So you want to learn Japanese? Part 1: Kanji
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I was inspired to write this article by a post on Watashi to Tokyo. I don’t know how many people that come to redruin.com have a real interest in learning Japanese, but if you want to know the little secrets I have discovered in my studies over several years, then by all means, come on down.
First, there are a few basic requirements that are absolutely essential if you want to become proficient in Japanese. They are, in order of importance: Motivation, motivation, motivation, and imagination. If you have a good stock of these traits, then you will go far and fairly fast. If you don’t have motivation, you probably won’t even learn enough to impress a 5 year old from Oklahoma in a Pokemon chatroom. (You’ll have to rely on your imagination for that.)
Anyway, there are countless methods and books, cds, dvds, courses, tricks, and training programs out there. I have bought a great many of them myself in my quest to master Japanese as quickly as possible, and most of them are getting dustier by the minute. I would have week-long bursts of motivation, and get part of the way into each one of them before having work get in the way for a week or two. The problem being that, after only a week or two I would have forgotten a LOT of what I had previously learned. I gradually sorted out the things that were working, and put aside the ones that weren’t. Then one day I stumbled upon one book that actually worked like the proverbial charm that everything else claimed to be. The book is called “Remembering the Kanji” by James W. Heisig.
Now, in Japanese there are 3 main writing systems, which many of you may know. There’s “Katakana” which looks like (カタカナ), and is a phonetic system used for writing foreign loanwords and names like: Johnson (jonson/ジョンソン) and elevator (erebeeta/エレベータ）. There’s Hiragana, which looks like （ひらがな）, and is the phonetic system used for conjugating words and for Japanese words without Kanji. Then there’s Kanji, and Kanji is where it gets rough. See Mari’s post for exactly why that is.
Suffice it to say that Kanji are the fancy characters that everyone thinks of when they think Japanese or Chinese (in which they are called Hanzi). They look like (漢字), and since you need to know about 2,000 of them to be able to read most Japanese publications, it’s probably the biggest hurdle in the pursuit of fluency. Even Japanese kids spend a dozen years having Kanji drilled into them before they are expected to understand most of them.
A big step toward developing a useful method of studying Kanji is realizing that they are made of up smaller “primitives” which came from early pictographic representations. For example take: 雑 (which means something like miscellaneous). It looks rather complicated at first glance right? But looking closer, you’ll see that it is made up of the characters: 九 (nine), 木 (tree), and 隹 (an old symbol for bird, which Heisig re-appropriates for our purposes as: “turkey”) which are much simpler. Then all you have to do is make up some kind of shocking, outrageous, or funny situation in which the combined meanings of the characters become the meaning of the new character. This technique will enable you to remember the character far more easily than just writing and rewriting it.
Basically EVERY Kanji is either composed of other primitive elements, or is a primitive element itself. This means that even the most complicated characters become easy to remember if you know the characters that they are made of. The trick is finding a progressive order in which to study them so that you are always building on ones that you know. In this way you automatically review the old ones that you have already studied, and you automatically know how to write the new ones that you are building with them. Sounds great right? But how do you construct an order with 2,000 characters so that you can study them in a progressive way? Well, don’t bother trying, James Heisig already did it with this book.
“Remembering the Kanji” puts all the 2,000+ Kanji that adults in Japan are generally expected to understand into one book, and in an order that allows you to build on what you are learning until you know them all. This was the most helpful feature of the book for me.
Heisig teaches you to create stories for the primitive element combinations which will help you remember them “permenantly.” Here’s where the imagination part comes in. The more vividly you can picture the scenarios you create, the more easily you can recall them. This is FAR FAR more effective than simply writing them over and over. Anyone who has tried to learn Kanji has inevitably realized that if you just learn by drilling and drilling you WILL forget how the characters go, how to write them, and mix similar ones up. It gets really discouraging to be on top of things and then come back a week later to realize everything has fallen apart in your memory.
I have used RTK with results that, to me, are frankly astonishing. I pretty much used it to start over completely, and within a couple weeks of studying for maybe 30 min per day I found I could remember many many more kanji than I had previously studied, and with amazing accuracy, (maybe getting 2 wrong out of 300). The sad part is that I had actually passed over this book many times previously when searching amazon and ebay. Honestly, the title seems a little bland and obvious, and the cover design is pretty much the definition of non-eye-catching. Never judge a Japanese language book by its cover-design though; this book is a diamond in the rough if ever there was one.
There is no substitute for being taught by a native speaker of Japanese, and I recommend that everyone with an interest in learning Japanese call the Japanese embassy closest to where you live, and ask them to fax you a list of all the Japanese language schools and classes in your area. They will be able to help you past the very different and sometimes seemingly senseless parts of Japanese grammar. In my opinion however, the major secret to becoming verbally fluent in a language is to become literate in its written form. You will learn more by reading Japanese books than you could ever hope to learn by watching any amount of Japanese TV, (no matter how much bizarre fun that can be…). The reason for this is that you can see the sentence patterns over and over and can go at your own pace. Just as anyone who is well-read in English is more likely to become a grammar-nazi, so will anyone who can read in Japanese more quickly absorb the sometimes difficult nuances of the spoken language.
There are 2 basic “Remembering the Kanji” books. The first one, (which I am mostly talking about) covers remembering the meanings and writings of the 2000+ Kanji that you need to know; and the second book, “Remembering the Kanji II” covers the various readings of the same characters. Coupled with motivation and imagination, the difficulty of the written language pretty much disappears. (There is also a “Remembering the Kana” for teaching the Katakana and Hiragana syllabaries if you need help with those.)
But, as LeVar Burton might say: “Don’t take my word for it, Download a free copy of the first section of ‘Remembering the Kanji’ book 1.” This consists of the lessons for the first 276 characters in the book. It’s quite a chunk to get for free and should definitely dispel any doubts about whether or not this will be the book for you.
Anyway, I don’t know if anyone has read this whole thing, but suffice it to say, I think these books are absolutely great. And they aren’t even paying me… I’ll write another post at some point probably, about how you can review your Kanji in tiny increments that EVERYONE has time for. Let me know what you think!
If these books sounded good to you at all, they are well worth the prices on Amazon:
Remembering the Kanji II: A Systematic Guide to Reading Japanese Characters
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:43 am
David,
I’m glad I found your site interesting enough to read this article (and I did get all the way through it). I downloaded the sample chapter and will use it and see what I think. At this point I can read about 300 kanji, so it should be perfect for maybe actually getting to *know* them. I hope so.
Reading your bit about “reading” sounded very familiar to me. I have said almost the exact things to people who have asked me why I think Japanese is so hard–because I can’t read (and I explain the reasons you said).
If you can see the e-mail I’m posting comments from, send me an e-mail sometime so I can have your address. Thanks.
February 3rd, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Benn,
I’m glad you found it at least bearable. Honestly this book has helped me so much that I can’t help but sound over-enthusiastic about it. I am so busy, (and bad at prioritizing) that I barely spend 30 minutes every other day on it, but I somehow can remember almost everything I do. A large part of the reason it works so “effortlessly” is that you are automatically reviewing everything else you have done as you progress, so you get the drilling aspect too almost unconsciously. It really is a joy to be able to understand how Kanji are broken down. This also equips you to take on any kanji you may meet in the future since you will understand its component parts.
I somehow can’t see the email you are posting from, but you can just email me at redruin@redruin.com (or through the link on the sidebar) I think it’s because I don’t require people to register to comment maybe that I can’t see it… Not sure =/
February 4th, 2006 at 3:48 am
that pdf is definitely worth the download; I should look at it more often than I do, and just pony up and buy the book too.
Do you live in Japan like me?
February 4th, 2006 at 4:01 am
I’m pretty fluent, but cannot read or write well, which is a real problem. I tried Heisig’s method years ago, and it worked fine for the first 500 or so kanji, but then I got hopelessly stuck. And gave up! If anyone has ideas about how to get the motivation back again, I’d be glad to hear about them. I agree Heisig’s method is brilliant, and I felt really bad when it just didn’t work anymore. It semed I couldn’t come up with sufficiently colourful and vivid stories beyond a certain point.
February 4th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Claytonain: Right now I live in Washington DC, but I move around a lot, and expect to be in Japan sometime this year.
Martin: It is rather hard to come back to it after taking a break. That’s why motivation is SO crucial. I found it a little hard at first to make up my own stories after he sets you loose on your own with the later lessons, but I found that if I just sit back and close my eyes and think about a Kanji for a couple minutes, things will come.
One tip is to make the stories as unusual as possible. Go for shock value, humour, violence, intrigue, fit them into stories from your past, from memories, and don’t just make situations that just cram the meanings in. Flesh it out a little, get the background and surroundings in your mind as well. I think you will find, upon review, that the ones you have the most trouble remembering are the ones whose stories have the least detail and fleshing out. I think that after experimentation you will agree that even if you have to spend 10 minutes on a single character in order to come up with a good story, it far outweighs the time it would take to re-learn it over and over later.
So, don’t be afraid of spending too much time on each one. Take it slow, the method itself is extremely fast so you can afford to spend a little extra time to do it right. That’s something I still have to remind myself. If you review, and find that you are just repeating a short mnemonic or something to remember the characters, stop yourself and start again slowly. I think it’s natural to lapse into this sort of thing when you are taking in so much information, but eventually it will defeat the purpose
To keep my motivation up, I bought over 100 Japanese books from ebay (for around $50!), and replaced my english ones with them. I also watch Japanese variety shows and dramas without subtitles. (This is helpful for your listening comprehension of course, as well as for boosting your desire to become fluent in the language.)
February 5th, 2006 at 11:02 am
Your diary about Japanese language is really interesting to me, I am not a Japanese learner though. I wrote about the meaning of THIS and THAT from Japanese cultural site. If you are interested in it, would you please read my diary? Mirai
February 6th, 2006 at 4:11 am
Mirai: I think you have some very interesting things on your site, I’m sure I’ll be linking to it in the future
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April 18th, 2006 at 8:43 am
Hello David!
I read your article with great interest. I must say that yesterday I was looking accidently in the pdf of the heisig. The thing that distrurbed me was that the pronunciation was not mentioned in the page. How did you manage this?
I am learning japanese for about 2 years. I am not living in japan but in Germany. The main reason for learning japanese is my japanese girlfriend. Till some months before I was thinking that I would manage to avoid to learn kanji, and that it would be sufficient to know hiragana and katakana. I was thinking thisway, because in some literature many kanji have fyragana above them. As I was looking more carefully in the literature I realised that even though some kanji are explained in fyragana it is still very difficult to get the meaning of a setence if you do not know any kanji.
David, you are definetely right when you say, that you improve your japanese a lot when you started reading books, etc. I had the same experience with spanish. At least in spanish it also helped a lot watching films in spanish with spanish subtitles. This is not possible for japanese films unless you know how to read kanji, so we are back to the starting point again.
So David , what books did you choose reading for the beginning? How many Kanji did you know before you did your first attempt.
Finally here is a link to fresh new blog (not so interesting like yours David, but it is a start).
http://panas-japanese-corner.blogspot.com/
Best regards from Germany
April 18th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
パナさん、glad you like it. One of the reasons the Heisig method works so well is that it doesn’t overwhelm you with too much information at once. Think about kanji that have 13 different readings and 25 strokes… if you try to study all of them at the same time just to get that one kanji memorized, you will run into huge problems very quickly. In the remembering the kanji books he tackles one important phase at a time. Just like you can more easily associate new names for objects you are familiar with in your own language.
It’s much easier to attach the word “canine” to a dog when you hear it for the first time if you already know what a dog looks like and already have an understanding of what it is. But trying to learn the kanji and all of its different readings at the same time is like being introduced to a dog for the first time and being told, “this creature is called a dog, this it what it looks like, it’s also referred to as: pooch, pup, puppy, canine, mongrel, hound, doggy, mutt, etc.” It’s simply too much info for your own good, and much of it will be inferable once you know the basics.
So Heisig gets the meaning of kanji and how to write it into your mind first.
Then the second book tells you how to put readings to the “objects” you already recognize. In this way you learn everything about the required kanji in 2 steps.
For practice I would first recommend manga that has furigana for all the kanji. Manga is a good starting place for several reasons: There are pictures that show you what’s going on and give you a sense of the attitudes of the characters toward one another and what they could be meaning to say. This can clear up some otherwise ambiguous-seeming sentences. Another reason is that it will be most likely contain a majority of spoken dialogue. This way you get a sense of how people talk to each other in normal conversation without a lot of extraneous description and literary device, (given that you have chosen a manga in which people talk “normally” and not in exaggerated anime fashion).
Personally, I think the “Death Note” series is particularly good, since the story itself is very engaging; the grammar is very robust seeing as how the story is a rather complicated strategic drama, and yet the vocabulary is relatively straight forward since they are talking mostly about everyday things and situations. Therefore you will get a lot of practice with useful daily vocabulary and not “waste time” on learning words for magic ninja scrolls or moon powers or too much fantasy jargon, (not that these don’t have their place!).
If you want, it may be helpful to purchase both the English
and the Japanese versions which can be read side by side to clear up any confusion that might crop up. This will at the very least increase your hiragana/katakana reading speed dramatically in a relatively short period of time. I think I will actually write a whole post about this soon, there is a lot to be said for it.
Anyway, I think your blog idea is a good one. I’ve done similar exercises in the past, just making up stories as I wrote along, thinking of ways to incorporate any grammar and kanji that happened to wander into my mind at the time. Being creative is definitely a good way to spice it up!