Meaning of the kanji in Japanese

[MacFinch]

From what I gather from your posts, you’re using Remember the Kanji to learn Kanji?

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 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.

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

I think that’s great if it works for you but maybe you’re getting too caught up with kanji

I did notice it is starting to get pointless at this point 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.

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

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

[solaero]

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.

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。

[Asher]

BIGLOBE inc.

[MacFinch]

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.

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.

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. Should make me free from some unnecessary suffering xD

I will give kanji some more love later.

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

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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

[NickavGnaro]

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

[NickavGnaro]

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

[MacFinch]

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.

yeah, seems sensible. link makes no sense xD

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

[NickavGnaro]

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

[MacFinch]

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

[nekoyama]

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.

[Asher]

Dang, didn’t know that. Unlucky. It’s from a legit company, so you can buy the physical book… But a heck of a lot less convenient. I will research some ios apps and see if any are comparable

[nekoyama]

I think the app I mentioned is pretty good. I like that if you buy multiple dictionaries, you can search across all of them in one go, and it’s easy to look up any text in an entry in any dictionary that’s available too. It also has some basic capability for pattern matching, e.g. “#(猫犬)” in pattern matching mode will find words that consist of two kanji where the second kanji is 猫 or 犬. Handwriting recognition is OK too.

[Asher]

Nice! Sounds like a winner.

[solaero]

辞書by 物書堂 gets 3.1 stars in the Japanese store… you really like this app? I want to make sure before throwing 4千円 at it…

よろしくお願いします。

[nekoyama]

I do like it but keep in mind that I don’t live in Japan and even if I did I would have different requirements than a Japanese person…

I had a look at the JP app store and it seems many of the 1 star reviews are related to their transition from standalone apps to IAPs. It’s certainly true that family sharing doesn’t work anymore with the new IAP model. One person also had some issues with migration from the standalone apps I think.

Oddly the JP app store seems to list fewer in-app purchases than I see in the app on my phone… but it’s possible they just don’t show on the app store web site, since that’s all I can see.

[solaero]

細かい説明ありがとうございますよ。

[nekoyama]

I’ve previously mentioned the Monokakido Dictionaries app on iOS in this thread. They’ve just added the content of the third edition of the 明鏡国語辞典 as an IAP. I haven’t used it much yet but I think it might be interesting for learners. It has hints on word usage, meaning differences based on which kanji is used, groups of related words, antonyms, common mistakes, and it’s possible to enable furigana for the entire definition.