having second though about learning japaneses

[ziaddayner3087]

sorry if my english isn't perfect, at any rate, currently i'm attending a Japaneses school here in tokyo for at lest one year
my main goal is to study at college or university here in japan, i passed the jlpt n4 with little problem in kanji, and currently studying for this year N3 and EJU, sadly its not going so well.

while the grammar of part is easy, i'm having hard time learning the new kanji and words, specially kanji, its like i know i have studied this kanji before, but i don't remember how read it or its meaning, i'm always prefer math and crushing number over literature, i'm really bad at remembering and sometime i lose my motivation to study when i make too many mistake or unable to answer at all to the point of having second though about learning japaneses and i should just focus more on my english and pass the toefl exam instead

maybe i overthinking about it since only one year left till the course end, but the college i want to go to don't have 留学 classes and i have to study with same level as the japaneses students, so i'm a bit worry about it

so i want to ask other learner, how do you study new words and kanji ?, i already tried a lot of stuff but with no veil (flash cards, reading and writing, est )

[thegooseking]

ziaddaynerさん、

I'm sorry to hear you're having difficulty. I can only give my perspective, but hopefully it will help you.

Like you, I'm probably more mathematically / scientifically inclined. Because of that, I'm more comfortable knowing how something works than just accepting it.

So, whenever I learn a new kanji, I look it up on Wiktionary. It normally tells you how the kanji is composed, so you can see what different radicals are involved: you can see how the kanji is constructed. More often than not, this gives a clue to the meaning of the kanji (sometimes it doesn't, particularly with ateji, but that's often even easier to remember because the relationship between the radicals and the kanji seems so absurd). So, for me, going into the details of how the kanji is constructed and remembering what the radicals mean makes it easier to remember what the kanji means.

がんばってね、
小狼

[ziaddayner3087]

ありがとうございます

I used to study kanji by radicals and it did help a lot before, but I stop using it since I keep getting overwhelm by the amount of kanji receive from the school, not including words

Well I did get good advices from my homeroom 先生 and I'm thinking about give it a try
Basically I don't try to read it or write it at first, just look at the word 1st , study it and try to remember its meaning だけ
After I feel comfortable about it, I'll move the next part which it reading it

[Dariat]

Hi, ziaddayner-san!

For me, learning the words and kanji alone is not sufficient to permanently install them into my long-term memory. I also have to become familiar with them in their natural environment, that is to say in texts. That's why in addition to learning with flash cards I try to read as much as I can. Finding texts for your individually required difficulty level can be a bit tricky, though. Try the JapanesePod101 podcast transcripts, textbooks, or search the internet for other material that is explicitly designed for children or language beginners. If you don't have much to work with, you can, in order to get the most out of it, memorize the text, so that you can recite it by heart. This has proven effective for me in the past. Even though I no longer fully remember the texts, the words and the flow of the sentences have stayed with me.

As for memorizing kanji, I think there's a good deal to be said for simple training by repetition. Think about it: the ultimate goal is to be able to fluently read texts that contain many kanji. Fluently means that you do not think about the individual words and characters and how they are composed. You see the words and you instantly know what they mean. So, being able to derive the meaning of a kanji using some form of memory aid can only ever be an intermediary step.

Having said that, sometimes such memory aids can be useful for kanji whose meanings you keep forgetting, the kanji that you just can't seem to get into your brain. In such a case there are two ways to approach the issue. You could either use some sort of mnemonic that helps you to remember the meaning but may not necessarily reflect the real and historical reasons why the kanji carries that meaning, or you could research it's true history of origin, that is its etymology. For the latter task I have found the site http://www.kanjinetworks.com/ very helpful. You can type in a kanji and it will describe the origin and development of the character. Note, however, that the etymology of kanji can be complicated at times. Sometimes they're just simple pictographs or ideographs. But at other times they are compound characters composed of two or more elements which carry either semantic or phonetic information. Most compound characters contain one element that hints at the pronunciation and one at the semantics. The pronunciation relates of course to the original Chinese and may not be easily recognizable in the Japanese ON reading. So, your mileage may vary. Sometimes the etymology of a character is just too complicated to serve as a useful memory aid.

I hope I could be somewhat of help.
Best regards,
Dariat

[ziaddayner3087]

again thanks, may i ask one more question

while i'm studying for L3 in july , my main goal is to pass L2 in December and i'm a bit worry about it, should i study for 3 and a bit of 2 with it ? or should i just focus on 3 ?