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 Posted: Sat May 05, 2007 10:19 am
Some say that you should not learn kanji until you are sufficiently versed in grammar and vocabulary. Some people say you should learn them side by side and some even advocate learning a sufficient amount of kanji before you even touch grammar.
As for me, I started teaching myself at 13. I didn't even know kana until I was about 15, and then I didn't begin kanji til just last year (at about 16). As a result, my listening comprehension and speaking are good, and I think that I grasp the language intuitively very well, but my reading ability is so lacking that I need a kanji dictionary for anything I try to read.
I've just begun to really get into kanji, but I made this choice on my own to do things the way I have. I've always believed in taking a more 'natural' approach to learning language, and the natural way would be to learn the kanji after one has a good grasp of the language, as thats the way it is done in Japan.
Do you think I've been going about this all wrong? I know that in classrooms they begin introducing kanji immediately, and I'm afraid that when I get to my first Japanese class in college, I'll find that the dialogue is way too simple, while I'll be struggling to keep up with the other kids in reading comp.
So how did you go about learning? Did you learn kanji simultaneously while you learned the words? Or did you learn it before even learning grammar? Or did you wait until later like me? I'd like to know everyone's opinion on this issue.
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Posted: Sat May 05, 2007 10:30 am
Side-by-side with grammar! There are many bboks that use roumaji instead of kana, but it still has kanji for examples. For some like me, that makes it extremely hard to learn because I don't retain things as well if they're in roumaji.
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Posted: Sat May 05, 2007 8:08 pm
I started learning kanji after I learned katakana and hiragana
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Posted: Mon May 07, 2007 4:25 pm
I started studying kanji after I learned hiragana, katakana, and basic grammar. But I'm better at reading/writing than speaking... sweatdrop
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Posted: Mon May 07, 2007 6:59 pm
I believe that the kanji should be learned while you are learning the language as a whole. The hirigana and katakana should be mastered first, since they are the base board to spring from. 3nodding
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Posted: Mon May 07, 2007 7:15 pm
I was taught kanji starting with the third chapter in my textbook. Considering we did a chapter in two weeks, that was pretty soon. The problem with learning kanji, though, is if you don't use one over and over, you're never going to remember it. I'm supposed to know 200 some odd kanji, and I guaruntee I only know fifty at the drop of a hat. I can recognize some, but couldn't guess the meaning if my life depended on it.
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Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 9:51 pm
ShadedGray I was taught kanji starting with the third chapter in my textbook. Considering we did a chapter in two weeks, that was pretty soon. The problem with learning kanji, though, is if you don't use one over and over, you're never going to remember it. I'm supposed to know 200 some odd kanji, and I guaruntee I only know fifty at the drop of a hat. I can recognize some, but couldn't guess the meaning if my life depended on it. Yeah same here. sweatdrop
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Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 11:03 am
Personaly, I think you should introduce Kanji after you're solid with Kana, have a strong vocabulary, and a strong grasp on grammer.
Why try to confuse your brain with the hard stuff if you don't understand the easy (or easier) stuff first?
Just my opinion.
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Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 4:40 pm
KumaChang Personaly, I think you should introduce Kanji after you're solid with Kana, have a strong vocabulary, and a strong grasp on grammer. Why try to confuse your brain with the hard stuff if you don't understand the easy (or easier) stuff first? Just my opinion. If the Japanese can learn grammar and kanji at the same time, we can...and should.
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Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 1:55 am
I've grasped hiragana thoroughly, and I'm starting kana now. My grammar sucks, and I'm slightly lacking on the vocab side of things. I can introduce myself and conduct a limited conversation. I'll learn Kanji when I've mastered basic grammar and kana.
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Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 2:52 pm
To me is better learning it at the same time with the other two... this way you are training your brain to recognize kanji words and this letting you read way faster and also reading comprehension is easier than just reading whole sentences in hiragana.
It happened to me, at the beginning, that while I was reading a complete text in hiragana, I confused words and hiragana with the particles and had to read one sentence 10 times to completely understand what it was trying to say...
I got class 3 times a week, 2 sessions were used in learning vocabulary and grammar and 1 to kanji.
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Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 8:39 am
I think that one should begin to learn kanji once you have a decent grasp of both sets of kana, and basic vocabulary. Learn hiragana and then katakana at the same time as learning the basic sentence structure and some vocabulary, and then once those are mastered (reasonably, not necessarily perfectly), start kanji. They're essential to the comprehension of the written language, and so I don't think that they should be left long. The textbook that I and my friends (in other schools) have used also starts kanji in the third chapter, learning about 12-16 per chapter. Mind, I didn't learn the basics through Genki, but it seems to work well. I studied Kumon when I was first learning the language, and they started both kanji and katakana in the fourth text, which I really didn't like. Katakana were too late (they did foreign names and such in hiragana for ages), and they shouldn't have been taught at the same time as kanji.
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Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 3:24 pm
I've found kanji a lot easier if I already know a word that includes the character. I recommend learning kanji for words after being good with the words you're learning the kanji for. Of course, everybody has a different learning style.
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Posted: Thu Jun 21, 2007 9:29 pm
I think the best thing would be to learn kanji as soon as the kana are mastered...
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Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 8:52 am
I think you should learn kana and kanji alongside with grammer and such. I started learning to read kana and knji first, so now I can read a lot of Japanese but I can't understand a word that I'm reading.
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