Progress as of October 24th

So this past week I had a holiday and I got a lot of Japanese done. I've also got more of a clue now on how to progress, so I'm progressing faster and further.

So here's another update on how I'm doing.

I've started RTK2 again, so far I'm on 577 cards.
Vocabulary for N5 has me on 191 words (I think I'll add some more today, so I'll be past 200 then).
I've just finished Tae Kim's Basic Grammar, which contains 11 topics. Now moving on to Essential Grammar, which contains 18 topics.

Japanese-wise, it's been a productive holiday! ^^ Health-wise it's been a bit worse, but hey, you can't have everything.

Progress

Wooooh I've finally caught up with where I left off in RTK2.

Like I said in my previous post, I had suspended all my RTK2 cards before my Japan trip, so I wouldn't have a whole load of reviews when I got back. And just now I unsuspended the last cards and I'm up-to-date with my reviews again! ^^ I am quite pleased with myself.

I have been studying more N5 as well. I am up to exactly 100 words now. ^^

Also I have caught up on my Tae Kim studies, reviewing what I'd learnt so far, so tomorrow I can start with a new chapter.

So all in all it's been quite a productive day and I'm pretty proud of myself! ^^

Final Preparations and Setbacks

Well, in 5 days we will finally be leaving! It's getting so close. Eddie is coming here on Wednesday and on Friday we will head to Japan! ^^

Unfortunately there is a minor setback: Himeji castle is closed from April 2010 until somewhere in 2011 for renovations. I was really looking forward to seeing it. ><

However, I've found a good alternative; Okayama. A small town which is also on the way from Kobe to Hiroshima (as is Himeji) and it also has a castle that looks similar to the one at Himeji (only smaller). And where the one in Himeji is white, the one in Okayama is black, causing it to have the nickname 'The Crow's Castle'. The rest of the town looks interesting too. So hopefully it will be just as good. ^^

I haven't been doing any RTK studies, since I don't want my reviews to pile up again, like they did when I had the computer problems. So I've only been reviewing, but not adding anything.

I've also started Tae Kim's grammar and I wish I had done it sooner. It's so easy and fast! So I will keep that up for a few more days and hopefully I can string a few sentences together when we're there. ^^

Progress as of June 13th

I've finally made it past the 1/4 point on my Onyomi cards! ^^

RTK2: 517 cards in Anki
Pimsleur: Japanese 2, Unit 17 done

Progress as of June 6th

IBS is slowly getting better. ^^

Pimsleur: Japanese 2, Unit 13
RTK2: 420 cards in Anki. Almost at the 1/4 mark! ^^

I want to see if I can't make it that far today, but I'm a bit worried about the amount of reviews I'll have tomorrow if I do. Everything I add today, I'll have to review tomorrow, and I've already added 28 today. If I add 100 more... Well. We'll see!

Progress as of June 1st

So my IBS has really been flaring up, so I wasn't able to do a lot. Yesterday I did a bit, though, as well as today, so my progress at the moment is:

Pimsleur: Japanese 2, Unit 9.
RTK2: 392 cards in Anki.

Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig - part 2

In my previous post I explained how Remembering the Kanji 1 helped me learn the meaning and writing of 2042 kanji. So that's great and impressive at birthday parties and all, but completely useless if you don't also know the pronunciation. So that's what Remembering the Kanji volume 2 is all about.

It took me a while to get started, because it doesn't really give a set way of studying, like volume 1 did. I had to do a lot of research online and a lot of trying out to find a method that worked for me. But I think I have it now.

For those of you doing RTK2, you'll probably say, after reading this: You're crazy. You should be learning compound words, not loose onyomi! I'll explain in a minute why I am not doing that.

First: What is onyomi and what is kunyomi?
Onyomi is the Chinese pronunciation of the kanji.
Kunyomi is the Japanese pronunciation of the kanji.
As I explained in my previous post, the kanji were brought over from China. The Japanese had their own way of saying words, but no symbols. However, the symbols had their own pronunciation. So the Japanese decided to use both. (This is all putting it very simply, of course.) Onyomi is mostly used in compound words; words that consist of two or more kanji. Kunyomi is usually used when kanji stand on their own.

In RTK2, Heisig focuses more on the onyomi, as we've already learnt single kanji, so kunyomi isn't that hard (though he does give a method for it at the end of the book, which I will explain and tell my experiences with when I start doing it). But since onyomi is used to write compound words, it's more difficult and he focuses on it more.

The method he uses is that some of the kanji can be divided into groups in which all the kanji share a certain radical (a symbol that is part of the kanji) and a certain pronunciation. An example: These four kanji (長, 張, 帳, 脹) all have a shared element (also known as primitive): 長 (sometimes these primitives are kanji themselves, sometimes they are radicals and sometimes they are neither). All four are also pronounced as 'chou' (the u indicates that the o is elongated, so it rhymes with 'show', not with 'chew'. This way, it's easy to remember that a kanji with that particular primitive is pronounced that way.

Sounds like a good method. However, there were a few drawbacks for me. First of all; there are kanji that share the same primitive, which get a different pronounciation. Also, these four kanji aren't the only ones that are pronounced 'chou'; there are 23 others as well. And there's a whole bunch of kanji that fall outside these groups altogether. Lastly, and most importantly to me: Heisig focuses on learning compounds with those kanji in it. However, if I only know the onyomi of one part of the compound, it would be rote memorisation for the other part and that is not the way his method works. So, I decided to find another way to work.

At the Reviewing the Kanji website forum, I found some people talking about the 'Movie Method'. The way I understood it, it works as follows: You take all the kanji with a certain onyomi (for example 'chou') and look at the meaning for all of them (you already know the meaning, because you learnt them in RTK1. Though some meanings there are off, most of them are pretty accurate). You then think of a movie you know very well, for example The Lord of the Rings. And then you recreate scenes with those kanji involved, say you had the kanji for roadway, ring, group, etc, it would be easy. But you also get kanji that don't immediately seem to suit with this film, like delight, or permit. It's the trick to make up a story that can also involve those kanji. Which shouldn't be too hard, after finishing RTK1.

However, I'm not too much of a movie buff and I also didn't want to come up with different movies for allll those different onyomi. Also, I didn't want to use the same movie for all or a lot of onyomi, because I was worried I'd mix up the stories. So I decided to go with making up stories, but not attaching them to a movie. Basically the Heisig method, but instead of there being primitives, there were kanji with which to make up a story. I also always make sure to include the pronunciation, or I still don't remember!

An example of a short one:
Onyomi: suu (スウ)
Kanji: 枢 (hinge), 数 (number), 崇 (adore)
Story: My friend Sue (suu) is off her hinges! She actually adores numbers and wants to become a maths teacher!

I've done all the groups of 3, 4, 5 and 6 kanji so far. The smaller the groups, the easier, but if they are smaller than 3 it gets harder. So I am doing the onyomi with 1 and 2 kanji last. The bigger the groups, the harder it gets as well, but after a lot of practice with the smaller groups, those will also be ok. I am considering attaching movies for the biggest groups, and then dividing them up into little scenes (there are a lot of groups with around 20 or 30 kanji, but some are as big as 40 or 50 and the biggest one has 68 kanji). However, I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

As for reviewing; I downloaded Anki, a programme that works with the Spaced Reviewing System I explained in my other post about RTK1. On the front of the Anki card (the bit that you see first) I put the kanji. On the back (the bit that shows up if you click 'Show card' I put the onyomi and the meaning (doesn't hurt reviewing that as well). I've noticed that not all my stories have stuck as well as others, but that's the same with RTK1 and you can always tweek them a bit.

At the moment, I have about 350 cards in Anki; so 350 kanji I know at least one onyomi of (some have 2 or 3). When I'm done with these, I will probably do the kunyomi at the same time as learning the compounds Heisig mentions in the book. I haven't really thought too far ahead. My main goal at the moment is finishing Pimsleur before I go to Japan and hopefully also finishing the onyomi part of RTK2 I am doing now (though I don't know if I'll make it). It's going pretty fast this way, as did RTK1, so once I have all this out of the way, it will make learning sentences and vocabulary that much easier. ^^

Remembering The Kanji by James Heisig - part 1

So I have already explained a bit about this topic, but I'll explain it with a bit more detail now, so you guys know exactly how I've been learning the Japanese writing system.

First a short explanation of this writing system.

Japanese consists of three different sets of 'symbols'.
- Hiragana (ひらがな): Each hiragana symbol represents a certain syllable/sound. There's the vowels a, i, u, e, o. Then there's the consonant/vowel combinations, such as ka, ki, su, te, mo, and all other combinations. Consonants cannot stand on their own, except n. Here is a hiragana table for anyone that is interested in it. Distinguishable from katakana by their 'curvier' forms.
- Katakana (カタカナ): Each katakana symbol also represents a syllable, the same as the hiragana ones and a few extra ones. This is because katakana is mostly used to transcribe words of foreign origin. Most words are changed around so they don't really sound like their original selves, to fit into the 'no loose consonants' rule, but a few sounds not in hiragana symbols (vi, du, etc.) were added to help out a bit. Here is a katakana table. As you can see, the symbols have straighter lines and less curvy bits.
- Kanji (漢字): This is the hardest stuff and what I've spent months and months learning. And what I use the book for that this post is all about. The symbols, taken from Chinese, respresent meanings, rather than just sounds, like hiragana and katakana. A few hundred years ago, Japan had a spoken language, but no writing system. The spoken language wasn't anything like Chinese, but the writing system came over from there (putting it very simply). So they had a problem: They had sounds in Japanese and symbols in Chinese, both meaning the same things. So, seemigly to complicate things even more for us Japanese learners, they decided to give most of the symbols both a Japanese (kunyomi) and a Chinese (onyomi) pronunciation. They did make up some rules of when to use which, but there are lots of exceptions too. Also, some of them have multiple onyomi, so when to use which? An example: So far, I have learnt three different onyomi for this kanji: 納: na, nan and noo. Some are used more than others, but all can be used.
Luckily for us foreigners (and also for the Japanese themselves) the Japanese government decided a while ago to make a list of roughly 2000 kanji (there are over 50,000 in total) that it is strictly necessary to learn, in order to understand newspapers, regular books, etc. These are called Jouyou kanji and these are the ones I've been learning. Kanji that do not appear on this list, and also verb inflections, etc. are written in hiragana in books, newspapers, etc. The exceptions to this are people's names, some contain non-jouyou kanji, but that's not for this topic.

Remembering the Kanji 1
In comes this amazing book (full title: Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters). This guy, James Heisig, went to Japan. He didn't speak or write the language. When he arrived there, he was too late to start the Japanese language course that was already going, and he had to wait a few weeks before a new one would start. So he decided to have a look at the language himself. He created his own system for learning the kanji that allows us to learn them as foreign adults, rather than Japanese children.

Say what, Koos? Well, in universities and Japanese courses all over the world, people are taught the kanji by writing them over and over again (stroke order is very important, and also knowing stroke count, as dictionaries are often sorted by number of strokes), at the same time trying to get all those onyomi and kunyomi (pronunciations) in their heads. Heisig reckons this is like trying to walk to the left with your left leg and at the same time trying to walk to the right with your right leg. It's just very difficult. A common idea among Japanese teachers at universities is that foreigners can never learn the kanji as well as Japanese people can. Heisig also reckons that's crap (and so do I, after working through this method).

In his method, he points out Chinese people learn Japanese much faster than people from other nations. This is because they already know the symbols, their meaning and their stroke order. What he wants to do with his book Remembering the Kanji 1, is get you on that level; learning the stroke order and the meaning of the kanji, while not yet trying to learn the pronunciation as well. He argues that this also goes much faster than trying to learn it all at once, so within a few months you are done and you can move on to learning the pronunciation. And he is right; I finished learning the meaning and stroke order of 2042 kanji in 6 months (while working fulltime!). That's an average of 11 a day, whereas it took me 3 days to learn just the numbers 1-10; stroke order, meaning, onyomi and kunyomi. There were also many days during those 6 months where I didn't learn any, because I was tired or busy, but on my top days I learnt between 60 and 80 in one day!

How does this method work? It's easy. Heisig starts off from the fact that we are not anything like the Japanese schoolchildren, who learn the kanji by writing them over and over again. There are several major differences: we are adults, so we have a different brain. We are capable of abstract thought and imagination better than children. Also; Japanese schoolchildren already know the pronunciation of these words, they just haven't learnt to write them in kanji yet. We, foreigners, do not know the pronunciation yet. Therefore, it would be nonsense to learn them in the way they do.

What he did was show how the kanji are made up of certain elements. To start off, he took the kanji for the numbers 1-10, because most people have learnt them already before finding this method (and if not, they're easy to learn): 一,二,三,四,五,六,七,八,九,十. He also introduced 5 other easy kanji that often come back: mouth 口, day (aka sun) 日, month (aka moon) 月, rice field 田 and eye 目. A lot of kanji can be made up by combining these 15. The trick was: you take the loose elements, take the meaning of the kanji and make a story with a strong mental image to remember it.

An example: the kanji for sun 日 and the kanji for eye 目 make up the kanji for risk 冒. In it, the sun symbol is over the eye symbol. Your story could be: When you look up into the SUN with your EYE, it is a RISK, because you might go blind. That's it; then you know it. There's nothing more to it. Next time you see the word 'risk', you'll know how to write the kanji, because of this story.
(In the book, the stroke order is also given, but it's fairly straightforward and after a while you just know what stroke order a symbol should get, I wrote each kanji twice while learning it, to get a feel for the stroke order.)
Another example. Sun 日 and moon 月 together form the kanji for bright 明. Yeah. Do I really need to make a story for that? XD
After you've learnt a lot of kanji combining those first 15 (and some of them seem really difficult before you start this, like Dr: 博, that's the 47th one you learn) you start learning more new elements and learning kanji with those elements. Each element gets its own meaning that you can use to make your story.
The pieces kanji are built up out of are called radicals. Each radical is an element in Heisig's book, but not each element is a radical. For example, the kanji for bright (seen above) is an element in a kanji that comes back later: alliance 盟, but it is not a radical.

In the beginning, I thought I was doing something wrong, that's how easy it was. I was so proud of myself for doing 10 the first day, I never thought it could be done!

After this, of course, the trick is reviewing and keeping it fresh. If I never again wrote the kanji for risk, I would forget it quite soon. But if I keep reviewing, it stays in my head. For this, I use a Spaced Reviewing System (SRS) on the best site ever: Reviewing the Kanji. SRS makes you review after the amount of days after which you have almost forgotten the kanji again (almost, but not completely). This way, you do not review too much, and have enough time to add more new kanji, but you also don't review too little.

First, you review after 1 day. If you get it right, the kanji comes back 3 days later. Then, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, 120 days and finally 240 days. If you fail a kanji, it goes back to square 1 and you start from the front again.

I soon realised that 10 cards a day was very little; that I could do loads more per day. On the forum of Reviewing the Kanji, there are people who say they do 100 a day and I believe them. However, I was working fulltime and usually tired in the evenings, so I didn't always learn new kanji. I finished on January 31st of 2010, though, and now I can proudly say I know the meaning and stroke order of 2042 kanji. :D

And what's even better; if I were to encounter a kanji I've never seen before, I can recognise the elements, make up a story and remember it as easily as the other 2042! So if I wanted to learn all 50,000 kanji (not saying I do, but hypothetically) I could use this method to learn all of them. It's not just for those 2042 I've learnt already, it can be used for any kanji I come across (Chinese characters too, for that matter).

I'm also using Heisig's method to learn the pronunciation (onyomi and kunyomi) but more about that in part 2, as that is my explanation of Remembering the Kanji 2. ^^

Progress as of May 23rd

Pimsleur: Japanese 2, Unit 5. Getting a bit easier...
RTK2: 343 cards in Anki.

Progress as of May 22nd

Pimsleur: Up to Unit 4 of Japanese 2 done. This is harder than Japanese 1, though. I hardly understand anything of the conversations at the start of each unit, as they are speaking so fast. XD

RTK2: 322 in Anki. Did 35 today, now I'm tiiired.

Progress as of May 16th

Pimsleur Japanese 1 is done (30 units), now on to Japanese 2! ^^

After finishing Remembering The Kanji 1, this is my first new major milestone.

RTK2: 273 cards in Anki

Progress as of May 14th

Pimsleur: Unit 29 done
RTK2: 255 cards in Anki

Progress as of May 11th

Pimsleur: Unit 27 (did that one twice)
RTK2: 233 cards in Anki

Progress as of May 9th

Pimsleur: Unit 26
RTK2: 204 cards in Anki

Progress so far

Because I decided to start posting this blog over a year into beginnig to study Japanese and making plans for a trip to Japan, I have already made quite a bit of progress that I will share with you now. Please keep in mind that I work a fulltime job, so progress is slow but steady. :)

I'm using a few excellent books and online resources that I can recommend to anyone.

I started by getting a book called 'Japanese in Mangaland', from which I learnt hiragana and katakana in a few days each. Then I didn't do much for about 9 months, because the next chapter was about kanji and it just seemed too much to take on while working as well.

However, in August of 2009 I discovered the most wonderful book ever: 'Remembering the Kanji' by Heisig. Learning kanji was a breeze with this book (I remember being impressed I could do 10 per day when I first started it, and by the end I was doing between 30 and 80 a day), and then when I discovered the website 'Reviewing the Kanji' I was set. I learnt the meaning and stroke order of 2042 kanji in about 6 months. When I finished on January 31st, 2010, I was over the moon!

By then, I had forgotten a lot of my kana, so I used Heisig's 'Remembering the Kana' to brush up on it.

Recently, I started 'Remembering the Kanji 2', which focuses on learning onyomi and kunyomi. I'll explain my method for that in another post, as RTK1 is quite fixed in its method, but RTK2 allows forces you to come up with your own method of studying. It took me a few weeks to figure out how, but I've found a method. Most people doing RTK2 will call me crazy for doing it the way I do, but hey, it works for me.

So most of my time was spent in Kanjiland; I haven't studied much 'real' Japanese so far, except for using another wonderful method: Pimsleur. Pimsleur is one of those 'repeat after me' CD methods that seems to work wonders for me. I tried the whole 'reading and copying and saying' thing, but it took me way too long and I found my retention was much too low. However, with Pimsleur's aural method I retain things much better! Pimsleur consists of three parts, with 30 lessons consisting of 30 minutes of listening. It also has supporting notes. At the moment I am on part 1 - lesson 27, but I plan on doing one lesson a day so I am finished before going to Japan. Sometimes I do a lesson twice, if it features a lot of things I mess up.

All about my trip to Japan in another post!