Learning kanji before Japanese?

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Sonjaconjota
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Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby Sonjaconjota » Thu Jan 13, 2022 12:02 pm

I’ve got a question for people learning Japanese.
I really would like to study Japanese at some point in my life, but I know that it will require a lot of attention and probably letting any other target languages rest for a while. That’s why I’ve always postponed it so far.
For now, my plan is to start with Japanese when I turn fifty, as a birthday present to myself.
I know that one of the most difficult aspects of learning Japanese are the kanji.
So I thought: Why not start to learn kanji beforehand?
I’m about to turn forty-three, so I still have seven years left. Even if I would only learn one kanji per month, I would have eighty-four kanji under my belt once I actually start with Japanese. It would give me a nice headstart.
So, here’s my actual question: Is this a good idea, or are there any reasons against it?
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jan 13, 2022 12:29 pm

Just start learning Japanese now!
Seven years is a long time. I have memorized and forgotten the Hebrew alphabet (planning to start learning the language at some unknown point in a very distant future) plenty of times, and that's just... um... don't even remember how many letters. Admittedly, vague recollections of it have to sit somewhere in the back of my mind, so remembering it the next time should be much faster.
You probably should either find some way to use these characters (like learning a language that uses them in its writing system), or employ a systematic spaced repetition system/software to keep your knowledge of them from fading away.
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby lemonbird » Thu Jan 13, 2022 3:03 pm

You could start learning kanji now. However, one per month seems like a very slow pace especially since the first ones are very simple (一、二、三、人、木、山、口、日、白、百、川、月、…). I just listed 12 easy kanji that could be learned in one day, maybe one week if you were doing it really slow. You do you but it seems weird to me that you would take one year to learn those. You can do whatever floats your boat but I personally would get bored by the easiness of it and would start studying something else after a couple of months. Maybe study a bit harder at first to learn the more simple kanji and radicals and then, once you get to those that are more complex, get into your habit of one per month?

Also, I would add that 84 kanji are not that much. It's better than nothing but if I would want to have a nice headstart, I would think of a few hundreds (200? 300?).
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby tungemål » Thu Jan 13, 2022 3:16 pm

Yes, one per month is too little. At least do one per day.
I can recommend the https://kanji.koohii.com/ website for learning kanji without learning japanese. But that's only if you're going to learn all the 2136 Jouyou Kanji. I'd say 10 per day is manageable, 20 if you study hard. 20 translates to 3-4 months of hard work to learn all the jouyou kanji.

Edit:
Maybe it would be better, since you don't want to spend too much attention on it, to take half an hour one day every week to learn 5 kanji. And if you'd like to learn only the most common ones first, the kanji.koohii / Heisig method is not the best, but you should rather find a system where the kanji are ordered by frequency.
Last edited by tungemål on Thu Jan 13, 2022 8:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby devilyoudont » Thu Jan 13, 2022 3:30 pm

There are a lot of people who attempt to learn kanji first. There's no problem with doing it this way, other than it tends to cause burn out. Generally, people who try to learn kanji first are trying to learn kanji within 3 (25 a day) or 6 months (12 a day), and I don't really see that as an issue on the time frame you are dealing with. Setting a goal of like 5 a week would mean that you "know" basically all of the kanji before you start. "Knowing" the kanji in this context means you have associated each kanji with an English keyword. Optionally you can also learn to write each kanji during this time period. Pronunciation of the kanji and deeper understandings of their meanings within Japanese comes later as you are actually studying the language.
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby Sonjaconjota » Thu Jan 13, 2022 4:57 pm

Thanks to everyone who has chimed in so far. You have all provided interesting insights!
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Jan 13, 2022 5:40 pm

tungemål wrote:And if you'd like to learn only the most common ones first, the kanji.koohii / Heisig method is not the best, but rather a system where the kanji are ordered by frequency.

While Heisig's method is often sold on its systematic approach to building mnemonics and its square focus on learning to write kanji by associating them to English keywords (based on the observation that Chinese and Korean students are at a great advantage in learning Japanese just by being familiar with the kanji and being able to associate them with concepts in their own languages), I'd say that its most distinguishing feature is precisely that the kanji are not ordered based on frequency, but instead in a way that is most conducive to gradually building on prior knowledge, even if that means learning an obscure and rarely used kanji before very common ones.

I personally did learn kanji with Heisig's book and using the kanji.koohii website (I miss its no longer active forum so much..). I intended to complete the book in 3 months, but due to still having school at the time it ended up being double that length. I also couldn't resist starting to learn the actual language before finishing the book and started dabbling in grammar in the last couple of months. Now, 12 years later, when I think back to that period I feel like the most lasting effect of learning using Heisig's method wasn't learning to write the kanji (I've hardly ever had to write by hand) or learning to associate them with English keywords (those eventually ended up being replaced with actual Japanese words), but the fact that I actually got down to learning Japanese without being overwhelmed by the amount of kanji that need to be "mastered". Back then I wasn't actually as interested in Japan and Japanese culture as I am now, so the idea of a "quick and dirty" way of learning the Japanese writing system, without having to write endless lines and doing rote memorizations of character readings, was very appealing to me (ironically, if I were more of a Japanophile at the time I probably would have just bitten the bullet and went for a normal textbook).

All in all, as others have said, learning kanji before Japanese is very doable, but I'm not sure if I'd do it that way if, for whatever reason, I had to relearn Japanese while having all the meta-knowledge I have today. Maybe I would just go straight to what I ended up doing after completing Heisig - learning actual words in sentences and acquiring the readings of their kanji through that process. Or I guess I could go for Wanikani, which didn't exist back then.
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby AndyMeg » Thu Jan 13, 2022 5:44 pm

I think what you want to do is similar to what I'm trying to do, so I'll tell you how I'm going about it.

First, a bit of context:

I've previously studied Japanese and a bit of Mandarin Chinese (and I already have some knowledge of Chinese Characters under my belt); but I'm currently focusing on Korean.

For when I officially go back to Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, I want to have an easier time with Chinese Characters, so I decided to engage in a daily activity that doesn't take away my energy or focus from Korean, but that at the same time paves the way for when I return to Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.

For me, when compared to learning a language that uses an alphabet, just looking at a text full of Chinese Characters feels more complex and energy draining. So, what I'm trying to do with my current approach is to take away as much as possible that overwhelming feeling of complexity that gives me headaches when I try to engage with such a text. So, the first step for that, in my opinion, is to build familiarity with those Characters. Just enough familiarity to have a more pleasant experience when interacting with a text written in Chinese Characters.

I'm not currently trying to learn their meanings or their pronunciations, I'm just trying to get a strong feeling of familiarity with Chinese Characters. So here is what I'm doing:

I have an Android app called "Japanese Kanji Study" and I'm using it this way:

In the app you can organize and divide the Chinese Characters by different kind of lists. For example, you can choose between these options:

- Divide the Characters by the Japanese School Grade they are taught at.
- Divide them by JLPT levels
- Divide them by the Kanji Learner's course order
- Divide them by the Kanji Kentei order

And there are many more options.

And you can also import custom lists of Chinese Characters and study them.

For now I'm using the order in which Chinese Characters are taught at the Japanese schools, but I've also used the Kanji Kentei order and the JLPT order in the past. Plus, I've also imported custom Characters lists.

I've sub-divided each level in groups of 5 Characters each, and this is what I aim to do with at least one of those subgroups each day:

I take the Calligraphy test/challenge for each subgroup. At the end of the challenge it shows me a summary of my performance for each character and where I made mistakes and it also shows an overall percentage of precision for that subgroup of characters. My goal is to get an overall 100% precision for each subgroup of characters before moving on to the next subgroup (for this I need to write each character without any mistake on the first try).

In case you want to try it, here is the configuration I use:

- Automatic detection of strokes
- The cue is the character’s main associated meaning
- It doesn't show any kind of readings for the character.
- Normal stroke detection (the other options are “Permissive” and “Strict”)
- Show answer (it shows the whole character in gray and I can write/draw over it while my strokes are shown in black). I chose this option because right now I’m not trying to test my ability to write a character from memory, but just practicing how each character should be written as a way to build the familiarity I aiming for)
- Show clues (If I’m struggling too much with a character it shows me, with a small animation, which one should be the next stroke and how it should be written)
- Repeat a character until I get it right from start to finish (so if I make a mistake while writing a character, I have to correct my mistake and finish writing it right, and then I go back to try to write the same character from the beginning. I can’t move on to a new chracter until I’ve perfectly written the previous one from start to finish)

I've been doing this activity on and off for a while now and I've already seen my familiarity with Chinese Characters increasing to a level that makes it more comfortable for me to look at a written text and to notice differences between similar Characters with relative ease.

I think if I engaged in this activity more often, my current familiarity level with Chinese Characters would be a lot higher, so that's why I'm trying to make this activity part of my daily routine.

After I've built enough familiarity with Chinese Characters I plan to use the "Language Learning with Netflix browser complement" (now called "Language Reactor") for my next step. But I'm in no rush. I'll keep working on the activity I've described before for however long it takes for me to feel enough at ease with Chinese Characters to be ready to move on to the next activity in my plan.

I hope my approach can help you or at least give you some ideas to try on your own ;)
Last edited by AndyMeg on Fri Jan 14, 2022 4:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby alaart » Thu Jan 13, 2022 5:56 pm

I learned Kanji for 2 months several hours a day before I started my first lesson of Japanese. I got to around 1000.

I don't think it helped beyond the most common 200 or so, because in the beginning you don't need most of them. So what actually happened is that, even when I increased the Kanji count and tried to finish all the Kanji and got to maybe 1800 after a year or so, I still couldn't read.

And that was the thing I misunderstood. I believed I could just read a book after I would get through Kanji, but actually you can't just read only because you studied Kanji. I wasn't interested much in reading then and never followed up. I also never really restudied Kanji, maybe a bit here and then - and in my Chinese classes, but never again so intensively. So now my Kanji knowledge is pretty mediocre, but it was good enough to get by while living in Japan.

If I would study them again I would learn the basic 200-500 hundreds, and the rest naturally through contact with the language. I think it can burn you out and kill your motivation if you overdo it.
Last edited by alaart on Thu Jan 13, 2022 5:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Learning kanji before Japanese?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jan 13, 2022 5:56 pm

Okay, this is going to be a weird metaphor, so bear with me. There is a process called Gram staining where you apply certain dyes to bacteria on a slide. This helps you categorize what kind of bacteria they might be. So anyway, one of the important steps is to heat-fix the bacteria to the slide by waving them over a bunsen burner. If you don't heat-fix the bacteria, they'll wash right off when you rinse off the various dyes!

There are a lot of steps you can take to memorize something, but there is one step that will heat-fix it into your memory, which is to actually use it! If you don't use something, all the spaced repetition in the world won't keep it in your brain forever. I actually learned about 200 Kanji from James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. It's true that some particularly memorable ones did stick in my head permanently, but for the majority, I forgot them because I didn't use them!

In light of this, I would not recommend memorizing the Kanji more than a year (absolute maximum) before you are ready to start applying them. And you should stay on top of your preferred memorization schedule the entire time that you're waiting to start using them.
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