I recently made a breakthrough in study habits which allowed me to start adding new kanji cards to my Mnemosyne deck at last. See, the past few months (since December), my main deck's been clogged with failed cards, so if I added new stuff there it'd just get even worse. Yeah, the failed stack has been slowly shrinking, but at this rate it'll be a year before it's down all the way. (The breakthrough which let me make progress once more is detailed here.)
After doing a couple new lessons and being pleased with the ease with which I digested them, I decided I'll start blogging the final sprint. Today I'll be trying to swallow Lesson 49 from Heisig's "Remembering The Kanji". There are 56 in total, and then I will officially be acquainted with all the Jouyou characters (the ~2000 common ones sufficient to read local newspapers).
Heisig summarizes L49 as: "A few primitives having to do with groupings and classifications of people". Yeah, that doesn't sound very exciting, I know. The really exciting groups have all been hit in earlier chapters, and in the last few, Mr. H really had to pull off a miracle to get any sort of coherent groupings at all. The characters covered here are #1828 to #1852 (using the unique Heisigian numbering system).
I'm getting considerable aid from Fabrice's excellent site, Reviewing The Kanji, a whole community of people learning the writing system of Japan. Due to the difficult nature of this task, the site has actually unintentionally become one of the most advanced and sophisticated discussion grounds for second language acquisition in general, but mostly in the context of Japanese. Anyway, the site offers two huge tools. First, the ability to copy-and-paste characters in their Heisigian order, greatly reducing the mechanical difficulty of making a digital flashcard from my paperback copy of RTK1. Second and even better, for every character there are stories added by other users, and ranked by voting so the best stories go to the top. By stories, I mean quick vivid scenes that stick in your mind and transform kanjilearning from an impossible act of god into a very doable task. For more on that, see Imaginative Memory.
For flashcards, I'm using Mnemosyne. It's a program which optimizes the studying process using spaced repetition. I'm something of a rebel for using this instead of Anki, which is what is more commonly used in the JSL community. I wrote a compare-and-contrast article, Mnemosyne Vs. Anki.
ADDING THE STORY TO THE ANSWER SIDE
When I decide to incorporate an image, I'll put it on the answer side of the card, but I'll do so using invisible text.
ROMAJI/KANA KEYWORDS
Since I already know a lot of the spoken tongue, I'm already familiar with reading a lot of these chars, and the only problem is learning to write them. In particular, for a lot of them I can add a Japanese keyword to the question side of the flashcard. That helps a ton when you can pull it off. Of course, write the keyword in kana or romaji, so you don't give the answer away.
CREATING THE CARDS
It took me forever (like two and a half hours) to add the 25 cards, because at first, I was making detailed notes in this article about each one. I realized that that was going overboard, that it was a bad use of my time, and so on. In short, I decided I won't do that for future lessons, so I may as well delete what I did for this one, so I'm consistent throughout. So I basically typed over a thousand extra words here, then deleted them.
OBSERVATIONS WHILE ADDING THE CARDS
I only now noticed that the verbs neru and nemuru use different kanji. This is weird cuz it goes against a common pattern where highly similar verbs will often use the same ones. Neru (寝る) means "to sleep (lying down)", among other more obscure things, and nemuru (眠る) means "to sleep (not necessarily lying down)". It's interesting how some languages make subtle distinctions that others do not.
There was one Heisig entry, #1838, whose English keyword, "bulrush", was unfamiliar to me. Turns out a bulrush is some specific kind of flower or weed growing around a bay, or something. Which is very convenient since the structure of the character basically says exactly that. It's interesting though how, even though I pride myself on having a big English vocabulary, I'm encountering new English words by studying nihongo.
Of course, the real observations will come not when I add the flashcards, but as I review them and the symbols gradually get etched into my long term memory. With the next update, I'll have comments to make about the review process as well as the adding process.
Lesson 50
Lesson 51
Lesson 52
Lesson 53
Lesson 54
Lesson 55
Lesson 56 (Not Online Yet!)
FURTHER READING
I'm putting a lot of time and energy into learning this language, aren't I! You might wonder whether I'm going for full native fluency. I'm not. It's actually just a hobby, and this kind of thing is actually how I relax. Read more: Native Fluency.
You've seen plenty of jwords which were borrowed from English. But what about ones where there's a resemblance which is just coincidence? Those are Japanese False Cognates.
As long as we're on the subject of language, here are some cool variations on the phrase "I love you".
After doing a couple new lessons and being pleased with the ease with which I digested them, I decided I'll start blogging the final sprint. Today I'll be trying to swallow Lesson 49 from Heisig's "Remembering The Kanji". There are 56 in total, and then I will officially be acquainted with all the Jouyou characters (the ~2000 common ones sufficient to read local newspapers).
Heisig summarizes L49 as: "A few primitives having to do with groupings and classifications of people". Yeah, that doesn't sound very exciting, I know. The really exciting groups have all been hit in earlier chapters, and in the last few, Mr. H really had to pull off a miracle to get any sort of coherent groupings at all. The characters covered here are #1828 to #1852 (using the unique Heisigian numbering system).
I'm getting considerable aid from Fabrice's excellent site, Reviewing The Kanji, a whole community of people learning the writing system of Japan. Due to the difficult nature of this task, the site has actually unintentionally become one of the most advanced and sophisticated discussion grounds for second language acquisition in general, but mostly in the context of Japanese. Anyway, the site offers two huge tools. First, the ability to copy-and-paste characters in their Heisigian order, greatly reducing the mechanical difficulty of making a digital flashcard from my paperback copy of RTK1. Second and even better, for every character there are stories added by other users, and ranked by voting so the best stories go to the top. By stories, I mean quick vivid scenes that stick in your mind and transform kanjilearning from an impossible act of god into a very doable task. For more on that, see Imaginative Memory.
For flashcards, I'm using Mnemosyne. It's a program which optimizes the studying process using spaced repetition. I'm something of a rebel for using this instead of Anki, which is what is more commonly used in the JSL community. I wrote a compare-and-contrast article, Mnemosyne Vs. Anki.
ADDING THE STORY TO THE ANSWER SIDE
When I decide to incorporate an image, I'll put it on the answer side of the card, but I'll do so using invisible text.
ROMAJI/KANA KEYWORDS
Since I already know a lot of the spoken tongue, I'm already familiar with reading a lot of these chars, and the only problem is learning to write them. In particular, for a lot of them I can add a Japanese keyword to the question side of the flashcard. That helps a ton when you can pull it off. Of course, write the keyword in kana or romaji, so you don't give the answer away.
CREATING THE CARDS
It took me forever (like two and a half hours) to add the 25 cards, because at first, I was making detailed notes in this article about each one. I realized that that was going overboard, that it was a bad use of my time, and so on. In short, I decided I won't do that for future lessons, so I may as well delete what I did for this one, so I'm consistent throughout. So I basically typed over a thousand extra words here, then deleted them.
OBSERVATIONS WHILE ADDING THE CARDS
I only now noticed that the verbs neru and nemuru use different kanji. This is weird cuz it goes against a common pattern where highly similar verbs will often use the same ones. Neru (寝る) means "to sleep (lying down)", among other more obscure things, and nemuru (眠る) means "to sleep (not necessarily lying down)". It's interesting how some languages make subtle distinctions that others do not.
There was one Heisig entry, #1838, whose English keyword, "bulrush", was unfamiliar to me. Turns out a bulrush is some specific kind of flower or weed growing around a bay, or something. Which is very convenient since the structure of the character basically says exactly that. It's interesting though how, even though I pride myself on having a big English vocabulary, I'm encountering new English words by studying nihongo.
Of course, the real observations will come not when I add the flashcards, but as I review them and the symbols gradually get etched into my long term memory. With the next update, I'll have comments to make about the review process as well as the adding process.
Lesson 50
Lesson 51
Lesson 52
Lesson 53
Lesson 54
Lesson 55
Lesson 56 (Not Online Yet!)
FURTHER READING
I'm putting a lot of time and energy into learning this language, aren't I! You might wonder whether I'm going for full native fluency. I'm not. It's actually just a hobby, and this kind of thing is actually how I relax. Read more: Native Fluency.
You've seen plenty of jwords which were borrowed from English. But what about ones where there's a resemblance which is just coincidence? Those are Japanese False Cognates.
As long as we're on the subject of language, here are some cool variations on the phrase "I love you".
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