Kanji!

I've resumed studying kanji again! I think I'll make a brief post now about how I've been studying kanji for the past 6 months. First of all, I purchased this book from amazon:



According to this book, there are 1945 Kanji which are used regularly in everyday Japanese texts, so I guess the idea is that if you learn them all you can read pretty much anything. And on the subject of reading, one of the biggest things that has been bugging me about Japanese is that even if you've been studying it for a few years you still probably will have a lot of trouble reading anything because you don't know a lot of the characters that you see. So, I bought this book and told myself that I would study all the Kanji at least to the point that I really got down the readings of them so that I would be able to pick up a book and actually be able to make sense of it.

The book takes each individual kanji and gives the meaning, all the readings, sample vocabulary and even a lengthy paragraph about the origin and history of the character. The first half is the 996 characters which are learned in grades 1-6 and the second half is the remaining 949 characters grouped alphabetically. So I started to go through and write every single kanji over and over again. Grades 1-4 went pretty fast since I studied most of those characters in the first 2 years I took in school. Then things began to get more difficult as I hit more and more characters I've never seen before.

Right now, I'm currently studying numbers 1121-1223 which means that after I'm done with this set I'll have 722 kanji left to study...which just scared me just now. That's a quite big number...but I hope to at least study the rest by August or so...then the trick will be to remember them. Since I already feel like I forgot a lot of the kanji I learned in the past few months. After I look at them all...I'm not sure what the best thing to do is. Maybe just start reading books? Reading Japanese novels is something I've really wanted to be able to do since I was in Tokyo for the first time and saw people reading on the train. I think it would be really cool to read a book in a different language...and understand it. When the time comes I might need to ask for help in recommending me some good authors...maybe stuff that's normal for younger teenagers to read...

This post was a little dull I'm sorry about that. I do like kanji though. it's interesting the way this was adopted as the main writing system since there seems like there's so many issues with it. I mean, I always hear Japanese people complaining about kanji and not being able to remember kanji and how today's newest generation can't remember how to write them anymore because of computers, etc...I wonder if another revamp of the writing system is coming anywhere on the horizon...