What is the one useful study/learning technique you use that you're pretty sure most learners don't use?

Japanese
#21

I personally don’t even consider writing very helpful, but I find it to be the most peaceful/relaxing Japanese-related activity, so I oftentimes just open up a manga or song lyrics and, sentence by sentence, translate and rewrite into my notebook. Maybe it helps with learning, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s definitely the least mentally devastating (compared to failing tons of SRS reviews every hour).

Ironically, my kanji writing knowledge is far ahead of my kanji reading/meaning knowledge, let alone vocabulary knowledge. Over the past year, I have written approximately 20x more Japanese by hand than all other languages combined. My handwriting is terrible, but it’s kind of fun. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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#22

Thats… strange. You can write kanji you cant read and dont know the meaning for?

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#23

I’m in a similar boat and I can say this is the case.

Once you’ve written about a 1000 unique kanji you just get a feel for how to write stuff.

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#24

Pretty much this. I am convinced that writing sentences is a huge help. It surely helped me in English. Looking up words in a dictionary as you write, thinking about what kind of expression you would use to say this in that way, etc. All of this help you build the foundation necessary for retrieving from your memory which is a necessary step for fluency.

Buuuut… And it’s a big but, nobody will correct you, you can reply on twitter or on a youtube comment in Japanese and end your message with “sorry for my poor Japanese”, but nobody’s going to correct you and your Japanese will stay poor. :confused:

I want to start using hellotalk for that, but I can’t find time for that. I’m already drowning on my other exercices from bunpro to anki to immersion to everything else… My biggest enemy is time-management right now.

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#25

I am glad the sentiment seems to be fairly mutual for the usefullness of writing. I think it has helped me more than anything recognize kanji instantly. I am so used to writing the strokes now that if I see the first few lines of a kanji I have written before, usually the meaning will pop into my head straight away.

This is doubly helpful for higher level reading where a lot of the kanji look quite similar. I really don’t understand how anyone could think it doesn’t work. An artist learns to draw the human body by drawing each part countless times, seeing what looks right, seeing what doesn’t, learning to get a feel for what goes where. Kanji is very much the same (for me at least).

Once you get a feel for all the shapes, they aren’t just blobs of blurryness floating around in your brain anymore, they become reproducible individual pieces of information that each have their own special place in your memory, in the same way an artist would never accidentally draw a foot instead of a hand despite them both having 5 digits.

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#26

Being an amatuer artist myself, I can’t believe I never made that connotation. Kanji are easier once you break them down, and realize that more complicated Kanji are mostly just combinations of radicals and Kanji with less strokes. In the same way a dreaded foot or hand can be a pain for artists, breaking it down into shapes makes the process much easier.

I still write quite a bit in my studies, and I feel that it has helped me. At the same time I understand why people feel that wouldn’t benefit from it. I fell into this camp once, considering everything we seem to read these days is digital or printed, and we tend to type and text quite a bit…like I am now. But I recall one time that a Japanese girl asked me to write 麺, because she couldn’t remember how to write it. That when I realized that writing is important.

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#27

Because i have a very bad memory, when I want to memorize something new I almost always try and make connections with other things I already know, have lived, watched, feeled and so on.

For instance, in order to remember the kanji 猛
in wanikani with radicals animals, child and plate, I visualize

Spoiler

the beginning of Promised neverland where we see the children in plates

I also made an anki deck with kanji I find similar, side by side to make connections and comparison . In a similar way out of Bunpro I make sessions to study bunch of similar grammar points alogether. To remember the pronunciation きょう i don’t only think to 京都 as done in wanikani mnemonics but visualize and relive my absolutely memorable sojourn in this city. And so on and so forth.

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#28

Reset an entire N-level – I recently reset all of N2 to get more practice, which has been really useful to get extra practice on many rare grammar points, but also…

Reset one grammar point – I also realized that, instead of taking a massive hit on XP for a whole level, I can reset individual grammar points and get more practice just where I need it. I’ve started doing this for grammar that somehow has reached level 10+ but is still fuzzy in my brain. :slight_smile:

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#29

Hol’up…

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#30

Mnemonics like what you mentioned are definintely helpful (especially for people that are inclined that way). I kinda wish there was a book that taught new kanji, while also mentioning whether if there is another kanji that looks similar to it.

For the particular kanji that you mentioned, 猛, I never learned a mnemonic for that, I just drew it maybe 50 times and I have never forgotten it, or its reading (もう）. The reason I think this is important, is that if no other kanji looks like it, drawing it becomes even more useful. You will remember it sooooo fast, because you don’t have to make sure you aren’t mistaking it for another.

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#31

One of the reasons that you don’t find writing that helpful is because your writing is far ahead of your reading/meaning knowledge. Which tells me that you aren’t actually writing, so much as doodling the shapes. One of the best things you can do while you are writing kanji, is say the meaning AND the reading/readings out loud, every single time. For example

(write) 奪 (say) だつ、うばう、rob.
(write) 奪 (say) だつ、うばう、rob.
(write) 奪 (say) だつ、うばう、rob.
(write) 奪 (say) だつ、うばう、rob.

If you do this while you are writing, there is no way that you will ever forget it. I have never, ever forgotten the meaning of something, before I forgot how to draw it. As you write it, you are carving all of those mental associations of sound and meaning into your head as you write it and say it. The hardest part to remember is how to draw it without a visual aid, by far. The readings and meaning are the easy part.

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#32

There is one, Alex Adler’s dictionary. It introduces kanji that looks alike together, and there’s a listing of kanji grouped by sound components or semantic components. Beware that although he advertised “real etymology”, it is actually made up mnemonic a lot of the time.

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#33

Thanks for mentioning it! Yeah mistaking etymology as mnemonics is a bit silly, but so long as it is mentioning similar shapes and sounds, it is probably quite useful even without the mnemonics.

#34

Yeah, sketchy advertisement aside, it’s super useful. In your example, it would introduce these components that might be easily mistaken together like this:

Capture
Capture843×1020 77.8 KB

And a summary at the end like this:

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And you can look up which kanji has the same sound like this:

3

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#35

Ohhhhh I see. That’s really unfortunate actually. To be honest the the writer of this book probably did not have a very strong understanding of kanji, otherwise he probably wouldnt have compiled it like that.

The reason I say this is that the position of a radical plays a vital role in the meaning the kanji has, and also is probably the biggest thing that trips people up in terms of reading the wrong thing accidentally. For example. 奪、奮、These share exactly the same shape and pattern (crown component), and are something people are likely to mistake. Yet for some reason he didn’t even mention the second one (despite it being the most similar!).

Putting the same component on the left, or the right, or even the bottom changes the meaning quite a bit, as well as not being as important in regard to accidentally mistaking similar ones.

Edit - I do like that it says which kanji have the same sound though… Although the same sound in kunyomi is far more important than onyomi. So hopefully it does both.

2nd edit - Sorry, I didn’t make this very clear. Think of it this way. He shows the structure, and that is great. He also shows kanji that have that shape, which is great. (He also shows a lot of others that don’t have that shape at all which is a bit strange). But the most important thing that he is missing is the kanji that actually share the same radical in the same position. This is extremely important, as it plays a role in the nuance and meaning, and recognition of the kanji.

For example imagine if someone was teaching English, and they were teaching un-. Unprofessional, uneducated, undivided, uncool. (Great, meaning stays the same)
Then suddenly they start saying fun, bun, lung, sung. (still has un in the words, meaning is wildly different however). It’s a bit like this.

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#36

Yeah that has to an oversight. These should be introduced together.

I like that approach though. Learning the meaning is far more important. If the kanji’s too similar, usually it’s used in widely different contexts that it ended up being insignificant from a consumption and computer typing standpoint which is what matters to 99.99% of Japanese speakers. There was a research that sneaked in typo kanji to native speakers and nobody could realize what was wrong with the text.

There’re both.

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#37

The radical is not the primary prerequisite for fluency. We do not process parts of the kanji subsequently. We process the whole thing as a comprehensive unit. If we process unspeakable as un-speak-able, it is possible to do that but it is far too inefficient and slow to process information that way.
If we talk which part of the kanji is important, native speakers encode kanji by the sound component, not by the radical which is in most cases the meaning component. Sure, it is arguable that it’s not necessary for JSLs to encode that information the same way as native speakers and it’s virtually impossible to conduct an experiment to prove using what as a primary encoder or the base of the kanji memory schema is more efficient. However, I would argue that making the sound component the primary base of kanji memory is far more conductive to speaking and listening.

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#38

For sure, I am happy to agree that sound is by far the most important component for a native speaker. I would say that it is far more kun-yomi than on-yomi though. In terms of having a relation to the meaning.

#39

i absolutely cant live without zkanji - solely for its popup dictionary.
http://zkanji.sourceforge.net/

i have put alt+a as a hotkey and whenever i want to look something up lighting speed quickly i use it. its one of the view things that prevents me from switching completely to mac systems haha.
also use the old version, the new beta is too clunky in my opinion.

#40

As part of my listening practice, when I have time, I’ll open up a Notepad file and type up everything I hear. It’s shown me that, even if I don’t know what a word means just from hearing it (yet), I at least recognize the sounds and I’ve got a better intuition for when individual phrases begin and end.

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