Comments on: Help A Reader Out

By: Marshall

Marshall — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:21:53 +0000

Ok, I’m doing kanjis too. There were a couple weeks where i wasn’t adding new kanjis( something along the lines of i shouldn’t have downloaded a deck, making ur own cards is best), but i got really good at the ones i knew in that time, cuz i reviewed! But what i want to say, is that its really good to have lots of japanese text around. I can’t read yet, but what i do, is i look through my 朝日新聞 newspaper, look at all the titles, and through w/e kanji i knew discover what the article is about. You could even do this in the bathroom! Its like having your SRS right there, but its recognition, not production. You might also learn some new words, even if you don’t know how to pronounce it.

By: Nii

Nii — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:41:08 +0000

WTF?!? You blog post says Vietnamese has kanji? I’ve been missing out =P. I’m pretty sure it uses the french script now (used to have Chinese characters looong ago).

By: edsmaffs

edsmaffs — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:13:35 +0000

Agree with you on the subs… they always take over…

By: Links of interest - Nihongo Notes

Links of interest - Nihongo Notes — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:39:00 +0000

[…] Help A Reader Out Some excellent advice from Khatzumoto. […]

By: X3R0 ("X-star")

X3R0 ("X-star") — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:14:42 +0000

Sorry for the double post back there. That’s weird. I posted once and it didn’t show, then I posted again and it didn’t show, then I came back the next day and one showed and a couple of people replied, and then it appeared a few days later o_O

By: Nivaldo

Nivaldo — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:31:48 +0000

Oh! I’m so sorry, guys! Just making the page bigger and bigger with useless questions. I’ve just read the “Language is Like a Video Game” article and I’m perfectly satisfied with it as an answer to my question. So, sorry. Got to read read this site thoroughly. 🙂

By: Nivaldo

Nivaldo — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:02:27 +0000

Hey, X-star! You like Death Note too, that’s nice. I love the intellectual challenges between the characters, full of enormous chess(or shogi, etc) plans. In fact, I think it teaches the way one should think when facing a problem, like when L showed up to Kira. Kira held on till he was home to free his anger AND find a counter-attack plan.
By the way, this “Death note” topic(?) came right in time because I’m really stuck. I was following Khatzumoto’s advice about Native Japanese Words but I started feeling like “Hey I’m tired of seeing 君が好きです. I want to go back to my デスノート.”, so recently I got the Death Note v13: “How to read”(in image form which makes it difficult(?) to sentence-mine). But then again, in contrast to the love manga/anime, these words don’t seem to be used everyday. What should I do? Continue with the love manga/anime thing or switch to my loved デスノート?
As for the readings thing, I also found ここ for 地球 and other words. I didn’t know it was common. Well, sorry for the long text, my worst habit I think.

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:29:13 +0000

Hey X-star
Mucho congralutatos (< -- these aren't even words) on finishing RTK1! >I hope I don’t pick up a wrong reading for kanji that way.
Don’t worry, man. There’s no, like, “pure” “unspoiled”, “proper” version of Japanese that Death Note is somehow preventing you from acquiring. If it’s made by and for native speakers then it’s fine. We’d never tell someone to not watch Friends because “you’ll start talking all sarcastic, like Chandler”…

>is this common?
It’s part of the beauty and flexibility of the Japanese language. It’s an amazing discovery, I think — that you can disconnect the meaning and the reading of a word. People are sort of inventing new readings all the time, especially when it comes to their kids’ names..

I don’t know if these are very convincing answers, though. Anyone else care to pipe in?

By: X3R0 ("X-star")

X3R0 ("X-star") — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:24:14 +0000

I’ve finally finished RTK1, and am reading the Death Note manga ‘cos I loved the anime and know the plot, and I’m learning a lot from looking up interesting words I don’t know from it. I understand now why learning the kanji was so important, it makes it so much easier. Though, I’ve noticed from reading manga how strange Japanese writing is, sometimes one thing is written and a different, but related, thing is said. eg. 死神界　was written as　that but said as ここ from the furigana which is understandable because they were in the Shinigami world, but why couldn’t they just write “ここ”? Slightly confusing, I hope I don’t pick up a wrong reading that way.
Compounds are quite hard to remember too, should I memorize them with mnemonics or start trying to associate kanji more with Japanese than the Heisig meaning? One that particularily tickled me was 邪魔 which is made up of “wicked” and “witch”, so now I think “the wicked witch was じゃま/in the way”

By: X3R0 ("X-star")

X3R0 ("X-star") — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:27:52 +0000

I’ve finally finished RTK1 and I’m loving reaping the rewards. I’m reading the Death Note manga because I loved the anime and know the plot, and I’m learning quite a lot from it by looking up interesting words I don’t know. I can see now why learning the kanji is so important, it makes it so much easier. Though, Japanese writing is very strange, writing one thing and saying something else at times, according to the furigana. Like writing 死神界 but saying ここ, which is understandable because they are in the Shinigami World but why don’t they just write ここ? When people fluent in Japanese read something like that without the furigana, would they instantly read it as ここ because of the obvious context? Sorta confusing, I hope I don’t pick up a wrong reading for kanji that way.
It’s also confusing that some words can have more than one reading, like 人間界 was said as げかい　and then later as にんげんかい, is this common?

By: watashimo

watashimo — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:48:57 +0000

There’s a digital version of 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱? Where did you find that torrent? Any chance for an upload?

Just installed Winny hoping to find your version. Well, I just feel totally lost in there. Dowloaded a bunch of doujinshis, but nothing like a novel.

BTW, what’s　the 青空文庫 format? A special format that’s used by the aozora website? Just speculating, heard a few things about that site.

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:49:06 +0000

@quendidil
>BTW Khatz, would you recommend shadowing or repeating after an audio file?
Yeah, I do it all the time…I call it “imitating Cantonese Batman”, but, yeah, definitely.

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:46:49 +0000

One the Chinese/Japanese deal…It doesn’t matter what other people know at the beginning of the process (if you really want to go into it, we all start ignorant as babies). All that matters is what you know at the end. Quit talking about it and just learn what you need to learn….that goes for all of us.

…Sorry for doing the condescending dad thing… 🙂

By: Barron

Barron — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:38:27 +0000

Kanji without readings written on them are a pain for beginners. If you’ve done Heisig, they aren’t anymore!

I know wading through Dragonlance in translation, my life was made a hell of a lot easier by understanding meanings, regardless of whether or not furigana were present. Reading is FUN with Heisig. Promise.

By: Meshi

Meshi — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:28:03 +0000

[quote]Ok, I can’t completely answer this one from experience. Assume 250 hours active study time for Kanji (assuming you’re doing RevTK), about 400 hours of active study for your first 1000 sentences (utilizing starter sentences meant for building vocabulary, grammar and kanji readings) with additional 400 hours for every 1000 past that. So, after 1500 hours of active study you should be damn close. Estimate 2 hours per day active with the others hours in passive mode (listening, reading, watching TV, radio, movies, manga, etc.) that could equate to two years. These are rough numbers based off my current experience of only 300 sentences. I assume you’ll put in the work everyday in addition to enjoying Japanese things outside of studying.[/quote]

———–

Personally I haven’t had many hours open for active study, so I tried to be very time efficient. I realized that since we are dealing with large numbers of kanji and large numbers of words, a small difference in time spent on each one can have a huge impact on the overall time it takes.

RTK1 took me about 150 hours. I tried to make use of as many shared stories on RevTK as I could to save time (for over 90% of kanji I borrowed a story) , and by doing so I quickly got very good at making other people’s stories work for me. Now a little over one month after finishing the last kanji, I have 98% in the last stack and on average about 25 reviews to do per day, which take about 5 to 10 minutes to review daily, so count 2.5 to 5 hours ongoing review per month for RTK1.

I know some people spend a lot more time than that on RTK1. I didn’t do anything magic, just used Anki for reviews adding about 20 new kanji per day (spending about 2~3 minutes learning each one) and always doing every outstanding review every day. It was all about learning how to use the visual stories, and never letting failed kanji build up at all.

For sentences initially I picked things from grammar books. This is fairly quick because it doesn’t take much searching, as grammar books usually provide example sentences with translations to use with your SRS. As I got more happy with grammar I wanted more vocab, and I started going through the 2001.Kanji.Odyssey books. Again this is fairly quick since you have example sentences for each compound in the book with translation, and the examples are designed to be efficient in introducing related vocab. The amount of time spent setting up each SRS card is short while doing this. About 90 hours per 1000 cards.

For sentences that I have to search the required time is longer, so I try to do only a limited number of these per day for now, just plucking things that I hear repeatedly on TV or read somewhere and is interesting to me.

I know Khatzu recommends just doing whatever interests you. I do plenty of that, but I am also trying to use 2001.K.O for systemized vocab study because it seems to me to be time efficient. It’s a learning experiment on myself, if you like. A lot of the vocab I’ve learned through 2001.K.O later turns up in my Japanese input, so that’s very satisfying.

By: nacest

nacest — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:29:26 +0000

I bought it from Amazon.co.jp.
www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%B6%BC%E5%AE%AE%E3%83%8F%E3%83%AB%E3%83%92%E3%81%AE%E6%86%82%E9%AC%B1-%E8%A7%92%E5%B7%9D%E3%82%B9%E3%83%8B%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC%E6%96%87%E5%BA%AB-%E8%B0%B7%E5%B7%9D-%E6%B5%81/dp/4044292019/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204216072&sr=8-1

By: quendidil

quendidil — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:33:38 +0000

From Kinokuniya 🙂 you could try amazon.co.jp. I had a nice torrent of the first 8 novels in 青空文庫 format but it’s no longer seeded; there are scans of the pages in jpg format in rar files available on eMule.

By: watashimo

watashimo — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:51:18 +0000

Hi,
I love 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱. Where did you get the book?

By: quendidil

quendidil — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:52:30 +0000

I know 🙂 I find reading the books easier though, you can read at your own pace and using a dictionary is far more convenient with a book. It is slightly shortened in the anime though, so I didn’t copy it exactly from the book.

By: nacest

nacest — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:13:28 +0000

quendidil,
That’s the starting sentence not only of the anime, but also of the book. It’s given me a few headaches, and he speaks so fast! Especially the 「赤服じーさん」 part, you can’t even distinguish the words clearly…