Learning the Kanji

Hello!

Another week has passed. We had a national holiday on Thursday that created a shorter working week. Like I have mentioned in previous updates, Japan has not mastered the art of using holidays to create long weekends like in America.

Related to that, despite having a strong public transport system, I have noticed that the trains here do not run late at night. In Chicago, for instance, we had at least one (maybe more) subway lines that would run all hours of the day plus several overnight busses.

Japan does not seem to do that. I have not looked into the reason why, but I could see that possibly the government has some reasons such as not wanting to encourage people to be out late at night. That said, there are several different ways that people cope with missing the last bus or train.

For example, I believe that the last bus to my neighborhood from the nearby train station stops running around 11pm on the weekdays and 10:30pm on the weekends (you would think on weekends the bus would run later but this is partially why I think maybe it has to do with encouraging people to go home early).

The last train to the train station is around midnight, so if you are stuck out at night, it is roughly a 40 minute uphill walk home.

But if you miss that last train home, you still have a few options. Some people choose to go into karaoke rooms or internet cafes. You can rent them for the overnight hours and they usually do not care if you sleep there. These types of rooms might not be the most comfortable place, but it is an option.

Capsule hotels, which I have written about before, are another option - usually they are pretty cheap. But, the most common option I hear people doing is the karaoke route until the trains start around 6am.

I spoke about language learning last week and wanted to follow up on kanji.

Kanji are the Chinese characters that show up in written language. Last week, I shared the sentence 私は学生です - the kanji characters are in red. Also, as I wrote last week, an educated Japanese adult knows about 2000 of these characters.

Some are fairly easy to learn. For example - 木 means "tree." If you look at 木, it kind of looks like a tree. And the kanji for forest is 森.

Can you see why? If you look closely at 森, the smaller symbols are the 木 (tree) symbol. So in the 森, it is a collection of trees, aka a forest.

Not all kanji are this easy, though. The one technique that I have started to practice recently is breaking down a kanji into parts and associating a visualization with the parts.

For instance, the kanji 間. If you look closely, you can break this kanji down into two parts. 日 (the bottom part), which is the Japanese kanji for sun. The other part is 門, which is the Japanese kanji for gate.

間 means interval of time. So, to learn this kanji, the approach I have learned is to break the kanji down into its parts - sun (日) and gate (門) and visualize in my mind a sun passing through a gate on a regular interval.

So, I am storing information related to this kanji in several parts (the individual kanji that make it up plus a visualization). This helps the memory of this kanji become more "sticky" in one's mind by associating it with a visual and a few different parts. It's kind of like memorizing 9 digits is easier if you break it down into 3 3 digit numbers - 343218132 is 343 and 181 and 132.

Buuut, you are not done yet. You now know what this kanji (間) means, but you do not know how to pronounce it in Japanese. And, usually, with kanji, there are several different ways to pronounce it.

The Japanese imported kanji characters from China long ago, so Japanese kanji will have a Chinese pronunciation (refered to as the "onyomi" reading) and it will have the Japanese pronunciation (referred to as the "kunyomi").

So, to make matters worse, for one kanji, you need to know the kanji's meaning (remember, this one means interval, or period of time), its Chinese reading (for this one, it's "kan", like Genghis Khan) and its Japanese reading (it has two Japanese readings - "ida" like the first part of Idaho and "mo" like the English name "Moe").

Why do you need to know the Chinese reading? Well, if this kanji appears in a sentence next to another kanji, referred to as a "compound" kanji, or in a person's name - you will usually use the Chinese reading. However, if the kanji appears by itself in a sentence without other kanji around it, it'll usually use the Japanese reading.

For kanji study, I use the "Wanikani" app, which is a commonly used kanji study app. For the meaning, the app recommends breaking down the kanji liked I mentioned above and visualizing the sun moving through a gate on a regular interval.

To remember the Chinese reading associated with it - the app recommends thinking of Ghenghis Khan. I personally do not think this makes much sense. However, "kan" as it refers to time is frequently used in Japanese. So, for me, it is not hard to remember that the period of time or interval kanji is pronouced as "kan."

To help remember the "Aida" (pronounced like the Ida part of "Idaho") the app recommends thinking that time moves more slowly in Idaho (not really, of course, just for the purposes of remembering). Thus, the kunyomi reading is "aida."

So, this was all a long way of saying - recently, I have bought into breaking down the kanji and using visualization techniques to remember the various readings.

After about a year of studying kanji, I have learned about 230 characters. I would say this is pretty slow for almost a year's worth of studying - but it was off and on at times and I only recently started investing more into the break down and visualization methods.

The other key aspect that I have found useful for memorization are flash cards combined with spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is the idea that you regularly review something that you have learned. And doing it repeatedly over time while allowing for some time intervals in between is effective.

Forgetting and remembering through review are the key aspects of learning the material.

But not all review is created equal - simply re-reading something you have learned is not good enough. It seems that you need to test yourself, like through what a flashcard system does, to be most effective.

The information that you have learned is in your mind - what you have to practice and strengthen is the retrieval process.

I am still learning about all of this, but two books that I would recommend about learning and memorization techniques are Make it Stick and Moonwalking with Einstein.

If you have any books on memory techniques that you have enjoyed, please let me know.

Until next time,

​