

Hacking the Japanese Proficiency Test: How to Dissect Kanji - harisenbon
http://japanesetesting.com/articles/view/34/hacking-the-jlpt-kanji

======
redcap
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.

~~~
harisenbon
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. ;)

~~~
donw
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.

~~~
harisenbon
I work in Nagoya, at a small but apparently very well-connected Digital Media
company called NanoOPTMedia ( <http://www.nanooptmedia.jp> ). I mostly do
their webprogramming and system creation works. I'm the only foreigner working
here, so when I started it was pretty sink-or-swim.

I've done some of the DS games as well (100万 漢字検定 and.. some others..) but
they never seem to stick with me because as soon as I finish using them, I'm
back to typing on the computer and 馬鹿ing my ワープロ... or is that ワープロing my 馬鹿?
Either way it's not a path I'm happy with.

Where do you work in Tokyo? I was just there for a cakePHP conference (but
that's a post for another time)

------
soc
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.

~~~
harisenbon
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).

~~~
basugasubaku
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?

~~~
harisenbon
Yup, it is my site, and yeah, I have always felt odd about the Tae Kim guides
thing, but as they are CCL'd, I put them in there (of course with
attributions!)

The main reasons they're there is: a) they are an amazing source of
information for Japanese students. b) I'm currently in the process of creating
testing and flashcard packs based around his methodology to supplement his
site. c) they filled up space while I started getting original content up. ;)

The articles section of my site were originally an "extra" feature, with the
flashcards and testing information based on popular textbooks (without
copyright infringing) was the main purpose of the site.

Essentially 'Here's a bunch of study materials based on the textbook you're
currently using.'

Of course, as people sign up, and I get more feedback, that's been changing a
lot. People are very interested in the testing features, but they also seem to
want more articles than I originally anticipated. I'm currently in the process
of releasing new articles, (like the Kanji one above), but you're right that
having the Lesson articles in with the standard articles seems a bit strange.
Perhaps I'll create a subcategory for textbook-based articles (like Tae Kim)
and original articles.

Thanks for the advice! I'm always looking for more feedback.

~~~
basugasubaku
Oh, ok. I haven't registered so I wasn't sure what the site was about. It
looked to me like the articles were the main part.

Speaking of which, to find the index of articles I had to edit the URL by
hand; there doesn't seem to be a link to them from the submitted link.

~~~
harisenbon
(汗

There's a link on the right side, but you're right -- that's not very user
friendly. _laugh_ I'll put that at the top of my "To Fix" issues. ;)

~~~
harisenbon
Fixed and Fixed.

Thanks to all the opinions, advice (and complaints) from people, I've made the
navigation for guests much easier, and also standardized the login and signup
methods.

Next I need to decide if I'm going to allow comments for guests...

------
MikeMacMan
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
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.

