Life Beyond 3007 Kanji
Recently, I found my kanji reps getting a bit on the boring side, and I was considering what to do about this.
I thought about switching to Japanese keywords, as some of the kids out there are doing that nowadays. That seemed like too much trouble.
I thought about integrating my kanji deck, currently a separate deck, into my main Japanese deck. That bothered the purist in me.
Then I thought a little bit about what makes kanji fun for me normally. See, I love the kanji. LOVE. As in, big ASCII hearts jumping out of even bigger ASCII faces. So why was I bored?
I was getting bored because I was stuck with the same 3007 kanji from RTK1+3, and never seeing anything new. Every day, the same old kanji. “Oh, I remember you from last year.” “Oh, you again? Didn’t I see you the other day?” And so on.
Luckily, I had a text file which I had been using to warehouse unfamiliar kanji until the time came that I would want to learn them, so I dove into that and started making my own keywords, Heisig-style, and adding them to my Anki deck. And, wonder of wonders, kanji reps immediately became fun and interesting again! New kanji! Every day! It was just like back in the honeymoon period of RTK1, and this pleased me.
So, should you want to go about this as well (and I recommend you do, if you haven’t been already), here are a few tips I found helpful:
- Keep a kanji warehouse. A text file, a scrap of paper, the bit of the back of your hand between your thumb and index finger. Whatever. Just keep them somewhere, for when you’re ready to add them.
- Don’t add too many a day. The issue is that making my own keywords takes time, so I get bored of making cards after only 2 or 3 cards everyday. Don’t overdo it if you’re not enjoying it.
- Pick fun keywords. Use keywords that are easy to work into stories for you. Just because somebody on Koohii already made a keyword for that obscure kanji, doesn’t mean you have to use it. And don’t be afraid to use Japanese keywords. Or Chinese keywords. Or even Spanish. It’s your deck, right? Do whatever works for you
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Of course, those who have gone on to learn Mandarin or Cantonese, or other kanji-ken languages, will already be doing this, but I think there’s value for Japanese students as well, because some of these bizarro characters come up in literature, manga, etc.
Anyway, my numbers are still modest… I’m only up to 3042 characters, according to Anki. But if I’m adding a kanji or two a day, that’ll add up pretty quickly.
Mmmm… there’s merit in that fo’ shure, but… I ditched my Heisig deck altogether. Even though I clock up an extra 10 characters a day or something in my main deck, I don’t seem to need mnemnonics at all for most of them. Even crazy-ass characters like 鬱 I can remember how to read and write without any sort of extra help, just by carefully looking at the parts that make it up.
Then again, maybe what I’m doing will just turn out to be a lousy short-term fix…
Addendum [correct usage?]: the context of where I see those new characters each day probably contributes a lot to why they’re easy to remember. Also, sometimes I draw in Chinese-language definitions for new ones, so it’s not like I’m just seeing them once. I still write out lots of sentences by hand too, especially those with new characters in. Finally, the old radical-phonetic link helps with 70% of less common characters (i.e. the ones I’m working on at the moment), so maybe that’s why the mnemonics are kinda redundant.
Having said that, if I hadn’t used Heisig in the first place, I wouldn’t have known about techniques to break them down in various imaginative ways. Dunno what a good balance would be.
Actually, I read your article on the Heisig deletion just after I posted this. Seems you and I are thinking about similar topics these days.
I’m a bit envious that you were able to delete a deck, actually. And it sounds like the various points of reinforcement in your study process are more than enough to remove the need for stories etc. Especially, I would think, the phonetic link… that is, if the link is as strong in Cantonese as (I hear) it is in Mandarin, and not the lovable abomination that is the Japanese reading system.
I was thinking of deleting the deck myself, but decided to keep it because, since I plan on doing more 漢字圏 languages, it would be interesting to just have my L1 be a foundation of sorts for understanding the writing system in all the L2s. A neat little point of origin, or commonality, or whatever. It’s just a hunch. Whether that ends up working, or even making sense, remains to be seen.