Crazy Kanji Games

Good news, I learned the meanings of about 100 kanji yesterday.  I found this crazy RPG.  You basically fight enemies (blobs of slime!?) who attack with kanji, then you attack with english.  Inexplicably, the slime carries cash!  So when you win you can buy stuff.  It's a standard 'rescue the princess' story, and for the full version you pay $20, but I've been doing fairly well so far, free.  You get through 2000 kanji and the other kana in the full version.  Only trouble is I can't use the '-key, so I keep getting stuck.  It's called slime forest - the premise is crazy, but I've been learning fast! lrnj.com.

There is an equally mad free game featuring Knuckles, of Sega fame (unendorsed).  The battles are less engaging, but I'm told the gameplay is better.  I still think the book I mentioned before was best for Hiragana, I'm going to be getting the Katakana one too, plus the Kanji one.

One useful feature of this game is that you can customise the word/kanji lists.  I'm planning to import the Edexcel Japanese Kanji list later.
Find the game here.

I've made a set of Katakana flashcards too (to go with the Hiragana set we've already made).

If I can learn the words now I think I might do ok.

Story so far

Last night was Lesson 7.  We did 'i' and 'na' adjectives (Japanese adjectives are odd - they conjugate just like verbs, though Japanese verbs are odd too).

We recapped too - it became apparrent that there's a lot I don't know.  On the few excercises we did I took 2-3 times longer than some.  Listening I couldn't do - I'm told that will come naturally (?!)

Here's what we've covered:
-Greetings (need to learn these);
-The forms of 'desu' endings;
-Telling the time (fairly good at this now);
-'Tai' verb form - 'I want to do ...';
-Particles (I need to learn some sentence structures with these in);
-'Masu' form, verbal tenses;
-Saying where something is.

I've also got four pages of words still to learn.

Hiragana

Where am I going? I obviously want the GSCE, but practically I want to be able to make a passable effort in Japanese - reading a magazine or watching TV would be cool too.

I began with Hiragana, last week. I used this book (aimed at kids I think!) called "Let's Learn Hiragana", which takes you through how to write, and then tests you with lists of words to translate (romaji - hiragana). Writing is a great way to learn, 'cause you learn writing and recognition at the same time. Writing cemented the memory in my mind. I took about 1.5 days total, so it's not bad - just need to keep using it.


Let me know if you use it, or how you're going about it.

J



What I have learned so far is a handful of words, and I half know a few sentence structures, plus some verb endings. When I need to create a sentence in Japanese, I have to look up the structure and look up each of the words, and then plug the pieces together. It's not getting me anywhere. My teacher says if you struggle on both, you fail, if you struggle on one, you have a chance... Without vocabulary I'm going no-where.

J

Immersion

Learning a new language isn't easy. New alphabets don't help. Greek and Russian is daunting, but at least the alphabets have a lot of similarities to ours... Japanese is completely new.

For those who don't know, Japanese has 2 alphabets and thousands of kanji characters (chinese imports over the last few millenia...). Each alphabet has 46 (?) unique characters, plus quite a few modified ones. In order to read a newspaper, you will need to know both alphabets, and around 2000 kanji.

Kanji presents a more serious challenge though. Each character has several things needing to be learned:
-its shape
-how it's written
-how many strokes it has (so you can look it up in a dictionary?)
-what it means
-what its readings are (some have loads)
  -On'yomi (chinese readings) there may be variants from different chinese periods!
  -Kun'yomi (native Japanese): Japanese words were written with Chinese characters...

So with all these you need to identify the shape by its sound, and vice versa, and with the kanji you need to know the meaning too.

For a Japanese school kid, this would be spread over 9 years, I've got 9 months, and they have the advantage of speaking Japanese!

I think if I take the approach of dipping in and out, it will take me forever to learn, so I'm going for immersion. Let's hope I don't drown...

First, I want to be able to write in Japanese scripts, so that when I'm learning words I actually learn both. Plus I'll be making a corner of my mind that's entirely Japanese.

Would you go whole hog like this? Or do you think I'm crazy?

Getting started

As I start this, I've been learning Japanese for 6 weeks - never done it before. I studied French years ago, but this is completely different. The grammar is crazy, there are thousands of characters to learn, most of them have multiple ways of reading them. Talk about jumping in at the deep end!

If that wasn't enough, here's the jeopardy: the exams start in May...

Needless to say, the lessons seem to be moving fairly fast at the moment, and I am the one dragging behind.

Suddenly Lean manufacturing doesn't seem so intensive.

Learning a new language is a voyage of discovery, so I thought it would be interesting to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, not least because I'm bound to let it lapse in future - it will be interesting to see where the journey takes me. So I'm writing about what I did and what worked for me. I'll also be posting links sites that I found useful.

So to anyone learning Japanese out there: get involved! Do you think I'm doing it right? Let me know if anything I post is helpful!

J