Learning kanji

As both the regular readers of this blog will be aware, I have been learning Japanese and finding it hard. After much careful analysis, I have reached the conclusion that it is hard to learn because it is written all funny.

Specifically, beginners' lessons are written very funny indeed, in romaji (i.e. in latin characters). That makes the words moderately easy to pronounce but hard to look up in the dictionary, because their are so many homophones that you are bound to choose the wrong meaning half the time. Lessons written in kana are easier to pronounce but you still have the homophone problem, and you have the additional problem that Japanese people don't put spaces in between words.

But we aren't MEANT to read Japanese in kana, anymore than we are meant to read knitting patterns. Japanese people use about 2,000 kanji, which are sort of pictorial clues to what the word means. Pepper your writing with kanji, and it becomes easy to read, understand and look up in dictionaries. It doesn't matter anymore that there are not spaces between words, because the hiragana that's left in acts as a skeleton to show you where the words start and end. You just need to learn how to recognise, pronounce and translate 2,000 assorted squiggles. Not my idea of fun, but if other language obsessives can do it, so can I.

The advice I have had from other Japanese learners is: buy a book, make some flashcards, download a trainer program. I'm not going to do any of those. I use LingQ, you see. It's not that I love LingQ and can't bear to be unfaithful to it (I'm sure LingQ is broadminded enough to understand if I visit other websites from time to time), it's just that other websites have a nasty habit of not being fully compatible with LingQ. And this is irritating, because I really do love LingQ.

So this is what I'm doing. I have found a list of the most common kanji at http://nihongo.isc.chubu.ac.jp/wwkanji2k/frequencyTable.html. I am importing them, ten at a time, into LingQ using the "add a list of terms" function on the vocabulary page. Then I edit each new lingQ, adding the most common pronunciation (and, if I feel like it, a mnemonic) as the hint, the most common meaning as the meaning, and tagging as "kanji". It's a slow job, admittedly. If only we could import a data file then it would save editing 2,000 individual LingQs. Still, I wouldn't call it difficult. I can do it while watching Basil Brush, drinking a cup of tea and avoiding doing the washing up. I spend a lot of time avoiding the washing up.

Now I can do my own kanji flashcard drills, and LingQ keeps track of what I'm learning and what I've learned. I can drill English -> Japanese or Japanese -> English, shuffle the cards, use the pronunciation as a hint to the meaning or not. It's as good as any online kanji drill I've found and it also has the nice bonus that the kanji I'm learning will show up in yellow in the lessons I study, while the kanji I've learned will show up with an underline. If I want to be reminded of the meaning I can do a mouseover on the kanji in the lesson.

Now I'm just wondering, why do other people make learning kanji so hard?