Re: Help With Learning Kanji


Kevin Wayne Williams wrote:
If your goal is to be able to sight read Japanese text at speed with
correct pronunciation, run away from all meaning-based systems as
quickly as you can. Your studies should always be based on associating
kanji and kanji compounds with Japanese words. If you need to associate
the Japanese words with English words at some other step, fine, most
people studying a second language do that, but don't associate the kanji
or kanji compounds with English.

KWW

Just for the record, you can basically consider me starting fresh in
terms of kanji. I only know a handfull right now, based off of those
used in the examples of the grammar lessons I took. I could recongnize
maybe 15 or so off hand, and could only write the extremely simple ones
from memory (kiyou, nani, miru, hito ect.). I know all the kana,
though.

Do you think it would be more effective to learn to sight read first,
then associate meaning to the spoken word second? Assuming I'll be
working all the angles simultaneously (speaking/listening, reading,
writing), It'd make sense to also assume that as I learn to pronounce a
kanji word for the purpose of reading, I'll immediately or eventually
associate the spoken word with it's meaning through the parallel
speaking/listening training.

On the other hand, I'd imagine that most people associate the meanings
first, so they can decipher text more readily. In that case, you'd be
translating the text to english while reading. You could then speak the
meaning, but that wouldn't be the same as actually reading it verbatim,
would it?

From here it seems like it would be valuable to learn to sight read,
sense this would essentially lead to "thinking" in japanese with the
meaning becoming inherent. Or maybe I'm missing the mark, and that

.

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