I’ve been thrown into confusion by my own decision to learn Japanese. First, there is a sense of urgency. In April, I will spend about three weeks in Japan. We’ll do some hiking south of Nara, visit Osaka, do some more hiking, visit Onsen, eat wonderful Japanese food. And I want to freshen up my Japanese!
A friendly person on Mastodon offered to teach me some words and asked what I was interested in. I’m interested in reading maps and talking about directions and hiking. Is this trail dangerous? Is it steep? How do I get to the train station? When does the bus come?
At the same time, I want to learn how to read and write. I love scripts. If you’ve seen my posts on Toki Pona, you know that half my love are the hieroglyphs and the non-linear writing system! About twenty years ago, when I tried to learn Japanese (and my first book came with actual tapes, not even a CD), I loved the script. And years later, when I decided to learn something else instead, I picked Arabic because I love the script.
But when I was faced with my first words,観光 (sightseeing), 郵便局 (post office), and I sat down and learned how to write them, looked up the Kanji online and offline, and I had the sinking feeling that perhaps this was wasting time. And wasting time is a terrible feeling. Life is short, and then you die, and you didn’t even learn Japanese. You ran out of time!
Today I read the introduction to my German translation of the book *Learning Kanji* by J.W. Heisig. In German it’s called *Die Kanji lernen und behalten* by J.W. Heisig and R. Rauther. And in Heisig’s foreword, there’s an interesting passage where he says that you don’t have to learn the language and the Kanji at the same time. In fact, Heisig himself didn’t do that. He arrived in Japan having just missed the beginning of a course and had time to spare and so he decided to learn the Kanji without knowing much about the language.
That’s one way of doing it, I think. I’ll try and spend most of my time learning the Kanji according to the Heisig system and I’ll ask for example sentences that contain mostly these characters.
Wish me luck!
#Japanese
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Viel Glück! Ich denke, jedes gelernte Wort, Kanji und jede Redewendung ist in Japan ein Gewinn.
– Chris 2018-01-30 22:21 UTC
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Danke!
– Alex Schroeder 2018-01-31 08:41 UTC