Hi, Sorry if a similar topic has been covered before but I’d just like to know some of these questions with regards to reading.
How do you know how to pronounce chinese and japanese characters? Can you do this just by looking at them?
Did you learn how to read by listening or LingQ or through some other means?
If you did not use LingQ to learn them , then how and how long did it take?
Sorry if that looks a bit like a survey but that was the only logical way I could think of laying them out. I would like to know how you did them as I really want to broaden my horizons. I only know romance languages.
While I have no experience with Russian, I do have experience with Chinese, Japanese and Korean, all three of which use different scripts.
Pinyin helps immensely with Chinese, but I find that as you learn more you start to notice similarities in radicals and can sometimes guess the pronunciation (not the tone). It gets easier as you learn more words, but it’s still the case that you won’t be able to accurately read a word/character unless you have already seen it and learned it before.
I learned hiragana and katakana from sheets, and probably had memorized them all over the course of a week or so (maybe 2?). The general rule is that each character you see is a complete syllable. I found that katakana was much more difficult to read though, because the writing was vastly different from hiragana and you simply didn’t use it as much. It’s really easy to forget the kanas from my experience. Kanji operates the same way as Chinese characters, except that some kanji can be 2 or 3 syllables (which really threw me off).
Korean uses an alphabet, and it’s possible to learn it completely over the course of a few hours. However, while you can almost always accurately read things it might be a while before you know what it says.
If I was going to study a language that doesn’t use the roman alphabet, I would probably find some charts or exercises to do so. It’s a lot faster than learning by listening and means you can also get started learning the language a lot sooner as well, since you won’t be limited by needing a form of romanization.
I only learned Japanese. As alex says, learning kana is pretty easy. I had a little chart and I just wrote them over and over again.
For characters, I would recommend the book “Remember the Kanji” by James Heisig. Some people don’t like it, but it’s worth a go. But nowadays, it’s relatively easy to read on the internet though as there are programs which will tell you how to pronounce kanji. So a major obstacle for beginners is eliminated - you can read more difficult content even if you haven’t yet mastered the kanji. And you don’t have to spend a ton of time shuffling through a kanji dictionary.
The Heisig books mentioned by Bortrun are absolutely the way to go. Absolutely fantastic and will save you loads of time if you wanna learn kanji. He also has a book for kana which he claims can teach you both hiragana and katakana in a matter of hours. Having used the kanji books I believe him. More recently he released remembering the hanzi which is all the basic chinese characters. Don’t believe the doubters!
The Heisig books mentioned by Bortrun are absolutely the way to go. Absolutely fantastic and will save you loads of time if you wanna learn kanji. He also has a book for kana which he claims can teach you both hiragana and katakana in a matter of hours. Having used the kanji books I believe him. More recently he released remembering the hanzi which is all the basic chinese characters. Don’t believe the doubters!
I would entirely disagree with all supports of Heisig’s ‘kanji out of context’ series of books. If you want to learn the meanings of kanji then fine, but if you actually want to read Japanese then they’re not very helpful.
The best way I’ve found of getting to a high level with kanji is the Kanji Kentei tests. Gets a bit silly for levels 1 and pre-1. (3,000 and 6,000 characters respectively). I did up to 2 and then stopped.
For books, I’d recommend:
Remembering Japanese Characters (Henshall). He gives the etymology of the Kanji, some examples and the reading.
New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (Halpern). The best Kanji dictionary out there for a learner.
It’s been said above, but the kana are not all that hard. Katakana takes some time to get used to because it’s not used as frequently, but you can learn both kana in a few hours if you put your mind to it.
I used Heisigs method and got 92% on the kanji part of JLPT 2kyu back in 2006. Yes there are other ways, I tried the traiditional method but found Heisig to be the most logical ,the least time consuming and the most effective. There are about 2000 JOYO kanji which are covered by Heisigs first book and they are all you really need to access, manga, magazines, etc.
The introduction to Heisig’s book makes a pretty good argument for his method and you can find that somwhere on the internet with the first 100 characters or so. The on-yomi and kun-yumi readings are a doddle once you can distinguish the characters from each other quickly(e.g.寺待侍持). You pick them up intuitively, especially if you can use something like LingQ. Plus Heisig’s second book on reading the meanings is quite useful too. If you just want to learn to read Japanese I wouldn’t bother buying a kanji dictionary. Just get an electronic dictionary with a touch pad or if its on the computer use lingQ or www.popjisyo.com
I agree with the Heisig lovers here. I wonder if the anti-H people appreciate that it teaches the writing as well as the meaning. While, the kanji are out of context and the meaning is sometimes tweaked to match the method, it is a fun way to familiarise yourself with the elements of all the jo-yo- kanji and get enough grounding to attack kanji texts right away, without plodding through learner materials.
It is also a mnemonic method that really sticks. I did about 1000 from that book 10 years ago when in Japan and I bet I remember the meaning and the writing of at least 600 or so, for the most part without living in Japan and not reading Japanese-- meaning AND writing. BTW the mnemonic method transfers to any thing you have to memorize (I devised a system for memorizing phone numbers and with the little method and mental effort I have no need for a contact list, it’s all in my head)
Yeah, whenever you see some memory master on tv memorise the sequence of a pack of cards or whatever thats how they do it, by associating characters and stories to the numbers of the cards.