah like you say I can probably practice writing things separately.
whiteboard method. i dont like to dick wave but if writing kanji by hand is the test, i guarantee id probably run laps around you guys. 80% of that is still remnants of the method all these years later, the other 20 is actually writing notes and such daily for years.
I learnt about 320 kanji and 900 words using that technique but towards the end it wasn't really working out for me anymore sadly. If I could take 3 months off and just do that all day I'd do it. In theory it's feasible to spend 8-9 hours at uni, do 1 hour of sport, 4-5 hours of kanji drills and 1-2 hours of reading/other stuff... But I just can't hold that pace for 3 months.
I've found that the limit where I'm able to be consistently productive both at uni and at home studying Japanese is about 3hr/day on workdays (and more than that on weekends, but week days are the lowest common denominator).
I mean, I guess I could still go for the whiteboard method and only ever revise the last 800 or so words on my vocab list, which would take less than 3 hours/day... But I'm not sure the words would be in the list long enough for me to really remember them.
you should do what works best for you. for me, i have split off vocabulary and kanji readings into separate practice. doing the former helps build up the later, certainly.
when i looked, anki had decks for each N* level. i'm working through N3 now. i made my own kanji readings deck with an excel spreadsheet.
it feels more manageable to me to do it that way, rather than have a giant mass of cards.
just modify the method to be used for learning how to write kanji, not how to pass the jlpt in 3 months. even if you only do 1 hour a day of handwriting kanji over and over, it's still more than what 99% of learners do. once youre well into n1 kanji territory, you have enough stroke and radical knowledge to mentally decipher basically any future unknown kanji you encounter. who cares if it takes a year at 1 hour a day. you going somewhere?
just modify the method to be used for learning how to write kanji, not how to pass the jlpt in 3 months. even if you only do 1 hour a day of handwriting kanji over and over, it's still more than what 99% of learners do. once youre well into n1 kanji territory, you have enough stroke and radical knowledge to mentally decipher basically any future unknown kanji you encounter. who cares if it takes a year at 1 hour a day. you going somewhere?
You are completely right, but I mean that's kinda what I'm doing already. I just get my words from Anki instead of a list.
It's just that I'm thinking it could be more time efficient to learn how to recognize all kanji/words and how to write them separately.
I could build my vocab base twice as fast this way which would be helpful for all the other aspects of the language.
I could do something like learn how to recognise 50 new words a day (~15 new kanji), and then only practice writing maybe 4-5 Kanji's worth of words. I'd "finish" the jouyou way before having gotten good practice writing them all but that should be all right I guess. It'd leave more time for practicing other aspects of the language.
the bigger question is why do you want to be proficient at writing kanji and is it the worth the investment. will you have a practical need for it? i need to handwrite japanese every day for professional reasons. i guarantee there are people on gaf who live in japan that are good with japanese but struggle when they have to write their address on a form or something. but if those inconveniences are so few they just dont bother wasting the time, which in the grand scheme i cant argue against.
the bigger question is why do you want to be proficient at writing kanji and is it the worth the investment. will you have a practical need for it? i need to handwrite japanese every day for professional reasons. i guarantee there are people on gaf who live in japan that are good with japanese but struggle when they have to write their address on a form or something. but if those inconveniences are so few they just dont bother wasting the time, which in the grand scheme i cant argue against.
That's a good point actually. I started learning stroke orders because it made it easier to remember words and out of interest. But looking at the stats a few months down the track it turned out to be less time efficient.
I suppose unless one needs to be proficient for professional reasons like yourself (or maybe to get into calligraphy) there isn't any pressing need to become so.
I do jot down a fair bit in English so I eventually want to be able to do the same in Japanese. However, I guess becoming good enough at the language to consume native media and communicate in Japanese is more important when you're starting out, so it'd be a better use of my time to concentrate on that for now.
if you put in the bare minimum and practice kanji you learn with a diligent schedule, i guarantee you will have more writing skill than the majority of learners. i fully support you learning how to write kanji, but if youre never put in real life instances to use it.. i dont think you need to go overboard. just get a good familiarity with stroke order and radicals.
True. I'll write every new word at least once and then put aside a bit of time each day to practice writing. I'll just put a timer on and write words on a whiteboard until it rings and then that's it for the day.
Anyway, thanks for the help! Changing study methods is always a bit scary haha
it's pretty funny that i can buy Tobira text & workbook from amazon.jp and pay for shipping to US, and it will cost over $20 less than buying just the textbook from amazon.com
I took a 2 month break from Wanikani because I was travelling, and now its brutalizing me. Currently at 320 apprentices and going up, consistently. I forget so much >_> Gonna take a while to get back on pace, and for now its eating up a lot of my time. I could get them to put me down to a lower level, but I'm being stubborn - I worked for a year to get up to 26, I don't want to let that all got to waste.
Thankfully, jumping back into Tobira has been much easier. I got through the entire thing before my trip, and I'm rereading it now, and its not too bad. Hope to finish that by next week.
Then I think I'm gonna start on simple news articles, stories and songs. Which maybe I should have already been doing.
I'm signing up for this and studying one hour a day for the whole of 2017. I know a bit of Japanese, but this will really help me with grammer and Kanji. I'm pretty excited.
_/¯
