Learning kanji

Could we be learning Japanese the wrong way? I am looking at a book on writing Japanese kanji characters which fascinates me like you would think this concept would make headline news but it’s just languages and nobody cares about those after all. According to the author of Remembering the Kanji, and I am now just reading the introduction, almost everyone who is taught Japanese, unless they figure it out in their own and find a teacher who did that too, I guess, is taught by introducing kanji, the Japanese character system, teaching the reading and writing and remembering of these characters at the same time, but this may be by far the less efficient way to do it if you want to really learn Japanese.

This book is dedicated to helping you remember and write Japanese characters in a literate way quickly and I am glad I discovered this because it makes such intuitive sense that, though perhaps more boring depending on how you take to learning lots of kanji before even learning anything at all about how to read Japanese or do anything else with the language, it is so much more efficient to learn the most efficient to take some time to learn the kanji first and I am in no real rush with Japanese speaking and comprehension and reading so why not just learn all the kanji first? For me anyway that will make enjoying Japanese so much easier than if I have to do visual stuff in my head and practice memorizing shapes which is a complex task at the same time I am performing other complex tasks like reading through a piece of enchanting  Japanese writing.

Good thing I didn’t take Japanese classes before finding this book, maybe, because I would have taken forever to learn Japanese that way. So what if your first introduction to Japanese was just learning the kanji in an order to help you learn the kanji themselves, as a completely separate study than reading and doing everything else in Japanese. So maybe the first course in Japanese should be just learning characters in the best way so you can later memorize them more easily, not according to any other logic except that of learning in an order that will help you most easily learn all the kanji. Not in the order they are typically introduced at different stages of Japanese education, but in an order that helps you actually learn all the essential kanji in the most efficient way. The author even claims that if you studied kanji full time you could learn the thousands of essential kanji for basic literacy in six weeks. But that will never happen if you are trying to learn everything else about the language at the same time, learning kanji each time you come across a word in a Japanese story. I realised I would never make it that way, I cannot devote myself to learning shapes at the same time I am trying to learn Japanese as a language that rewuires my other mental capacities to appreciate and think about and then you have to worry about forgetting these shapes at the same time you are trying to understand Japanese as a language.

Hmmm, English text looks weird and cool when I think about Japanese text at the same time. We usually see the words in terms of letters but I am suddenly seeing each English word as like a unique kanji made up of basic building blocks, a collection of strokes that can be used to make the words, that we call letters or the Roman alphabet. It would probably be hard for anyone to learn words by looking at the shapes without understanding that these really strange complex shapes that unlike in Japanese seem to have in shape no logical connection by meaning to any other words. English could be seen as just a whole bunch of totally random and sometimes reeeally long kanji but usually we are not learning the concept of letters and the sounds they make and how they make up words and how you can read those words in all sorts of different sentences at the same time we are learning the entire logic of another language, how to speak and understand it and communicate and everything. I am glad that I am learning this way even if it means I won’t get to the fun stuff for a while, and learning the kanji isn’t exactly an exciting task for me, but if I get that out of the way by using a method and order that is much more efficient for learning all the kanji if your goal is to isolate the task and just learn the kanji you need to start making much more rapid sense of the rest of your encounters with Japanese once you start doing that. Learning characters is so different from what I am doing when I practice Spanish or German that it’s actually probably good to learn the kanji first for other reasons such as the fact that I can so much more easily learn three languages at a time this way without confusing them because I am at very different levels in each of them and while I focus on getting better in Spanish and German I am doing totally different tasks in Japanese.