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Kanji Stories
Aug. 2nd, 2018 11:56 amDid you know there are something like 2,200 kanji in Japanese?
Kinda makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking try to learn this language, but whining aside it's not going that badly. Aside from using Duolingo I also downloaded Anki and a deck of kanji flashcards to help me learn to read. It doesn't tell you what the kanji sounds like, just what it means in English, and has a space for you to write a "story." Since kanji are pictographs, and the same basic pictographs can be arranged to make different words, it's helpful to be able to make up short phrases or something riffing on, for example, "moon" appearing in so many of them.
I'm not expecting any degree of real fluency, I just don't like to be that American who doesn't even bother to try. Fox says for the most part you can either say "eggo" (at least that's what the word for 'English' sounds like) or just point and grunt and in Tokyo that's good enough. But I'd like to be able to read signs and labels and such. Which could lead to some major "oops, oh shit" moments but that's what makes traveling fun ...?
So the cool part is that I'm beginning to recognize some printed words in both kanji and katakana though they don't make a ton of sense out of context yet. Is it katakana or the other written system? I have no idea. I just recently completed one month of Duolingo so I'm barely at the beginning.
I always like studying written language, I just don't do as well with the spoken version. It's like for some reason my brain is great with characters on a page but if you say something out loud, even if I'm very familiar with it written out, you just get blank looks. I think this is why I always performed less well than I might have in language classes - there's a huge emphasis on the spoken component that's so difficult for me. But then again sometimes people say shit to me in English and I ghost on them. I guess everyone's had that happen but it seems to happen to me a lot, and it's embarrassing to ask someone to repeat themselves three or four times when you're not even hard of hearing, you just don't understand what the fuck they said.
I should be doing a 40 minute tempo run today but I just finished my strength workout, and there's a cat sleeping on me. I'm a sucker for kitties, I'll sit here for hours until the cat gets up or someone less stupid than me moves the cat.
Kinda makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking try to learn this language, but whining aside it's not going that badly. Aside from using Duolingo I also downloaded Anki and a deck of kanji flashcards to help me learn to read. It doesn't tell you what the kanji sounds like, just what it means in English, and has a space for you to write a "story." Since kanji are pictographs, and the same basic pictographs can be arranged to make different words, it's helpful to be able to make up short phrases or something riffing on, for example, "moon" appearing in so many of them.
I'm not expecting any degree of real fluency, I just don't like to be that American who doesn't even bother to try. Fox says for the most part you can either say "eggo" (at least that's what the word for 'English' sounds like) or just point and grunt and in Tokyo that's good enough. But I'd like to be able to read signs and labels and such. Which could lead to some major "oops, oh shit" moments but that's what makes traveling fun ...?
So the cool part is that I'm beginning to recognize some printed words in both kanji and katakana though they don't make a ton of sense out of context yet. Is it katakana or the other written system? I have no idea. I just recently completed one month of Duolingo so I'm barely at the beginning.
I always like studying written language, I just don't do as well with the spoken version. It's like for some reason my brain is great with characters on a page but if you say something out loud, even if I'm very familiar with it written out, you just get blank looks. I think this is why I always performed less well than I might have in language classes - there's a huge emphasis on the spoken component that's so difficult for me. But then again sometimes people say shit to me in English and I ghost on them. I guess everyone's had that happen but it seems to happen to me a lot, and it's embarrassing to ask someone to repeat themselves three or four times when you're not even hard of hearing, you just don't understand what the fuck they said.
I should be doing a 40 minute tempo run today but I just finished my strength workout, and there's a cat sleeping on me. I'm a sucker for kitties, I'll sit here for hours until the cat gets up or someone less stupid than me moves the cat.
