I continue to learn with my system a few kanjis everyday (I didn’t post daily updates because it wouldn’t be very interesting).
It’s going well. More and more often I don’t use the mnemonics anymore and recognize the kanji instantly. But if not the mnemonics always bring back the meaning quickly.
I made several observations which may be of interest for other learners.
Using my “kanji-people” to feed (back) my PAO system
With time and using them the people and objects naturally « evolved ». For exemple :
- The fishing rod acquired a fish, and is now sometimes replaced by a fish.
- The mover (person for 口), who was in the beginning only a very muscular person transporting boxes, has become a sort of super-handyman able to solve any problem.
- My doctor (person for 心) is very depressed, even suicidal sometimes, has a gambling problem (poker) but can’t stop working to become a flutist like he’s dreaming of because he needs money to put his son through college. Needless to say he’s rather neglectful and doesn’t do his job very well, quite often it’s the mover-super-handyman (口) that saves the day. But he stays a fundamentally honest man, who refused to steal 100 millions yens when he had the chance.
In fact, some of them acquired so much personality (or biography) that I feel I know them better than some of the random celebrities I had to take from the internet to fill up my PAO (because I honestly don’t understand why people care about celebrities and follow their life… so I just don’t know so many).
Now, that’s an idea: since I already have a couple of “imaginary friends” from childhood in my PAO (people created for the comics we used to write), why some of these “kanji-radical-people”? (Plus I’d be able to choose their names specifically to fill in any gaps hmmm…)
Isn’t it basically the Heisig/wanikani system?
What I’m doing is nothing new. Yes, it’s basically Heisig/wanikani, but with a difference: I make EVERYTHING concrete (I have to remember myself to be strict with it for the system to work well). For example:
- 音(sound) is Glorfindel with a water bottle. He’s making sound/music by blowing on it (like a pan flute). So when 音 comes up as a radical in other kanjis, instead of using « sound » (which is abstract) I’m using a « pan flute ».
- 九 (nine). It’s easy to talk about 軌 as a “track formed by nine cars going through a field”. But why not ten cars? Or seven? Wouldn’t seven cars already have formed a track? If the exact number makes no difference to the scene, it’s an unclear mnemonic to me. I’d rather have a Nazgul (“one of the nine”), to represent 9. There’s no way I’ll mix him up with somebody else.
I’m now convinced that learning on/kun-yomi with the kanji is an utter waste of time (and possibly one of the reasons I “failed” in the past)
I went back and forth for a while trying to include on/kun-yomi. At first I included them when a mnemonic came spontaneously to mind that 1. fits well with the scene and 2. does not complicate/lengthen the scene.
But I now understand (which I did not initially, when I made my kanji deck a few years ago), that, if you want well-made anki cards, you should include only ONE answer for each card → so for one note you would need, 1 card with the meaning (and mnemonics), + 1 card with on-yomi (and mnemonics), +1 card with kun-yomi (and mnemonics). The situation is even worse when you get several possible kun-yomi!
I think it may be because I didn’t understand this principle that I gave up the first time I tried to learn kanji: I was trying to review cards with way too much information, which asked for TONS of answers, instead of focusing on one essential thing.
So it would mean multiplying the number of cards (and thus of reviews in anki) to learn an information… that may or may not be very useful! Because you’ll never know if the vocabulary words you learn later are an exception to the rule (have a different kun/on-yomi than the one you learnt).
You may as well learn vocab directly and let yourself notice patterns naturally (“another word with this kanji was pronounced SHOU so it’s probably also the case for this word using the same kanji? Oh yes it is!”). And you’ll remember it even better because you had to think about it.
So what I do now, is to look up the kanji in the dictionary, to see which words are formed with it, to get a more precise idea of its meaning. Because 1 kanji = 1 translation is a terrible imprecise thing. Even if I only keep 1 keyword per kanji, I need to “get a feel” for what this kanji is used for “in real life” (by this I mean excluding obsolete and rare words).
I then put these vocabulary words on the card, since I looked them up, but they are not part of the answer: I do not have to remember them, I’m just reading them after having given my answer and checked that it’s correct. Sometimes this exposure is enough to learn the word (when for example it’s just a matter of noticing “oh! so sabishii is written with THIS kanji”)
I fact, I wonder if I should have only learnt kanas as a beginner and waited a bit more to learn kanji? Kanjis are so much easier when learning them only means “put an image on words I already know”.