Meaning of the kanji in Japanese

It may be it! Thank you. I will try to learn to use it, and will see how it works for me. If you got any suggestion regarding how to go about learning to use it (np. Japanese linguistic terms necessary to not misunderstand anything or something like that) then it would be great.

Thanks a lot :hugs:

I don’t teach Japanese, just English. The website that @MZa mentioned looks good to me though. I’d go with that. I have a kanji dictionary that I use, but it is not website haha.

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I do remember, but you are in that environment so for sure you have much knowledge hidden to us mere mortals : P

Sorry, for making it past tense. I misremember it :sweat_smile:

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I am trying to wrap my head around this and how to apply it without knowing those kanji in advance (assuming I would be smart enough to figure out there is a link)? If there are resources to help with that they would be much needed :hugs:


I will start with changing some of kanji I know the best to try to figure out how to go about it. It will probably take month or two before I will be able to add new kanji this way, but it look like huuuge level up, which is great.

One thing is that I don’t see indicator of how common readings are, but that least of my concerns. Maybe I will figure it out when I will get use to that website. It is above my level but it is a good thing I believe.

Once again thanks for help. You can feel free to go around the main subject and give your opinions on related matter. Maybe it will be helpful to me or other people with similar problem in the future. :hugs:

辞書の名前を教えていただきますか?

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Can you please share the name of your dictionary that shows this (I’ve been intuitively figuring these out, but a dictionary approach world be nice.)

よろしくお願いします。

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One more follow up question about kanji learning:

Having in my goals in mind (I want to read asap, and will never have to write without assistance of mobile or computer) and stage I am at (about N4 + I have got 900 kanji as “mature” and another few hundred on the way, so I am already accustom to how kanji works from “hand writing perspective” - radicals and so on) would it be reasonable to start cutting some corners now to get more time for reading?

I mean flipping methodology and starting testing if recognise kanji not if I can write them from theirs meaning. So front card would be kanji itself and I would have to get at least one meaning right, one reading and one sample word with it.

That would make it like 10 time faster.

I don’t know if it is smart, or lazy xD That’s why I bother you with that question.

Edit:
I got kanji like 婚, that I am quite sure I would always recognise but my brain struggle find it when ask to write it. I written it down easily over 100-200 times already… It is start to feel more and more useless…

Woah, that’s so cool! I never realized that about かく. Did you learn that from the kanji dictionary you were talking about? I would love to learn about stuff like that

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I actually did the opposite when learning kanji. My cards would show the kanji from which I would test if I knew a general meaning, and maybe a couple of vocab it was used in.

I am only now slowly going through my kanji deck ‘flipped’. Front side is the meaning and a few vocab in hiragana from which I need to at least be able to write the specific kanji I was testing. Only doing about 3 new ones a day.

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Unfortunately I had to deduce that myself, but reading the descriptions in Japanese certainly helps to arrive at those more literal meanings. 新明解国語辞典 is probably the best vocab/kanji dictionary. You can get it as an app but it is about $10. Defs worth it imo

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I wonder if it might be more helpful for you to take a vocabulary based approach to kanji learning rather than learning kanji and their multiple meanings and readings all at once.

That way you can see how the “meanings” and the “readings” fit in with each other in actual words. Because even though kanji have meanings they’re useless outside of vocabulary.

From what I gather from your posts, you’re using Remember the Kanji to learn Kanji? I think that’s great if it works for you but maybe you’re getting too caught up with kanji in isolation.

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I modified it beyond recognition though. I try to do pretty much what you said plus:

  1. I break down kanji to theirs radicals to make them easier to remember.
  2. I did some work upfront to make it easier later. When I have extra time I add more kanji from 5100 novels frequency list. I stopped at position 757 which give 83% percent coverage and I know quite a lot after that (I would guess about 90%+ coverage) but there are quite rare one in my deck as well like 髭 (position about 1800) and 苺 (quite far away after 3000) since it was in the text, or other that are just radicals not much used if at all as kanji (I don’t add to deck if they are never in Kanji form though).
  3. I do my best to not disassociate them from readings and vocab. On this part Heisig misunderstood basic neurology: you want you knowledge to interact in messy way. That’s how brain works.

I did try to make “readings” deck but it was huge waste of time. I prefer learn reading from vocab. Fits better to that “knowledge soup” I am cooking in my head.

That’s why I was worried if that may be lazy life hack xD. But sometimes being lazy is smart :sweat_smile:

I did notice it is starting to get pointless at this point :joy: But there was good reason for giving Kanji some special love:

I am ready to defend claim that Japanese - if you ignore cultural difference - is easier than English because of Kanji. Kanji makes it easier to remember and read. It would be great if there was only one reading per kanji but it is still easier to remember than random string of letters. And my memory is bad, so Kanji is huge help. And is far more natural to our brains. That’s why we invented it first, and thats why Chinese and Japanese people read a lot faster and people “speed reading” (no pronunciation in your head, just ideas) are not as uncommon thing there as far as I know.

That basically only reason why I have separated deck for Kanji. They are tools to help me with vocab. It is important for me tool. Better know it well then. :hugs:

Thank you for pointing this out. That would be quite a huge mistake on my part if we would disagree much on this aspect of learning Kanji so better to make it clear :hugs:

Edit: I can speak all day about my love to kanji xD

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ごめん、アップル🍎のアップスターで少ないアップはこの名前を使っています。あシャーさんの辞書会社の名前を教えて頂きますか。頼んですみませんね。

Tap for English

Sorry to ask, but there are various dictionaries in the Apple App Store that use this title — would you mind terribly sharing the company who make the dictionary you recommend?

よろしくお願いします。

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BIGLOBE inc.

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I am here just to give some extra thanks for opinions like those two (and other as well obviously) since just 2 day ago I have noticed the obvious and decided to go with this approach for a few weeks. :hugs: Should make me free from some unnecessary suffering xD

I will give kanji some more love later. :hugs:

Thank you a lot. Your (I mean all of you) input is like 100 time more important than you probably are ready to believe. Food for thoughts indeed :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:


In case anybody wonder.

My new vocab deck looks like this after all help I have got from people of this community:

Now I only need Yomichan j-j dictionary that I can understand, or improve my Japanese so it will be not a problem with normal definitions, and it will be better than I ever imagine it to be :hugs::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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You can already add the Sanseido dictionary from the link I sent you earlier. Even if you don’t understand, you can include it automatically and refer to it at will. As you get higher and higher in vocabulary, the definitions tend to get simpler and you tend to know more of the words, so the utility of J-J dictionaries increases

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By the way, one thing I sometimes did when I used yomichan on BunPro sentences, is I’d go to the grammar point itself and grab the sentence from there. That way, the URL would actually take me to the place where I might be able to see an English translation if I felt it was necessary

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yeah, seems sensible. link makes no sense xD

Thank you a lot for your help. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: I was not sure if I can include you in public in my thanks :sweat_smile:

Sure, you can xD
You just need to go to the youtube video, look at description, go to the link in there with the “YomiChan dictionaries” download, and download it and inside it you should find the sanseido dictionary. You can import that into yomichan and enable search

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Well…It was done in private so it is not up to me to make it public, and asking for permission would be weird as hell… xD

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I didn’t see this earlier but I think BIGLOBE only makes dictionary apps for Android. At least I don’t see any on my iPhone…

On iOS the “Dictionaries” app by 物書堂 has the 新明解 and various other dictionaries as IAPs. They used to sell them standalone and some of those old apps are still available too in case you were wondering about those.

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