I am pretty sure there are some Japanese people on this forum. Tell me. How the fuck do you remember over 3000 kanji. OR if you're Chinese, 10,000. Or if you're crazy all 50,000.

Thank god I was born in an english speaking country. 26 letters biatch.

apart from our fucked up pronounciations I guess.

yeah kanji fucking sucks. but if you think about it, when you see an English word, you automatically read the entire thing at once (unless it's a word you don't know). I'm pretty sure no one sounds words out letter-by-letter once they can actually read at an adult level. So in a way, it's like kanji, except with kanji you have to skip to that final stage right away. They learn a certain amount each year of school.

it does break down into components and there are cool ways to learn it like this but it still fucking sucks

Yeah so true.

The one good thing about learning kanji is that you look like a fucking boss when you write it.

Man, Japan is so fucking cultured. America is not even close, not even remotely.

Quote from Jutsu

Man, Japan is so fucking cultured. America is not even close, not even remotely.

US hasn't existed quite as long as Japan.

After like 500 I gets a lot easier because you should know all of the components by then. At first its just like a jumble of lines but after a while it makes sense.

It's just takes a bunch of repetition, and writing. The really hard part is learning the pronunciations since theres like fucking 3 or more different ways to pronounce each one.

You can learn them all in like a year though if you're extremely dedicated. It's exhausting though. I did like 700ish in 2 or 3 months before I gave up.

Also, many of them resemble what they actually mean. Take the character for "fish" - 魚 - You can totally see the head and the scales and the back fin there.

Quote from Jombo

I got through all 2042 in about 6 months with a spaced repetition system, doing like 10 - 25 new ones each day, but I've heard some people do it in like 2 months or less

christ. you actually remembered all of them well? it took me like a month just to get hiragana/katakana down, lol. even now, sometimes I have trouble remembering a katakana character. i gave up tackling kanji learning because the kunyomi/onyomi/multiple readings shit annoyed me. fuck that.

also kanjidamage is funny/entertaining

Quote from Jutsu

Man, Japan is so fucking cultured. America is not even close, not even remotely.

pathetic otaku weeaboo detected in the vicinity

I was doing it the same was as Jombo. It's pretty effective if you put the effort into it.

I can still recognize most of the ones that I learned, sometimes it just takes a bit. I have a hard time recalling them to actually use them though. Like i couldn't write the kanji for whale, but if i saw it I would know it (true story, thats how i found canned whale). The only thing is that sometimes it uses really obscure meanings for words that aren't what they're normally used for. Also when they're compounded they can lose their meaning or mean something completely different

I would rather learn Chinese because it's obviously more useful. However I was mucking around with the Japanese basics recently, mainly because we covered Japanese in primary/highschool and it's interesting remembering things. But if I ever decided to really learn a language it would probably be Chinese.

Index: At first when I tried to memorize the hiragana it was hard as fuck. But now it's pretty easy. I have only memorized about 35 of them, but hey, I have only spent a couple hours doing it. It took me about 20 minutes to memorize 15 of them yesterday, and now I can remember all of them and write them all half decently. I also briefly looked at a couple kanji and memorized them without even realizing it (as I said earlier). It's just that I think once I have about 50 or so in my head I will start to mix them up and forget some.

Jombo I will look into the method you talked about. I actually saw that name mentioned in numerous places so it must be good. Thanks man. And maybe we should make a whole language section lol. This is interesting.

For me, Chinese is way easier than Japanese in terms of grammar. I'm planning on eventually learning both of them, but definitely Chinese first.

Quote from Jombo

Fusion, many kanji have meanings that have nothing to do with their components. In fact, at an advanced level, very rarely does the kanji show a pictographic representation of the meaning.

I know, I was just saying that there are a lot that do. I guess most of them are pretty basic things.

Quote from Jombo

Manga is good because they always have furigana

they do? I thought it was only the kiddie ones.

Quote from Jombo

It was just the meaning, I didn't know how to pronounce any of them, except for the ones I learned before and during the book. Right now there's still a lot that I have no idea how they're pronounced, but I can recognize them in texts and remember a majority of their key meanings.

I hate knowing some kanji but only how it looks like + the meaning, and not knowing how they're pronounced. it feels kind of useless because I don't know the word and would have to learn it separately. In learning Japanese, being able to speak is kinda important. Though I only know like ten random ones, lol.

Quote from Cronos

Index: At first when I tried to memorize the hiragana it was hard as fuck. But now it's pretty easy. I have only memorized about 35 of them, but hey, I have only spent a couple hours doing it. It took me about 20 minutes to memorize 15 of them yesterday, and now I can remember all of them and write them all half decently.

the only time i really studied hard till I had a certain number down was for a-ko of hiragana... years before i felt like doing the rest. when I learned the rest, it was super casual and I probably could've done it much more effectively if I wasn't a lazy ass. but now i can write kana close to as fast as English which always feels cool. whenever i forget a katakana it's when i'm writing em, though, and i fucking hate it; it's like a brainfart that I can't recover from without looking it up. I swear whoever created katakana was deliberately making them as confusingly similar to others as possible just to piss people off.

Quote from Index

I swear whoever created katakana was deliberately making them as confusingly similar to others as possible just to piss people off.

ohmygodthis
ソ vs. ン is just ridiculous, and they don't even sound remotely similar. Who decided that putting both of those in one writing system was a good idea?

Would you advise learning kanji before learning words/grammer/talking/listening?

It makes learning words easier doesn't it? Since you know the reason why some words sound like they do.