adventuresinlanguaging

[adventuresinlanguaging]

Follow up to the Kana post

After I wrote the post, I went over to Sporcle and started the Hiragana quiz. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a three minute quiz where you have to identify the character, giving the English pronunciation. After months of not having looked at a single Hiragana character, I was able to stumble through the quiz in just over a minute and a half. Constantly quizzing myself on the Kana is how I can best retain the characters.

[adventuresinlanguaging]

Random Tidbit I Feel Like Throwing Out There

Language learning isn’t like math. Once you learn it, you don’t retain that information for long periods of time. It will fly right out of that head just as fast as it flew in if you don’t keep at it and use it pretty regularly. That’s not to say that once you reach a certain level that things won’t just come naturally, but that’s a large hill to climb to get to that point. For beginners, and even probably intermediates, it’s hard work to remember all the information you’ve gained, and requires a lot of work to put into your long term memory. Making it applicable to my day to day life is what seems to help me best, but of course there will be those who retain the info after one review, or those who after fifty reviews still can’t get it down. I can only speak for what works for me personally, but hopefully there are those of you out there who could benefit from such a method. 

[adventuresinlanguaging]

Hiragana (and Katakana)

Writing hiragana and katakana out is a bitch. I have great handwriting in English, but my Japanese sucks major ass. It pisses me off, which usually ends in me tearing out the page and starting all over. For the Kanji, which are a lot more block-ish, the handwriting isn’t nearly as illegible, so I write those out (also helps with memory retention). For the Hiragana and Katakana, it really is just easier to use Sporcle. Knowing their form, being able to recognize them, makes it to where if I need to write them out I can, but as a beginner, being able to write it isn’t nearly as important as knowing how to read and understand them. Obviously this doesn’t hold for the Kanji, as you need to know stroke order so you don’t completely fuck everything up, but for the Kana - as Hiragana and Katakana are collectively known - it just isn’t necessary when you’re starting out. 

[adventuresinlanguaging]

Random Proud Moment

So I was binge watching Rachel and Jun videos earlier, as I usually do when I need a break, and in one of the shrines I saw a Kanji I recognized. The character was “generation”, and while I didn’t recognize the Kanji around it, I was super proud of myself that in one day of studying, I had already made progress. It really is the little things that count. 

[adventuresinlanguaging]

Starting Out

So, the first step forward is learning the Kanji with Heisig’s aptly named book Remembering the Kanji. The stories don’t always make sense to me, but being able to see the different parts that make up the more complex Kanji lets me create my own memory devices that have really helped. For example, learning the Kanji for “goods”, its the character for mouth repeated three times, forming a triangle. The way i remember that that character is goods is to think of three mouths consuming, and the word consuming triggers a memory from How I Met Your Mother, where Lily did that alternative theater piece. They held up a mirror in Ted’s? face and yelled CONSUMERISM. So now every time I see the little mouths I think consuming, then I yell CONSUMERISM in my head, and I remember that the word is “goods”. That sounds complex, but it happens within seconds, and once I retain the character, I won’t need to go through that process. 

[adventuresinlanguaging]

Big Scary Japanese Adventures

Taking on a new challenge can be scary, especially when it involves learning an entirely new system of communication, as this journey does. But being scary also makes it kind of fun. If I can accomplish this, what can’t I do? This is gonna be messy, there won’t be an exact flow to the way posts come out, and sometimes (like now) I’m gonna ramble on and on for no good reason. The first thing to do is to lay out my goal: I want to learn Japanese. Not very specific, I know, but I don’t want it to be. I don’t want to restrict myself to only learning the 2,00 or so Joyo Kanji, or just being able to read and not write or speak. I want to know it all. I don’t have a teacher for all of this, I’m more or less “winging it”, so at least if I fail it’ll be unique. That’s something, right?