I was just wondering if anyone has advice on the way I study.
I’m struggling a bit with the Kanji. I listen to the audio many
times and then when it comes to reading, what I do is the following:
I read the text that I recognise, then if I see Kanji that I don’t know,
I play the main audio until it gets to that part and then recognise
the word from the audio. This way I’m not tempted to look at the
meaning by clicking on the word to hear the audio.
What I’ve also done previously is to paste the lesson in The Furiganizer,
but I was worried that it would make me too dependenant on furigana.
What do you think about the method I use and do you think I’m
fooling myself by only recognising the words I see from audio?
It appears to me finding the pronunciation and meaning by replaying the audio is an enormously time consuming and tedious way. Unless you are already at a good level that you just have very few unrecognized kanji words in the text, I think it is impractical.
I believe in learning a language one should also keep in mind efficiency is important. If it takes too much time and efforts to make a small progress, most people will just give up - nobody has unlimited time and patience.
So I think a better and faster way is just looking up the kanji as they come up. You can first try to read and make sense of the text as is first. After that just look them up one at a time with a convenient tool, maybe Furiganizer, or something else. In the case of Chinese, I like “Zhongwen” which allows you to effortlessly look up a character or a word just by hovering your cursor over it. For me this seems a better way of learning them than getting a whole block of text annotated since that will show you all the answers in one view before you want them or require repeated copy-and-pasting to avoid it. But I am not sure if there is a similar tool for Japanese.
Whichever you use, after a few times of looking up the same word or character it will eventually stick in your memory. The tool might also provide a list of the words you have already encountered, giving you additional help for periodically reviewing them separately. LingQ does this at a higher level, but something more immediate and low level can assist you as well in other contexts.
Thanks for your reply. Yeah, I think Steve also says just keep looking it up. Some will stick and some won’t. As long as we keep on spending time with the language. There is a similar tool to “Zhongwen” for Japanese called Rikaichan.
Thanks for the Rikaichan (Rikaikun on mine) information.
I was thinking about such a program to get back to studying Japanese more seriously. It is exactly what I wanted, very much like Zhongwen.
These are fantastic little tools that save you a lot of time.
With such efficient look-up aids and online dictionaries, plus google translate, we are in a truly blessed time for language learning
