Well then. This is it, I suppose. Finally gone through all 1760 of the Kanji on Kanjidamage. This isn't the end though, not by a long shot. Whether that's a good thing or not I'll leave up to you. Now, I'll do a quick review of things I've noticed, failed at doing, succeeded at doing and finally a bit of a look-ahead on what I'll do with this in the future.
Well then. This is it, I suppose. Finally gone through all 1760 of the Kanji on Kanjidamage. This isn't the end though, not by a long shot. Whether that's a good thing or not I'll leave up to you. Now, I'll do a quick review of things I've noticed, failed at doing, succeeded at doing and finally a bit of a look-ahead on what I'll do with this in the future.
So initially I set out with the plan to learn ~1500 Kanji in 9 months, which I did almost succeed at doing. The reason why I need to do this is because in order to learn Japanese well I need to be able to read. Reading without Kanji is an almost impossible chore, so there's almost no way to start out without already having a huge base library of Kanji stored in your brain.
I've always had a reluctance to learning Vocabulary or the general mindless data-storage of things in your brain. Knowing this I set a couple of constraints for myself to ensure that I would keep at it, at least for the most part. The first constraint is one that exists for almost everything I do, which is that I start to absolutely hate myself if I don't put enough time into my projects. Sadly this isn't enough of a force to keep me on something when there's other things that are more interesting. The second constraint was to routinise the thing, so that it would just be a daily thing I did. Third, I wanted to at least get some outside pressure going by getting other people to depend on me learning them. This idea was represented by the blog entries that were supposed to come out on a daily basis, containing the 8 Kanji for the day as well as a bit of commentary for each of them. And the final constraint was to make a bet with my brother. Sadly I lost this bet because it was way too hard and didn't provide enough pressure.
I'm still glad that I managed to get through all this in a year. The biggest downside of course is that I do not remember all of them at all. I would've had to invest even more time into this to keep all of the Kanji at a ready state in my memory. Given that I already spent at least an hour every day on this I simply could not bring up the courage to do any more. The fact that my memory of all of them is incomplete now requires me to do possibly several more iterations of all of this. Not to mention that up until now I've only always tried to remember the meaning of the Kanji, excluding the Kun- and Onyomi as well as the Jukugo. It'll take me a long time until I've got that all memorised to the point of relatively ready access.
Still, it doesn't look so bad. After all, people growing up in Japan usually get until the end of middle-school to get the standard 2000 down, which is a long, long time. Given that throughout the time I've been doing this I've also had a consistent day-job as well as a bunch of other projects and interests to follow, it isn't surprising that I haven't gotten it all down. Even if I had the full time available to devote a year to this task, I'd say it would be a surprise if you could get all 2000 down perfectly, including reading, writing as well as all other nuances and extra information.
Enough self-reassuring though, it is clear that I have failed my initial goal and I am not happy about that. I'm also not happy that I'm going to have to continue this rather dull task for a long time still. But hey, I'm sure there's a couple of mistakes that I don't have to repeat on this second row, as well as a bunch of new ideas I could try to liven things up a bit.
So, let's start out with the negative. At first I paid way too much attention to Kanjidamage and its mnemonics and quirks. Later on, mostly thanks to @Isoraqathedh, I learned that it's much better to ignore his explanations for the “pseudo-radicals” and simply look them up on Wiktionary to get the actual meaning, as that's usually much more helpful than his inventions. The background of Chinese Etymology and general influence also provided me with much needed extra information that helped me along the way and even awoke an active interest in the development of the language and scripture. I'm nowhere near Iso's level of involvement, but I can very well see the alluring aspects of it.
Then, Kanjidamage's mnemonics are rather bad, I'm afraid to say. The best mnemonics (to me) should have the following properties: be short, if possible only contain the components and actual meaning, if possible, end on the meaning itself, don't contain negators and if needed adapt the components to another, but similar word to aid the sentence. Especially ending on the meaning itself is very important, as it then reads more like an equation and naturally follows, rather than being a gap in a sentence that you somehow have to piece together otherwise. I tried to do this to my best abilities with all of the Kanji I could (after I made this decision of course). So on my second iteration I will fix all the mnemonics I can to make it even easier.
Now on to new ideas. I've been planning this for a while now, but I will be writing my own Kanji site with its own sequence, own explanations, mnemonics and all that. I won't be able to work on this right away as TyNETv5 is not ready yet and there's still a lot to do on that front. When it happens though, the plan is to create a base dataset from Kanjidamage's site and then adapt and improve it from there as I go along the sequence. To note, the only thing I will be taking from Kanjidamage is its sequence to start out with. I will develop an algorithm that constructs a better sequence on the basis of components and stroke count, to improve on that, as well as remove any relation to Kanjidamage. I am also hoping that Iso will stand to my side in this endeavour and help me write up some interesting things for each Kanji. He has already helped me out a huge lot and I think with enough time we can get something really neat going here.
Otherwise I'm not sure if I will keep doing regular blog entries. I will most likely be repeating the Kanji in larger batches from now on. I will have to see if I there's a possibility for irregular entries to highlight some quirks and new insights I gain.
I will be taking a bit of a break as university starts for me (another blog on that soon), but I won't be stopping with this any soon.
Written by shinmera