To all Japanese speakers and learners on this forum | Specific language questions | Forum

Raphael,

have you tried ICQ yet? 

yes i did check earlier i saw a Japanese chat room.

I started learning Japanese on my own as a hobby some 3 years ago. After learning kanas I started learning kanji with a good motivation because they were the main reason I had started to learn an Asian language (meaning Chinese or Japanese) in the first place. Along 2 years of "a few hours a week" I learnt a few hundreds of kanji by writing and meaning, but hardly remembering the pronunciation.

Last year I went to China coutryside during the autumn and started to learn Chinese too on a bold decision (motivated by what I perceived as extremely good financial opportunity to do so). In the kung fu/ "culture" small school where I landed, there where about 5 other foreigners (Westerners) who also took Chinese lessons half-time (I being the only one who was there for Chinese only and not at all for martial arts). Those people where absolute beginners to Chinese writing system and rather slow to get used to it. I, with the experience I had in Japanese kanji, did not feel disturbed at all and began at once to take on the learning of kanji (that is, hanzi in Mandarin), trying to always memorize the corresponding characters as I learnt new words. This situation put me in a very high esteem of my capacities in comparison to my peers and give me a very welcome boost of confidence. With a steady and intense rythm, in total immersion (in China countryside, no one hears you scream… in English) and with the help of my faithful hanzi dictionnary, I learnt what must have been close to a thousand hanzi in three months.

After coming back to France, I continued to study steadily Chinese and resumed Japanese, while registering for uni's 2nd semester in English (piece of cake) and got a position in a one-year student exchange partnership with an Okinawan university, starting in September. I took the summer to memorize even more Chinese and hanzi in prevision to my GlobalfreeLoading trip to Taiwan on my way to Okinawa, which was delightful, and then arrived in Okinawa and started Japanese lessons. Needless to say, my level in kanji was already far beyond anything that was expected of me (that is, knowledge of a few dozen kanji), which was once more an appreciated motivation to keep being the best, to put in plainly. The first month or so was essentially devoted to transferring my knowledge of Chinese characters to Japanese, learning the Japanese pronunciations, feeling the general patterns in which the sounds evolved from Chinese to Japanese and the eventual meaning variations. Then I started naturally to resume learning new kanji and compound words… in the context of Japanese language this time (but mostly trying to memorize the Chinese pronunciation as I went when I could).

Now, it's the middle of December and I well intend to know all of the JLPT1's kanji by the end of the exchange year. (if you wonder, I do have a good visual memory – much better than my sound memory in my own feeling)

Conclusions : *Knowing Chinese is to Japanese/Korean as knowing Latin is to French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/Romanian ; *It's extremely self-building to make a personal decision no one is expecting of you, where you choose to put yourself a very unsettling context – especially if it concludes on a blatant success. ; *it pays to have a good picture memory when learning Chinese or Japanese ; *Hurray for the f** free French education system !!!

When learning Chinese or Japanese (especially Japanese), if one is to not get frustrated, you must see the whole kanji thing with distance : no, it's not necessary to have such a hard writing system to write a language; yes, for some reason, these are the only two countries in the world who didn't do the transition from logogramms to phonetic alphabets (or only partially so for Japan). It doesn't bear a particular significance to learn thousands of Chinese characters, but you got to see it as learning by heart lyrics of songs you like or learning by heart the steps of dances you like, the moves of a martial art, muscle training, etc.. time-consuming, not fundamentally useful, but as good a way to shape one's will/memory/body as another, and that can be enjoyed.

I'm saying all that on the suspicion that kanji must an extremely powerful deterrent/demotivator to many learners of Japanese – Japanese themselves have ambiguous feelings about kanji, much more so than Chinese or Taiwanese, for reasons that you can understand if you're studying Japanese. All I can say is, as for all potentially frustrating things, try to put yourself in a situation where you can look at it with distance.