Remembering the Kanji

hi my name is James welcome to kanji 101 today we're going to teach you a simple and useful method for learning the meaning of kanji kanji as you may know refer to the Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system other countries also use Chinese characters but the ones used in Japan are called kanji look at them they're pretty they're gorgeous they make for great tattoos and t-shirts but unfortunately to a new student of Japanese Kanji can seem like an unassailable wall separating them from Japanese fluency tat GED kimchi entry prohibited the frustration of learning kanji for Japanese students is compounded by the fact that there are not just a few of these things there's a lot in fact according to the Japanese government grade school students need to be familiar with about 2100 of these kanji here they are it's not all doom and gloom though we're here to give you the good news be safe in the knowledge that even if you didn't enroll in Japanese school at the age of 6 years old it doesn't mean that you'll never learn how to read and write Japanese perfectly fluently check this out the Heisig method you can learn about this method in more detail following the link in the description below but for now let's get our hands dirty and start learning some kanji this means treat and this is how you write it one two three four strokes can you have a specific way that they're written this is called the stroke order this one is written with four strokes and we'll talk about the logic behind the stroke orders in a future video it's not difficult to imagine this kanji looking just like a tree so the idea of a pictograph is often used at the top here we have the bushy green part and the bottom we have the thick trunk so let's continue our next kanji is this one hmm two trees together what on earth could this represent well in English we have the idea of a forest or a wood or something like a Grove so how to write it well basically one two three four one two three four that's right two trees together so a total of eight strokes okay so far so good let's keep going hmm three trees together what could this represent you don't need me to patronize you of course you can guess this kanji means forests three trees together and again we write it with one two three four one two three four one two three four a total of twelve strokes from three trees okay so far so good we haven't used a lot of mental energy to figure out the meaning of kanji based on how many trees they're comprised on for now on to this fellow and this is where the heisig method really comes into its own we can't rely on the idea of pictographs or all of the candy this means apricot and as you can see the top is tree and this bottom part means map it looks like a box that it's actually amount so how do we make a mnemonic for remembering tree and the mouth mean apricot be as vivid as possible in order to remember that this composition of tree and mouth means apricot so where can we start let's think of a huge mouth right below the tree just waiting for all those lovely apricots to fall down this is a vivid image it has to be this way that's we're going to figure so when I see the key word apricot I have to remember that there's a tree at the top and the mouth is underneath waiting for the apricots to fall down apricots fall into the mouth that's how I remember let's try that one more time this next candy is used in a few different words but we want to make it as simple as possible so we're going to assign it a keyword that keyword is dummy as in a dumb person an idiot now we have a bit of a problem we have the exact same components we have the mouth and the tree but this time they're in the reverse so we need to create another mnemonic that will help us remember this can G let's imagine a loud mouth a noisy guy a dummy a Nereids with this big huge mouth open on top of the tree so again when it comes to remembering this story or this mnemonic I have to remember that the dummy is on top of the tree how did he get up there we don't know he's a dummy and that concludes our brief introduction to the heizak method or the mnemonic method for remembering the meaning of kanji at this point you might be wondering why knowing only the meaning of the kanji and not it's reading could be useful let's have a look at these four sentences all of them say exactly the same thing all of the sentences say my name is Brad Pitt the first one we can even probably make out the word name here at the start however the fourth one is completely alien to us being familiar with the writing system of the first three sentences is a real advantage for us we need this advantage for Japanese too and that's where the heizak method comes in consider a Chinese learner of Japanese like us with the first three sentences they have familiarity with Japanese because they use the same writing system so by using this divide and conquer method to learn the meaning of the kanji first it puts us on a similar footing as a Chinese learners Japanese we can look at a page of kanji and know exactly what each one of those means and believe me from having first-hand experience of using this method to learn to read and write Japanese I can tell you that it's a massive confidence boost to look at a page written Japanese and know what each of those can do me okay so you may be wondering when you get to learn how to read the kanji well that comes after learning the meanings first we're going to use a method called the kanji town method which is similar to the Greek Loki Palace memory technique this will be covered in a later course thanks for watching my name is James and you can find more about my study methods and my experience with Japanese in the link below

Channel: 英会話スクール English Garden

Views: 1,206,706

Rating: 4.9252911 out of 5

Keywords: khan academy talent search, Heisig Method, Remembering the Kanji, Japanese, kanji, 漢字

Id: Y2yRyS5-c7Y

Length: 6min 11sec (371 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2015