[Kanji] Understanding but not Reading

[dampingwire]

I'm in the same camp as vonPeterhof. I have used (and still use) RTK both to learn to recognise individual kanji and to have a convenient handle (the English keyword) with which to refer to them.

I mostly have not made an effort to learn possible readings. (At least, not yet. I expect that that will change if I start to work through Kanji in Context.

To start with I learned only a few words via kanji, most words I learned in kana form and remembered the pronunciation. There were exceptions, obviously anything that cropped up often enough in みんなの日本語 I probably learned as kanji. However, the bulk of my learning was via kana or pronunciation. Beyond JLPT N5 (say 700 words or so), I found that the homophones started to be confusing. At that point I made as effort to start to learn new vocabulary via kanji. By the time I was working on JLPT N3 I decided to make my primary source of knowledge words in kanji format (except, of course, for those that are always or almost always written in kana alone).

So with your sentence:

もう宿題をしましたか。

I would count that as a pass if I knew that it was asking whether the homework had been done yet, even if I couldn't say it out loud properly. I'd probably fail it if I could read all of it (including しゅくだい) but didn't know the meaning.

As time has gone on, I've seen enough kanji in words that I can probably make a guess about 宿題. 題 also occurs in 問題, which is another very common "textbook" word. It happens to have only one reading and I do tend to make a note of those in my deck when they come up (if I happen to notice). 宿 happens to have only two readings, both concerned with inns or lodgings, so that one has stuck too. I do try to notice these things, although I don't drill them so I don't necessarily recall them on demand. But when I see them in a word it often triggers enough of a memory that I can work out the pronunciation as well as the meaning of the whole word.

Coincidentally only last week in みんなの日本語 we were covering such gems as 五月蝿い, 時雨, 向日葵 and 倫敦, which I take as a vindication of my early decision not to slave away learning isolated readings

[Delodephius]

I don't have much to add, since I'm only a beginner and still discovering Japanese and what methods work the best for me. But when it comes to reading Kanji it depends what I learn. Let's say a character like 人. When it stands alone it is read ひと, which is it's Kun-reading, when in a compound like イギリス人 it's read as じん, which is it's On-reading (out of many more in both readings). In my Anki deck I have cards that are just a single character, a word, a phrase, or a whole sentence. For a card with just a single character I only have the reading for how it is read when it is just that one character, not how it would also be read in various compounds. I have that reading in the cards containing compounds, and even though I try to learn the meaning of each individual character, it's not necessarily helpful. For example 元気.

So what I learn is basically this: the most common reading of the character when it is used alone, and the reading of the character within a compound, but only when I'm learning that compound. I don't have notes in the single character cards of how it is ALSO read. That does not concern me.

That his how I have been doing it so far. Might not be the best method since I can't recognize some characters unless I see them together with some other character from a compound I learned.

[Nandemonai]

Now I just do sentence cards and reading (light)novels. I do advocate RTK (which teaches the meaning before readings) as a supplement to studying early on, it helped me a lot as it basically kickstarted my learning.

Do have example of your sentence deck? Do also learn the meaning of words before their readings?

My RTK deck and sentence deck are two different things. I never finished the RTK one, and sentences is mostly a mix of core6k and subs2srs decks. I've attached some screenshots of my decks.

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[Sizen]

In all honesty, I'm having a hard time formulating a coherent response to your question. I personally believe that knowing only the dictionary meaning of a character holds little real value for learners whose goal it is to learn to use Japanese proficiently.

My reasoning is as follows. If you want to learn to read Japanese, you need three things: you must be able to recognize the form of characters, you must know words, and you must be able to arbitrarily associate those words with the characters that they've been assigned. Knowing the meaning of individual characters will come through knowing the words associated with the character, and is therefore, in my opinion, irrelevant in the process of learning kanji but not in the process of learning new vocabulary.

It is possible to learn to read through listening, but only to a certain extent. When I first started out, I don't think it would have been possible. In fact, when I was studying Mandarin a few years back, my experience was that despite my good knowledge of characters, I was more often than not unable to associate spoken word with written language with my beginner's knowledge of Mandarin. I had to look up the reading of each word. On the other hand, now that I've reached a more advanced level in Japanese, I have a much easier time associating words and expressions I've only ever heard to characters I never knew before because I have the kind of knowledge that lets me anticipate the structure and meaning of a sentence before it's over. (Much like you can often guess the end of a sentence that's been split onto two separate pages.)

In other words, if I were you, I wouldn't expect to progress very quickly if I waited for each character's reading to become clear on its own. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it will probably be a frustratingly long time before this becomes a viable and efficient way of learning to read.

In response to your other question, in the beginning, I personally only ever studied kanji in conjunction with vocabulary. I never studied meaning or reading in isolation. The on- vs kun-yomi difference became clear to me over time, as did the individual meanings of characters.

Let me make this clear, though: no matter what you're doing, as long as you're learning something, you will eventually make it. As a general rule of thumb, the more effort you put in to make things understandable, the better. However, you will learn Japanese if you continue as is. I might be worried that you'd eventually get frustrated or burnt out at some point because that's the kind of person I am, but if you enjoy the process, there's really no problem at all.

[Woodsei]

I too studied kanji through Heisig. At first, I started only with learning the meanings, and then I got a bit greedy and added readings. There's nothing wrong with that, and if you can do both, by all means do them, but it was distracting to me, and it slowed me down. Suddenly my stories turned from being useful and funny stories that stick, into meaningless, paragraph-long stories stuffed with readings, various meanings, etc. It became like reading academic passages, and I couldn't bring myself to look at them. So I just went back to meanings and blazed through the kanji. It was faster to me that way than doing both together.

I didn't have experience with your issue as much as you do, because I mostly exposed myself to a lot of listening before I had ever started reading. That feeling of seeing a word, but only the English meaning pops out rather than the reading. I did, however, experience that with lesser known kanji and vocabulary. But that didn't last for long, primarily for two reasons:

1. Listening a lot
2. Audiobooks, anime/drama/movies with subtitles in TL, podcasts with transcripts, etc.

Concerning number 1, I listened A LOT. And I still do. Increasing my listening exposure likely increased my exposure to vocabulary, and more likely than not I had already come across the word I was listening too in question. Especially if it's a word as common as "homework," which you'll definitely find in a lot of school dramas and anime. As your vocabulary grows, the unknown words will start to stand out, and as a result, you will pick them up a lot faster through context, or by looking them up. If you listen a lot, you'll find yourself learning a lot of words without necessarily knowing what their kanji ever looks like in writing. Likely, you'll have known your kana, so you can input them in kana in an online dictionary, and among the various homophones that all sound the same but have different kanji, you'll be able to tell exactly which one it is because you already know it's meaning. Learning kanji meanings was truly a blessing to me. It made learning the readings bearable, and kanji overall is not painful at all. Sometimes, writing out the word when I see it, reminding myself of the stories and how the kanji connect, will be enough to burn it in my brain for a very long time. Then, with some more exposure, I never forget it. That's how it was, for the most part, with me. I still remember, for example, 手柄　（てがら）, meaning achievement or accomplishment, after only seeing it once, I think in the subs of Fullmetal Alchemist, because I already knew the word previously through watching the series, as well as knowing the individual meanings of the kanji.

2. Audiobooks are amazing. There's http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6241 this log on HTLAL, and even though most are classical books, the collection is extensive and you may find something you like. A lot of words I was able to pick up originally by sound, and then later looked up their kanji as I did in the example above, and it has been helpful. For example, the word 銀河　（ぎんが）, meaning the Milky Way or the galaxy, from a story by Miyazawa Kenji. If not audiobooks, you can find podcasts with transcripts, news articles like FNN news, anime and drama with subtitles, drama cds (radio dramas), etc. Or, if an anime is popular enough and you can't find subtitles for it, read the manga if you can, you'll find the dialogue almost word-for-word.

I learned a lot through exposure to audio. Sometimes, if I've glazed over a word I heard somewhere but didn't know it's meaning, and then if I come across the same word as I read, if I know the meanings of the kanji, sometimes the sound of the word pops out and I think, "Oooh, that's what this word meant!", or something to that effect. Try to accompany almost anything you read with audio of some kind. You can try Rhinospike for getting audio of text you have that doesn't have any, but I haven't actually tried it, so I don't know, and it can be a bit time consuming, in that you have to wait and all. I just use a lot of what already has audio. It's important to me because pronunciation is important to me, but listening teaches you a lot more than that.

You'll still come across words where you fill drilling makes them work. And that's fine too. The above is just making the process much easier for me, rather than drill the entire language.

That's what I basically do. I don't use SRS, so I can't comment on that (I tried subs2srs, but fell off the wagon a week ago). Early on, I tried RTK 2, but again burned out pretty quickly. I think it's useful, it's just me. But I do put words in a word document or a spreadsheet, and look at it regularly, just to make sure I don't forget the common words. But lots of reading for me acts like a natural SRS, so I'm trying to do a lot more of that, consistently.

In a nutshell, read and listen a lot, and match your audio with transcripts as much as you can. As your vocab improves, and your sense of how a word should sound like does too, you'll be able to infer more and more frequently what a kanji you've come across sounds like. At least that's what I've found through my own experience.

I found that because of the kanji, listening was so important, as I would have probably had to go through kanji books to do so, and I hate rote memorization. I'm good at it, but I just really hate it, and it slows me down because I keep putting it off.

You can also use Kanji in Context, or if you use Jpod101, the lists of common words with their audio and kanji are provided. I think using a premade list can be very useful, and may act as a short cut, I just never stick with one, except ones I have made myself and put in an excel sheet or something and periodically review. Whatever you do, listen a lot, and read a lot too. It's not easy in the beginning, because there's still so much to know, but you'll get there fairly soon if you stay consistent. Good luck! Let me know what your thoughts are.