I'm glad I'm picking up this material again. Around June of '07 I gave up on this place and came back at the start of this year due to my new ability to read kana. Now it's at a fast pace! Weeeeee!
For the past month, I've been focusing a lot of my time on kanji. I don't know if it's because these characters are simply necessary in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the language or because the lesson notes use more of it as time goes on and I sometimes get stuck on certain dialogs outside of the topic dialog(I'm around 081_B45). The problem is, I'm not using a very solid foundation for learning these things and most of what I'm attempting to learn gets forgotten rather quickly.
I realize that the best method is probably doing the same that Grade 1 students are doing and writing a small set of kanji as many times as possible to gain the proper stroke order and associate the characters with their respective meanings and audible forms. This is where I first see a problem and I'm hoping a native(
READ: someone that had a complete
childhood while living in Japan!) reader can help me understand how these characters were taught to them in schools. This is probably the antithesis to JP101's creation of adult-learning so I'm going to try my best at getting straight to the point now.
My focus here is on how the meanings of the characters are taught as they are introduced. Going by audible definition of how a character is introduced and how two or more characters are conjugated together to form a complete idea can be rather bothersome since several words have exactly the same structure when written in kana. Furthermore, how are the Imported & Japanese readings of each character partitioned into these two groups while the readings are introduced to be one idea?
In case I just lost you there, for me it's like trying to find synonyms for a word and associating them from there. A good example may be instances of: big, large and massive. If I attempt to find a meaningful term in Japanese, I'll usually find 大 as the first result. The meaning is very broad. It not only traverses meanings of size and shape but of ability and age. 「おおきい」 is probably the common way of speaking about this character as it is. However, it has more forms to write with kana and it's usually these later two that I first think of when I see this character. I never see it alone in a rabid sea of kana.
Moving forward, 「たい」 and 「だい」 are the forms I see most commonly for this kanji and are usually the starting forms to pronounce whatever idea is presented with whatever kanji immediately proceed it. On an amazing note, I recently noticed that if something starts with a character's on-yomi, the rest of the characters connected to it usually stay that way. If it starts with kun-yomi, it goes that direction. This means that it's absolutely necessary to memorize not just the meanings of the kanji being studied but all
readings associated with these characters.
Via Heisig's approach, I currently know a little more than 100 characters by their loose English meaning. I know about half of these by their complete Japanese definition/wording. However, half of these characters are not even seen by me frequently(meaning weekly). For that reason, I feel like I'm studying something that isn't important because I see it once and then see it a week later and maybe recognize it if I had put enough effort into studying the character when it was first introduced.
Right now I'm convinced I'll only remember a character if I associate it with readings in kana. Associating one with two or more characters insures this. To me there's no point in memorizing a character if I subconciously assume I'll never see this pattern again. To prevent this from happening, I write the character. Many times. Still, the learning process just screws itself worse if I can't find a way to conjugate the character if it's alone.
This word was first introduced in 008_S2. It's something that has been bothering me for a while now:
大丈夫
I see these characters together and instantly conjugate it to 「だいじようぶ」.
Big
Stature
Husband
Together these characters conjugate into allright/OK. I only needed to glance at these characters once to take in the structure of the kanji and the order. Note: I had no idea what on/kun readings were at that time. I now realize that the characters don't make a perfect reading since the last one is expected to be read as ふ insted of ぶ due to the character's reading. One more thing to add to memory I suppose. =/
Anyway this forces a question: Why is this particular set so easy to remember? I see it written that way once a month, so it's nothing special. I hear it once a week so that might be a reinforcement. Still, the issue is the writing, not the word's audio. They're very clear and simple characters so that may have something to do with it. Or is it because of the way they were introduced? Understanding the meanings of each character and the order they're given sort of make sense but is that really it? I'm betting that if the lesson PDFs went into further detail about a kanji's on-yomi/kun-yomi, I might not be asking this question.
So studying a group of kanji by meanings, readings and combination for enhanced learning...Is this idea valid or a trainwreck in slow-motion?
Oh yeah almost forgot, last week I was talking to an exchange student that is here to study US English. She speaks perfect English and doesn't seem overwhelmed. A friend of hers was introducing slang with the use of sticky notes. Not sure if she may be on to something with that.
..............