selfstudying japanese - finished 2200 Jōyō kanji (originally chinese characters) - i have burnout

So i've been selfstudying japanese since early august 2020.

Japanese has 3 writing systems.
Hiragana which is used for native speech and words, then there's katakana which is used for foreign words. Both Hiragana and Katakana have the exact same sounds, however they are written differently to differentiate between well native and foreign words. it's not rare to see all 3 writing systems in 1 sentence being used.
Since japanese has a very limited amount of sounds you can create, foreign words, such as Icecream have to be well kind of slaughtered and re-made as some sort of Frankenstein.
So Icecream would be A-I-SU-KU-RI-MU - if you say those syllables out loudly and also rather fast they sort of sound like icecream. Slippers become SU-RI-P-PA or Vitamin becomes BI-TA-MI-N.

Though, the japanese even sometimes themselves are not sure wether it's BI-TA-A-MI-N or A-I-SU-KU-RI-I-MU or whatever.

There's a fun video that gives you a good idea of what i mean:



and started first with the 2 phonetic sound systems hiragana and katakana which have 104 syllables each. it took me an entire day for both hiragana and katakana respectively. Now im capable of handwriting them quite beautifully i'd say.

here are 2 screenshots of the hiragana and katakana charts






Now after those were done i started hammering down onto the real endboss, which are Kanji.
Kanji are basically japanese nouns, verbs, adjectives. They originally came from china to japan in 800 A.D.

This is the table for the Jōyō Kanji (note: i didn't count the ones in the picture, but my digital flashcard deck has 2200 Kanji)



I use an SRS ( spaced repitition system ) called "Anki" which is basically a digital flashcard deck, but the huge pros are that you can make tons of cards really fast and copypasta its basic structure to the next card, or even add videos / sound files / pictures to either front or back and so on.
But it's biggest advantage is that it asks you how well you were able to remember each flashcard. And depending on your answer it's algorithm ( which is absolute shit, but it can be improved easily, and let's face it, it's easier than using physical flashcards ) puts the reviewshedule for that particular card closer to the future, or further in the future, depending on what you chose.

Here's a picture of how it looks:



"Nochmal" = "Again" -> will show you the card earlier than other cards
"Gut" = "Good" -> will show you the card at a later time / day / week / month depending on it's state

So how have i been learning them?
Well, all Kanji are basically made up out of building blocks, let's call them primitves.
Basically i gave each kanji a keyword and from that keyword i tried to remember it's primitves (building blocks) and thus how to HANDWRITE it.

For example: 木 would mean tree
For example: 田 would mean ricefield Ricefield's story would be: A in 4 neat parcel ( or plots ) seperated Ricefield
For example: 果 would mean fruit

So when i see "fruit" on the frontpage, and by see, i literally just mean "fruit", not the kanji, not the japanese word fruit, but the english, or in my case german word for fruit.
i immediately think of the story i made up:

To japanese people fruit are basically ricefields ontop of trees.

The crucial part is to literally close ones eyes and imagine this weird scene happening, for example a japanese person trying to explain this concept to somebody "Well you see, to us japanese people, fruit are basically ricefields ontop of trees"

The more weird, extraordinary or even obscure the story is and clearer you try to imagine each story and put focus on the primitves and the keyword, the easier it will be to remember the keyword, and thus how to handwrite the kanji.

another example, and this one is pretty extreme would be the word "gloom": 鬱
i actually will just put a picture of it here as nobody can see it's individual parts otherwise.

kanji gloom: 鬱
tin can: 缶 ( the character for tin can is made up of 2 parts: the upper one being horse 午 and the lower one being mountain 山 Story: In these special tin cans you'll find the most exquisite horse, they are grass fed and lived only in the mountains ) [Horses 午 story would be: well it's not a story, but a pictogram, if you look at it, it's like a sideways laid horse ( the left part at the top left being it's head, and then steamrolled over it) and the story for mountain 山 would be: well not a real story here either, more of a pictogram, just a "spiky" mountain with the middle spike being the peak ]
tree: 木
crown: 冖
the bracket part is a shovel and the X part would be sheaf: 凶
the 4 sprinkles to each side of the sheaf: drops ( for example, drops of water, "drops of sheaf", etc. )
sit: 匕
to form: 彡

my story would be: The samurai sits with his crown, almost falling off his head and a tin can of fish between two trees as he sees a giant combine harvester's shovels re-form the landscape as it removes all the sheaf with drops thrown to each side.. an atmosphere of gloom..

Yes i know, not the best story, but for me it sticks, for others, other stories work best.





Now comes the handwriting itself. When i see the keyword i think of fruit, and then i slowly go through the story, and while i go through the story i write out each building block out by hand.

So how many Kanjis did i study daily?
That's hard to say, i work full time so it really depends on how much strength i have left at the end of the day. on some days i would study none, one some days i would study 10-20, on some days i would study 30-50. 3 days i can remember very well though.

Somewhere in the first few weeks i studied 100 kanji in one day, i was left with a burnout for about 2 weeks.
Somewhere in november 2020 i studied 150 (!) kanji in one day ( 14 hours with some breaks ) and was left with burnout for 5 weeks~

and the last day, well it's today, i was left with a 100 new kanji in my flashcard deck and decided that, since i have none left afterwards i'd just push through them...

Now that i finally finished them i'll continue to mass immerse myself with japanese media such as anime, jdramas and jmovies without any subtitles. it's crucial to the learning process. Our brains are language decoding machines

2408 characters in 6 1/2 months is O.K in my book.
For comparison, native japanese people spend their first 10-13 years in school learning those 2.2k kanji.


Now that i have finished
104/104 Hiragana
104/104 Katakana
2200/2200 Jōyō kanji ( which an average high school student knows )

my next goal is to finish 2000 japanese words ( they are faaaaar easier to learn once you have the kanji down )

Since copypasta:

Studies estimate that in English 1000 words account for roughly 75% and 2000 words for roughly 94% of casual, daily speech. With 5000 words, that number jumps to nearly 99%. Different studies analyze different sources, and come up with different numbers, but they all fall roughly into the same ranges. That is the case for most languages as life itself does not differ significantly from country to country.


The 2 Anki Decks i have are N5 and N4 Vocubulary with 1000 words ( sentence cards, since context gets your further than isolated vocubulary cards in terms of memorizing them ) each.

(Japanese have the following grading system for language ability with N5 being the lowest and N1 being the highest, however it does not make sense to learn past N4 as there are so few words you will not recognize it makes more sense to just look them up in a dictionary )


A grammar deck with 800~ cards
Core 10k Deck, which has the 10,000 most used sentences ( frequency wise ) in it.
Pitch Accent Deck with 2500 cards
a monolingual transition deck with 5000 cards

and last but not least the deck i fear the most as it's more kanji
800 Kanji deck for advanced use based on a frequency list

that'll bring up the total kanji known to about 3000 which an average japanese university student knows plus another 300-500 depending on which proficiency they are in, however those are not worth to learn all, but rather just pick them up along the way within your immersion, such as books, mangas, novels, youtube comments lol, and so on.


So that would be a total of about 23,300~ flashcards in total, though kanji are the hardest really.

here's a screenshot of the digital flashcard decks


Worth mentioning that in those 6 1/2 months i had 25,000 flashcard reviews for the Kanji Deck alone already.

I started the N5 vocabulary deck already and easily learned 50 cards a day which cost me less than half an hour as i am literally just reading the kanji i already know.

Having said that, i am burned out by kanji for now and will take atleast a 1 week break from them and ONLY review them.

On a sidenote, from all those days i only missed 3 days reviewing flashcards, but that was when i had 14 - 15 hour shifts and just fell asleep dead tired...



Goal is to be fluent by the end of 2023 on a native level.

God i hope i didn't miss anything important.. :3


Are you guys interested in japanese? or language acquisition in general?




Edit:

For those of you who like cute stuff, here's my 2 desktop folders with even more folders inside. I adjusted them so they look more motivating







For anybody wanting more information, visit the below link with Video Files i accumulated and labeled with numbers for a comprehensible watch order that makes kind-of-sense.

https://mega.nz/folder/v8oUhAaR#tpSn3NW19o4fmbrEIFgLUA


resources to jumpstart your japanese journey:
download Anki here: https://apps.ankiweb.net/
https://mega.nz/folder/3pYAAaoD#BOQUJxfGb5C2Rm8j9mIt8g

 

Cool post

 

10/10. Once I will be done with Spanish I would love to start with Japanese!

 

Awesome work! I'm actually studying Japanese in school right now to better grasp primary sources in my graduate research. As a native Korean speaker, Japanese grammar and language as a whole comes very naturally for me but having to memorize Kanji has been an absolute pain in the ass. My goal is to be fluent by the end of 2022 as well

 

Thank you, it's been quite some hard work and im glad i pushed through.
I don't know how far you are with Kanji in general or what type of Kanji study you prefer, however i found this book incredibly helpful.

https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2012/12/RK-1-6th-edition-sample.pdf

it's just a sample, but the actual books are cheap too. and they're worth atleast 10 times their money.

 

応援しています(⋈◍＞◡＜◍)。

you can do it!

 

hiya<3