Learning Kanji

[harryhogue]

Konnichiwa, minna-san,

I am still on the newbie series of JapanesePod101.com lessons, but I have the funniest feeling that the true key to unlocking Japanese ability, aside from learning particles, is through learning kanji. I almost feel like I should take the time to memorize several kanji before doing anything else. I am curious to hear from others who have learned kanji -- did you learn the kanji specific to the lessons on JapanesePod, did you learn the top one or two hundred kanji to get started, etc? If you learned a top list of kanji, where is such a list found? I know the common thought is that around two thousand kanji are necessary in order to be able to read a newspaper (i.e. to be considered literate).

Since I am visually impaired, I read the kanji through synthesized speech, so I receive only the phonetic representation (i.e. 'i' for 'sun," etc) rather than the visual representation. I suppose I may have one advantage in that I need not concern myself with the writing of the kanji, as the tenji (Japanese Braille system) is purely phonetic and based upon hiragana). What I am looking for is the ability to recognize kanji so that when I come across a phrase if I need to read it character by character (as there are no spaces in Japanese, this is often the only way), I will be able to recognize the individual kanji which make up words (suc as "kampai, "kyou, "suiyoubi," etc).

Arigatou gozaimasu.

[mieth]

I personally think that you would be putting yourself at a disadvantage by concentrating your efforts on learning kanji before anything else. I would recommend just going through the lessons and getting up your vocabulary and grammar. But everyone has to find out what works best for them on their own. So enjoy that discovery for your self. Enjoy!

[harryhogue]

コンイチワ、ありがとうございます。
に本後は勉強するそれからまたありがとう。

[brad12]

hi you can try general japanese sentences and also some simple japanese lessons.

learn japanese free | hiragana chart

[seifip]

It may not be the most important part of the language (which, I believe, is different from person to person, depending on what they enjoy and use the most), but I completely agree that kanji are crucial to learning of the Japanese language, and wrote about it at Should I learn kanji?

BTW, I've never met any visually impaired Japanese learners. I wonder what are the specific difficulties and/or advantages, and what are the best Japanese learning methods for visually impaired... I'll certainly do some research about the Japanese braille system... Could be a great topic for my next blog post

[geebods]

I hope you don't mind me asking out of curiosity, but when you are using a screen reader, how do you know which kanji to select when you are writing? There are many homonyms in Japanese so is there a distinct way you can differentiate between them? For example, 期待 and 気体 are both read きたい but written with different kanji and have different meanings. I'm really curious as to how this is handled by screen readers, particularly as I understand that Japanese braille is basically based on the same phonetic set as the kana (please, correct me if I'm wrong).

[Javizy]

If it's anything like voice recognition software, it probably takes the surrounding words of the utterance into account, much like the English version distinguishes between there/their/they're, you're/your etc. I'm sure the selections are based on some extremely complicated grammar algorithm or something, and they can't be accurate 100% of the time. Japanese has an additional problem though, in that even if it correctly transcribes what you say, e.g. 程 for ほど, you might not want it in kanji, so it can take more corrections to stylise the text exactly how you want. I only have limited experience using a Japanese one, but my English one learns from my corrections and also has a feature to analyse text I've written so it can save vocabulary and recognise my writing style more accurately. I'm hoping to get a copy of AmiVoice this year so I can type more Japanese.