I've been learning Japanese on my own for quite a while now. It's not an easy task and it takes a lot of devotion. I'm not someone who's inherently good at languages or communication, so this definitely isn't something that I can learn during a lunch break. I've already had my fair share of trouble with the Hiragana and Katakana themselves, so I knew my journey was going to be a hard one pretty much from the first day on. Regardless, I think it's time that I go one step further and try to do the crazy thing. By that I mean, starting to learn Kanji!
For most of the time that I've studied Japanese now, I've only known very little about Kanji. My knowledge could have been summed up with the following: There's a billion of them and I have no fucking clue how I'm supposed to remember or recognize them all. Obviously I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of Kanji and couldn't, for the life of me, ever imagine how anyone could remember them. For the longest time I've hoped that I could avoid learning Kanji altogether. But, since they're still used in pretty much any written Japanese sentence nowadays, it's sort of hard to get by them. And, since reading is an important part of learning a language, it's pretty much unavoidable.
So, I've recently decided to finally take this task upon me and start learning the damn stuff. But, since I'm not suicidal, I decided to inform myself first, if there really was no other way to learn those symbols than by pure memorization. There has to be some kind of system involved, I thought to myself. Well… apparently the answer to this is yes and no. Kanji seem to be built up by radicals, of which there are around 200. Which basically means you have to learn an alphabet of 200 symbols and then you need to learn what the words mean as well and all sorts of crap and- why the hell am I even trying to explain this, when Kanjidamage does it much better: http://kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts
Now, I've set myself some goals so that I actually have something to aim for, rather than simply “learn Kanji”. The optimal goal would be to learn all the Kanji listed on Kanjidamage (which would be the most necessary vocabulary) until I finish work. That is about 7 months for ~1'700 Kanji. Resulting in around 8 Kanji every day. Why have I set this goal? Well, a friend of mine would like to travel to Japan with me for holidays, once we're both done with work. And obviously, it would be quite a shame if I were of absolutely no use there and couldn't even read anything. Hopefully I can get myself through this and won't just be extra baggage on that journey. As an additional push, I will be posting a daily blog entry about the Kanji that I'm learning as well as the ones that I'm repeating on that day and what I think of them (expect loads of complaints). I'll also buy myself some cards, so I can repeat the stuff on the go during my lunch breaks and whatnot.
I'll be doing all this alongside my usual Japanese studies during the train ride to work and back, which means I'll be studying quite a load of Japanese every day. Whether my brain will be able to cope with the workload and won't make me forget 90% of the stuff again is still uncertain as of now, but we'll see.
Written by shinmera