Hi Reese
I haven't studied Japanese Kanji, but I have studied Mandarin
Chinese, so perhaps my experience in learning characters may partially
be valid for Japanese. I found the first year or so of studying how
to write them to be the hardest until I became familiar with the
various parts of characters -- the wood radical, the water drops,
metal, etc. Then it became easier to hold onto the image of the
character in my mind -- I could 'name' the parts and then write them
easily.
A useful tool was a child's toy - I believe it's called a magic
slate. They are found where you buy coloring books and other
periodical-like things in a bookstore or a drug store in the US. (not
an Etch-a-sketch!) you just write on top of the 'slate' and then lift
a transparent plastic sheet to erase what you've just written. When I
practice writing characters on paper, my eye would always cheat to see
how I'd written the character before. With the magic slate, if you
erase the character each time you write it, you can't 'cheat'.
You asked about the 'best' way to master the characters. Different
people find different methods better for them because they have
different preferences in how to learn things - some people are visual
learners, some are auditory learners, some prefer to move their body
as they learn. And, of course, there are combinations of these
methods. It might be useful for you to find out what type of "learner"
(what type of learning preference) you are and then either find or
adapt a method to match your learning style preference. This concept
of learning preference is largely a topic in the field of education,
so foreign language teachers may or may not be aware of it. If you are
at a college or university with a center to help students study,
consider visiting them and asking their help in finding out a good way
for you to learn these characters.
I would, however, recommend much practice in writing the characters.
This will help you absorb part of the Japanese culture as well as make
your characters look more "Japanese-y'. From my experience here in
Taiwan with foreigners writing Chinese characters, it's very uncommon
for a foreigner to write characters so they look like an adult wrote
them. Usually the characters we write, although using the correct
stroke order, look very clumsy and can be an unspoken source of
embarassment. I'm not talking specifically about pursuing calligraphy
-- although a wonderful discipline!) -- but being able to coordinate
the strokes and proportions together.
A looming crisis in schools here is the impact of typing Chinese
characters on writing them. It's different from typing English wherein
you actually spell the word: in Chinese (and I would imagine in
Japanese, too) to type a character,you either type the phonetics for
the character or type a code for the parts of the character. This
brings up a menu of characters that match the phonetics or parts of
the character -- then you select which of those ten or so words you
actually want. So typing in Chinese is more a matter of selecting the
character you want from a menu than it is a matter of actually
typing/spelling it. Since so many people mainly rely on typing
characters these days, their written characters are becoming sloppily
written or people are forgetting how to write the characters. I'd
suggest learning how to type Japanese as well as practicing writing
them by hand. This can seperate the boys from the men, esp if you are
considering working in Japan or for a Japanese company. |
