Substance, Not Fluff
So, I was trying to catch up on reading the Gakuranman blog (I finally got around to putting it in my blogroll section here, which I have been neglecting for too long) and I see a site called Skitter being reviewed. It’s another one of these sites for learning Chinese and/ or Japanese kanji. Except it seems to require credit card info for a free trial. So, I’m not going to be touching the nuts and bolts of it.
Having said that…
This entire topic rather annoys me.
Part of this site’s attraction is the idea of using a mouse, or more effectively, a tablet, to draw kanji on a computer screen as a method for learning them. If you’re wondering what advantage this would have over doing this with a brush, ink and paper, there isn’t any advantage. You can stop wondering now.
More importantly, either you’re going to be physically drawing kanji, or not. If you’re not, the only reason to practice the stroke order is to force yourself to look at the kanji, stare at them, think about them, and use that as a way to memorize more.
Having said that, this isn’t like wood carving. Your brain isn’t going to remember kanji by feel alone. There’s too many of them, and that’s not really how this process works.
Kanji Are Concepts
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: Kanji are concepts in image form. That’s where they come from, and that’s what they all function as, on some level.
I’ve read the introduction to Remembering the Kanji where the author writes about the ridiculousness of trying to associate the sun to the kanji for sun. (日) Well it’s more that you associate the kanji with the sun, not the other way around. The kanji represents the concept; the concept does not represent the kanji.
So that’s one thing.
Using Kanji Yourself
I never made more e-books like the one below due to a catastrophic lack of feedback, but never mind that. The point of what is below is really simple: use it and you won’t lose it. It is using kanji yourself to form intelligent, complete sentences (starting with short ones) that makes you literate and fluent in Japanese.
The whole problem with flash cards and these methods is that they teach you how to remember this kanji or that kanji, but you’re not creatively employing them. Writing individual kanji by stroke pales in comparison with dynamically using the ideas advanced by the kanji, and the words they are used to form, in actual, living Japanese.
The Good Path
Instead of following the Path of Shura and going through hell, and instead of trying to pick the easy path that appears to be a shortcut, I urge all those seeking to learn kanji to follow the good path, and learn kanji not for a test, not for an exam, but for life.
You do that by making kanji a part of real language. Real language that you yourself are using.
Granted, when I thought this up, it was in the context of my providing the kind of strong feedback required to really pull this off well. My kanji presentations might be big and good looking, but ultimately it’s what the learner does with them that defines the quality of the learning.
The point is, I can sit across the table and listen to someone speak and say, yes, that’s good. Or, if need be, I can say, good but, you could have put it like this. Or, no, a word was mispronounced, let’s work on that and try again.
Using kanji creatively, building sentences around them, making the concepts work together in different ways… it’s building something that’s tangible in the mind of the learner. It leads to a real sense of accomplishment. It leads to permanent knowledge and knowing how to build even higher on a firm, rock solid foundation, rather than on a house of flash cards.
It just pains me to see this or that shortcut come along. It’s not a numbers game. It’s about building a core around which peripheral aspects of the language can be built. That’s when the process of discovery is simply pure fun again.
Anyway, that concludes that.
Other Japanese tutors have long promoted the idea of reading manga (漫画、まんが、kanji: Caricature + Sketch = comics), the word Japanese use for their comics, and that Americans use for Japanese comics, specifically. While this advice has merit to it, I used to translate manga professionally. There are a few little secrets you should know.
This is Part 1 of detailed advice for how to read manga better.
Onomatopoeia is a long, overly complicated word for sound effects. Specifically, sound effects that are represented through the written word, though they can be verbalized as well. “Pow!” “Smack!” and “Bang!” are all onomatopoeia. In a Japanese context, I like to call them verbal sound effects.
Why verbal? Because there’s no reason you can’t speak them as well, and many Japanese do as shortcuts, metaphors, and so forth.
Japanese sound effects, being “sounds” and not words by themselves, are written phonetically using katakana.
Put bluntly, reading Japanese comics without understanding the sound effects is only grasping a fraction of the experience.
A further inducement is the fact that some publishers of translated comics do not translate sound effects, either because they would have to jam pack the panel margins with fine print explanations or because they would have to use Photoshop to actually remove the printed sound effects from the Japanese artwork. However, seeing the original characters and having no idea what they mean is a bit stale.
Let me put this differently.
Even though manga are technically printed in black and white, sound effects add color to the experience. This is figurative color, but it is very important nonetheless.
Through the skillful use of sound effects, a woman discovering a dead body in a murder mystery can be “heard” walking. The “creak” of the door is audible. The sudden gasp that precedes the scream builds tension in the scene. These are things that make a scene more vivid.
The author is able to do this without the need for a single second of sound recording thanks to verbal sound effects offering a bridge between the author and the reader. Sound effects connect the two together as artist and fan, with the artist relishing in the understanding that the fan gains, and the fan rejoicing in better understanding the true passion of the artist.
So, if you want to truly enjoy manga, you should really, really want to learn verbal sound effects.
Article first published as How To Read Manga Better, Part 1 on Technorati.
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