http://archive.easymodo.net/jprules.php

tl;dr version:
>>>/lang/

Thanks for the helpful tip. Why didn't you use kanjidamage in the beggining? Sage for non-contributing post.

>forcing me to use kanjidamage
That's horrible!

Learn 2 Heisig failure.

>>7206370
Because my japanese teacher used this book at the university. I wanted to use Heisig, but it said that it's generally not a good idea to use different methods parallel. So I decided to stick with BKB and try to incorporate his method. The problem is that I can't make up my retarded stories, because I'm lacking crucial elements, the radicals. I can think up things like "double house with cells" for 隹, but if I keep doings this everything will be fucked up.

>>7206373
My issue is that I can't learn effectively from the net. That's why I printed it out. Also, I want to learn stuff when I'm away from it, like when I'm travelling.

>>7206432
Some guy made an ebook out of the kanjidamage stuff
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0F8G1CI0

Been a while since it was updated, but it should still beat that book you were talking about.

I ignored /jp/'s advice, and went with Japanese for Busy People and the Basic Kanji Book.

Both were excellent. You must have had a lousy teacher.

I used that book before moving on and completing kanjidamage. Not sure what your problem is with it. I'd use it again if I could go back and do it again.

>>7206443
Looks awesome, thank you.
Too bad, I already leeched off the office to print BKB out for me. Literally, it was a revenue office. I wouldn't want to see their faces when I show them this.

>>7206460
>You must have had a lousy teacher.
Yes, an incredibly lousy one. She is just a japanese girl who married to one of the professors at the university and got out of the country thanks to that. It doesn't help her situation that people are weak with english here, so in the end we have to figure out stuff ourselves after she said most of it in 3 different languages.

>>7206471
Basically it doesn't explain radicals. I could also say that the lessons are made up by themes.rather than a logical order of similar characters, but that's just the lesser part of it.

Kanji are used most commonly as morphemes. Studying them in isolation is retarded, as is claiming to 'know' them. What do people mean by 'knowing' kanji?

Knowing how to write them? Useless to a foreigner unless you live in Japan.

Knowing their broad overall meaning(s)? EDICT usually gives a half dozen often disparate suggestions for each, and they all tend to fall apart or become extremely obtusely applied in the context of actual words, setting aside even obvious examples like ateji.

Pronunctiation? There's usually two or three On readings at minimum on top of native Japanese words as well as the occasional anomolies that derive from neither. Totally unreliable and unworth studying in isolation.

Exhaustively knowing all the various combinations and okurigana comprising actual Japanese words? This is surely the most accomplished if not immediately practical path as it actually constitutes learning the language instead of simply dickwaving arbitrary numbers on the Internet, but I don't think anyone who counts the number of kanji they know to a semi-finite value actually does this.

So that leaves the conclusion that counting the number of kanji you 'know' is actually vacuous wankery and hardly related to measuring one's understanding of the language at all. So why do these threads keep happening?

You don't need special books for "learning" kanji. Stop dicking around and just learn the compounds

>>7206512
We've had this argument way too many times. Studying compounds right away is too complex. While context is important, too much context will just confuse most people. You should pick out the kanji in isolation, dissect it until you are able to identify it from other kanji, and then see the most common compounds and words it's used it.

>>7206512
Learning compounds and words with visual memory alone is retarded. Brain structures normally used for writing are also used to recognize kanji, so if you don't know how to write them your recognition is going to be much, much worse. I learned about 2,2 k kanji in isolation with heisig before I started learning compounds, but because I did that I was able to memorize them with great ease because I could associate the meaning and word with the keyword and story in my long term memory. Doing things your way is going to take forever and yield very little results.

>>7206512
I can read my porn. That's enough. I'll learn how to write kanji adequately when I'm going to the land of Nippon.

And people complain when a thread asking for translation is made here.

Hypocrisy/General.

>>7206537
>but because I did that

Placebo effect. You can't identify any causality between those things, it's just what the RTK salespitch told you. You would have been able to memorize them anyway.

>if you don't know how to write them your recognition is going to be much, much worse

Most Hanzi/Kanji users nowadays can't write for shit thanks to the advancement of computer technology, and yet IME's have vastly broadened the range of characters people are able to recognize. You don't need any knowledge involving writing to learn to read apart from a basic ability to break down radicals.

>>7206547
Because there is a difference between:

a) HEY GAYZ!!11 TRANSLATE THIS FOR ME kTHXBYE

b) I am currently studying X and Y books. Do you recommend I read A or B for my kanji?

>>7206512
Because you need to crawl before you learn how to walk. Learning the baby steps first will save you time and frustration later. I can say as someone that's already finished my primary kanji grind (and as someone who tried learning the "I'M A BIG KID AND CAN HANDLE THE HARD STUFF" method for about 2 years before my grind) that it makes things a hell of a lot smoother. I learn much faster, because I already know the kanji.

"WHAT DOES KNOWING THE KANJI MEAN?!"

I don't mean know in the sense of mastered. By knowing them, you have a basic meaning associated with them, know the parts that make them, know how to write them, and if you know how to write them then chances are you'll know what the hell it is when you see it. It no longer becomes intimidating.

Instead of learning vocabulary and trying to remember "this pattern of strokes and this pattern of strokes makes 'shoubu'" and relying too strongly on memory of how the kanji looks like; you can just simplify it as "victory and defeat form 'shoubu'" and it really does make it run smoother. You've already learned 勝 and 負 before, you already have a name associated with them to recall them easier. When you bump into 勝負 for the first time, you're not learning the kanji, reading, and meaning all at the same time. It makes the learning more flat. Just taking the kanji learning away from the equation makes memorizing the word a lot faster and easier, especially when the kanji meanings you have form jukugo that make sense.

Though some people do learn differently, and that's cool. Learning the harder way was extremely slow for me. The kanji grind held back my main learning for about 2 months, which seemed like an eternity at the time, but after that it was worth it.

By the way, I wouldn't recommend learning pronunciation when doing kanji grind. Keep it simple, learn the pronunciation when you actually see it being used. Sometimes you'll learn a pronunciation to find the kanji rarely ever uses that one, or you'll mispronounce stuff at first glance because of what you learn.


And yes, knowing how to write kanji is actually more important than you think. How can you truly say you're comfortable with a kanji if you can't recall it perfectly from memory and write it out? Writing it, even if you've no plans on writing in Japanese, helps reinforce the kanji in your memory. I used to think the way you did too, but I'd find I often mixed up kanji that looked alike at first glance, and I realized that even if I KNOW something like 麗 looked like, I had no freaking idea how to write it and was relying on a vague memory of how the character looks like to remember it when I see it. Yeah, it has a distinctive look to it, but it used to be just one mess of chicken scratches to me before.

To close my post, I'd like to say that when most people number the kanji they've learned, it's because they're grinding up to the point where they get all the important ones down. When you finish jyouyou kanji and a few others that make learning the jyouyou easier, any more grinding is usually pointless. The rest can be learned when you bump into them. That way you only really learn the ones that are useful. Grinding kanji doesn't take that long either, if you keep up at a daily pace and don't fall behind on your studies. It's a small fraction of the overall language learning process, one that (when taken early) makes the rest of the journey smoother and easier.

You're right, people who count how much kanji they know after learning the basic ones usually don't have much to show for it. Because they're wasting their time learning kanji and not actually learning how they're used. However, if they're learning new kanji after the basic set and add them to memory, only through immersion, then I'd say they're on the right track.

Kanji my Tatsumi

Oh, I just bumped into this one, might as well respond:

>>7206550
>Placebo effect
Well, I'm not the same dude, but I have 2 years of experience before my kanji grind. I can tell you that in those two years, I was moving at snails pace. Once I learned the kanji my rate this noticeably pick up. You can call it placebo effect all you want, there's no real way for me to prove to you otherwise, but I'm just trying to be helpful here. As someone that did things the hard way and then switched methods, I can tell you that I regret not doing it earlier. Your mindset reminds me of how I thought early on.

Why learn to write the kanji if I'm never going to write the language? I bet most modern Japanese people don't even know how to write most of their kanji either! There's always so much handwritten Japanese in my doujin that sparsely use kanji, so that's a perfect indicator.

Why learn them isolated? When they're outside of isolation they'll have different meanings depending on context. Why waste so much time learning so many of them when a lot of them are rarely used? I'll just learn as I go!

This is how I thought when starting. It only made things harder for myself. Looking back at that time, I'd say I was "dicking around" more back then because I was too stubborn to try doing the method everyone else was doing.

I've read that when learning new kanji/vocabulary, if you write them down by using them in a few sentences it will put the words into your active vocabulary memory instead of your passive/receptive, thus making it easier to remember and use. Is there any truth to that?

It seems like it would take a lot of time to do that with every single word. I've already memorized quite a bit without having to do anything like that, but I'm still curious.

>>7206659
Yes, but don't try cramming it into your head. Use an SRS to put in different sentences and learn the vocabulary that way. It may start off hard, but the repetition will keep it in your head. There's no fast way to learn vocabulary really, just immerse yourself to naturally pick up on words and SRS to keep them in your head.

>>7206659
Well, when you write down those sentences you not only use the kanji you just learnt, but a bunch of other ones. I guess it works because by writing sentences you're circulating your existing knowledge.

Immersion is important. Most people that learn English from foreign language don't come out of classes being able to skillfully handle a conversation. They usually immerse deeply, either through the internet, or books, or games, or whatever. They pick up on the language naturally while learning it formally.

That's what you should do while learning Japanese. Can't read a doujin? Don't give up. TRY reading it, even if you can only read the hiragana, it'll help you recognize those until you can read them as fast as you read your native writing system.

>>7206659
Well mainly, it uses different parts of your brain. So you can be good at reading but still deficient at constructing sentences.

>>7206679
This. I can't ever remember studying English grammar in a formal manner because I had already developed a sense for it when I was about 10 through watching English cartoons like spiderman and the biker mice from mars. Then again English is of course much more similar to my native language than Japanese, so I can't honestly expect to pick up Japanese with the same ease. However, immersion is just as crucial, if not more than formal studying, because it reinforces and adds to what you already know.

>Why learn to write the kanji if I'm never going to write the language?

Useful for dictionary lookups.

>Why learn them isolated?

I've noticed many of them make sense combined if you understand them individually.

>>7206694
>Learned English from Spiderman

Fuck yeah

Should Kanji Damage and Heisig be used together or not?

>>7206679
>Immersion is important. Most people that learn English from foreign language don't come out of classes being able to skillfully handle a conversation. They usually immerse deeply, either through the internet, or books, or games, or whatever. They pick up on the language naturally while learning it formally.
Very true. If you ever travel around in Europe and try to communicate in English, you'll find that the main indicator of how well the population speaks English, is how much they localize English media. Germany, for instance, tends to go for complete localization, with dubs for TV shows and full translations for most games, and over there it's very hard to find someone speaking English beyond a few words they picked up in a high school class. But in smaller countries where localization won't be that profitable and they'll have to settle for subs for TV shows and games in English, most people just pick it up naturally and can converse without any problems, even if their pronunciations are a little clumsy.

I think this is also one of the main reasons Japanese suck at English. They waste hours of their lives repeating various English lines after the teacher while in class, but then they go home and forget the language exists, never using it for anything, because all their entertainment is in Japanese, and for as long as they stay on their little island, they won't need anything else for the rest of their lives.

>>7206628
>Instead of learning vocabulary and trying to remember "this pattern of strokes and this pattern of strokes makes 'shoubu'" and relying too strongly on memory of how the kanji looks like; you can just simplify it as "victory and defeat form 'shoubu'" and it really does make it run smoother.

You can do this without learning them upfront and I do it often; deriving the meanings of kanji from the words you encounter them in and applying this to other compounds is a natural thing no matter how you're learning vocabulary.

>>7206655
>Well, I'm not the same dude, but I have 2 years of experience before my kanji grind. I can tell you that in those two years, I was moving at snails pace. Once I learned the kanji my rate this noticeably pick up. You can call it placebo effect all you want, there's no real way for me to prove to you otherwise, but I'm just trying to be helpful here. As someone that did things the hard way and then switched methods, I can tell you that I regret not doing it earlier. Your mindset reminds me of how I thought early on.

I'll defer to your experience but I haven't had that kind of difficulty; after about a year and a half I've amassed an Anki deck of about 2000 kanji and 3400 words encountered in the wild. Even if I don't know the characters of a word I can similarly guess at the meaning or at least type out the constituent kanji into a dictionary, but I seldom find it's useful to guess and it's always a last resort and not a shortcut past memorization.

>but I'm just trying to be helpful here.

Likewise, and I think your viewpoint is overly-represented around here.

>>7206710
I used them together, but if you're going to do this then make kanji damage a side tool while keeping RTK as the main one.

Why? RTK sometimes has some stupid word choices for kanji. Some words he picks are completely out there (what the fuck is with "doth"? I know what the word means, but seriously?)

When he picks words that you can't stick well with, see if Kanji dicks has a better word choice. HOWEVER, MAKE SURE THAT RTK DOES NOT USE THIS KEYWORD FOR ANOTHER KANJI. You can do so easily by using the search engine on http://kanji.koohii.com. You need to sign up, but it's worth it as a reference guide (and some stories if you're stuck thinking of one).

If you want to use kanji damage/kanji dicks as your main guide, don't go with Heisig. They often use different radicals with different names, so you might confuse yourself. Heisig is good because it teaches some extra kanji that kanji damage doesn't. Some of those aren't used much, but are nice to know for commonly used names.

I found this thread to be an interesting read despite not trying to be learning Japanese.

>>7206710
Personally, I don't think you would need Heisig if you've usin kanjidamage. While you'll learn some extra stuff from Heisig, most of it should be way down on your priority list if you want to start reading somewhat fast. The main thing that makes me suggest kanjidamage over Heisig is that it actually gives you some information on how it's used, rather than just a keyword. There are so many kanji that you won't be able to guess the actual use of by just knowing the keyword. Even if you don't memorize the words the kanji is used in right away, it helps a lot to know exactly what is meant by the keyword.

>>7206730
Well I finished RtK 1 a few weeks ago and I've noticed that I'm starting to forget keywords and instead am starting to associate real Japanese words with them. So yeah some keywords are complete nonsense compared to the actual meaning, but you're going to end up replacing them with actual Japanese anyway so it's not that much of a problem.