MONIKA'S KANJI ADVENTURE

[Monika]

Because I felt like recording it, I'll be using this thread to track my progress on learning all 2,136 kanji on the Joyo list (that is to say, the kanji that Japanese children are expected to learn from kindergarten all the way through high school - those required to be considered functionally literate). Not knowing them is a significant detriment to long term progress in the language, as any non-introductory study materials will make heavy use of them. Moreover, texting Japanese folks through apps like HelloTalk is a nightmare without knowing kanji - you either text them in an indecipherable mess of hiragana, or you type in the romanized version of the word you want to use and pray that the right kanji is suggested for you (e.g. if you wanted to say you make paper for a living, and you knew paper is pronounced "kami" in Japanese, you could type 「かみ」and select one of the kanji that shows up, but then you run the risk of choosing 髪 [hair] or 神 [God] instead of 紙 [paper]).

Beyond all that, though, I said that I was going to learn all of the kanji by the end of the year, so that's what I'm going to do.

I'll be using the book Remembering the Kanji 1, 6th Edition, by James W. Heisig for my studies. The book advocates the use of mnemonics as a means of remembering the kanji, as opposed to writing them down on a sheet of paper ad nauseam until they stick to your mind. I already know a few hundred from casual study, such as those that appear frequently - like 食 (to eat) and 私 (the pronoun I) - as well as those that have some personal significance to me - 闇 (darkness) and 主 (lord), for example. Despite this, I'll be progressing through the book in its specified order as if I knew none of them, for the sake of consistency.


Day One:
Today I went through the first 25. They consisted primarily of the numbers (一、二、三...九、十) as well as a few less obvious ones, like 品 (goods) and 明 (bright). In future posts I may record all of the kanji I studied that day, as well as the mnemonics used to remember them, but these seem so trivial that it doesn't seem worth the time. Not to mention it's almost 11 PM and it was a long day at work.

Until tomorrow!

[Monika]

Day Two:

Pfft, two days in and I'm already falling behind.

After much deliberation today, I decided that I also wanted to be able to write the kanji and would thus have to start reviewing them in the other direction; that is, instead of just being able to see a kanji and identify its meaning, I would also have to be able to look at some key word (e.g. "sparkle") and be able to reproduce an associated kanji from memory (in this case, 晶, which happens to be a component of the word 結晶 meaning "crystal").

There isn't any immediate practical value to such an exercise - after all, most written communication is done electronically without the need for handwriting and penmanship. However, I can't help but feel like the kanji themselves will be that much more solid in my mind if I can go both ways. At the very least, it'll let me write addresses if I ever had an extended stay in Japan, and it would serve as a nice party trick here in the West. (Fun fact: When I was first interviewing for my current job, I wrote the recruiter's name in hiragana on a card and gave it to her, a gesture which she really seemed to be impressed by. Katakana, of course, would have been much more appropriate for this kind of thing, but I made the 'mistake' of never practicing katakana when I first started studying Japanese. Consequently, I can read them just fine (コンニチハ！), but don't ask me to actually draw them IRL. Of course, the typical American doesn't know the difference anyway, so you could probably scribble on a napkin and pass it off as some Eastern Asian language if you wanted to.)

Figuring out how to duplicate and reverse my existing deck of flashcards took something like two hours because Anki isn't the most user-friendly SRS software out there (but then again it's free so, you know, you get what you pay for). By that time it was already 9:00 PM or so, so I just opted to review yesterday's kanji in both directions instead of learning a new batch of 25 today. One missed day of new material won't be too detrimental to the end goal - my timetable is such that I've got a spare 20 days for occurrences like these. What's more important is that I don't miss any scheduled review. Learning new things is important, of course, but reinforcing what you've already learned is even more important.

The first 25 kanji aren't anything particularly difficult in terms of stroke order. The most complex, perhaps, was 吾, a kanji that, from what I've gathered, doesn't seem to be used in modern Japanese except for in names. Historically, it meant "I" or "oneself", so if used in modern times it would be the first person equivalent of our "thou" , if there were such a thing.

With minimal exception, kanji generally follow a north-south, west-east, northwest-southeast stroke order, so as long as you're writing from top to bottom and left to right (as you'd probably be inclined to do anyway), you're probably good. The exceptions thus far have been 十 and kanji that have that same cross shape in them, like 古. There, the horizontal line is drawn before the vertical line. In a kanji like 田, however, the vertical line inside the square is drawn first. Perhaps confusing at first, but it makes sense once you've drawn it enough, I guess.

In any case, it's probably about 11:30 now and I've rambled long enough. I'll be back tomorrow with any relevant notes on a set of 25 new kanji, if all goes well.

Until then!

[Monika]

Day Three:

So today I went through another 23 kanji. I know the goal is nominally 25 per day, but this particular section in the book had a logical stopping point at kanji #48, and I didn't really feel like doing another two kanji from the next session just for the sake of keeping up with an arbitrary number. The next logical stopping point is at kanji #74, so I'll be doing 26 tomorrow.

The kanji today weren't particularly difficult, though a few did give me trouble. I don't yet regret my decision to practice writing them as I initially expected I would. It takes more time, yes, but there's something satisfying about being able to clearly picture the symbol in my mind (already I can draw more kanji than katakana). I wrote each number of today's date on a co-worker's board just to see if I remembered the first ten numbers, and the stroke order came to me without difficulty.

As far as complexity is concerned, the most powerful kanji was 博, which means something akin to "Dr." (in the sense of someone who has earned a Ph.D, rather than a medical doctor). It's 12 strokes, but easy enough to remember. The particular mnemonic is rather involved and probably won't make sense to you unless you also read this book. Without going into detail, it involves a combination of "needle", "ten", "rice field" and "glue".

Ironically, the kanji that gave me the most trouble was 百 ("hundred"). Despite my boast in the second paragraph of remembering the numbers, I could not for the life of me remember how to draw this kanji. The mnemonic in the book offered up the tidbit that the Japanese refer to someone's 99th birthday as their "white year", because the kanji for white 「白」looks like the kanji for "hundred" with the kanji for "one" 「一」removed. That is to say, 100 - 1 = 99, which equals white. Interesting as the fact is, it seems unnecessarily convoluted to me as a tool for remembrance. If typing out this post doesn't help me remember how to draw this kanji, I may just opt for rote memorization, writing a hundred times on a sheet of paper until it sticks. Recognizing it when it's already written is no problem, since it comes up fairly frequently.

Honorable mention goes to the kanji for "concave" 「凹」and "convex" 「凸」. The two are pretty trivial to recognize - they're pictographic definitions of themselves, after all - but the stroke order is unusual. I don't really have a good way to demonstrate stroke order on the forum, but each of them has five strokes, and 凸 in particular starts with the leftmost horizontal line. It's weird.

In any case, that's all the notes I have for today. At 10:12, this is thus far the earliest I've gotten done this week. I'm going to grab this victory and run.

Until tomorrow!

[Monika]

Day Four:

Me, yesterday: "Oh boy! Tomorrow I'm going leave work on time, and since I have food leftover I won't even have to cook! Then I can just go home, shower, eat dinner, watch Bleach, and study kanji - with plenty of time left afterward to unwind and go to sleep!"

Me, today: "Or I can get dragged into a project at the actual end of the day, stay at work for 12 hours, come home unbelievably tired at 7:30, shower, lament my life choices, eat, watch Bleach, cry, and then study kanji. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll be in bed before midnight. That sounds like a much better idea."

*Sigh.*

In any case, exhausted from work or not, I went through another 26 kanji today. That brings me up to 74 this week. Considering Tuesday is the only day I've really "skipped" thus far (and if today is any indication), I should have no problem reaching my year-end goal. I'll let that overconfident narrative I've constructed guide me through the next three months of study.

Not a whole lot to say about today's batch. I only found one particularly difficult to remember, and that was 頑. This is another one of those "the mnemonic given in the book doesn't really make sense out of context" scenarios. The keywords to remembering this kanji were "beginning" and "page", which is itself remembered as a combination of the kanji for "one" and "shellfish". You may have gathered this already, but the idea behind this book is to construct mnemonic devices so absurd that you can't help but commit them to memory, whether you want to or not. The author would be a good addition to Awesome Land, honestly.

Since the book doesn't go over the myriad readings for the symbols (and for good reason), when I'm typing the kanji in these posts, I actually just use my touchscreen to write them in Google Translate's handwriting recognition tool and then copy the symbol it suggests from the site into my post. Such is the quickest way I could think of to get the kanji I'm looking for, since I don't have some phonetic sound to type in to my Japanese keyboard. Not to mention it's yet another way for me to get writing practice in, which helps solidify the material.

頑 in the book is given the meaning of "stubborn". Writing it into Google Translate yields the word "tough". In either case, after writing it I recognized it as the first part of 頑張る (ganbaru), which roughly translates to "to work hard" or "to do one's best". Literally, it could be taken as "be stubborn in the face of adversity". This is the root word of the phrases "ganbatte kudasai" (polite) and "ganbare" (informal), both of which the Japanese will use as their equivalent of our phrase "good luck". It's a nice reflection of our cultural differences, how they attribute success to work ethic instead of luck.

Honorable mention goes to the kanji 万 , meaning "ten thousand". It's one I already knew the meaning (and even the pronunciation - "man") of beforehand, but the actual writing and stroke order is...weird. The top horizontal line is first, but then instead of immediately drawing the vertical line beneath it, you draw the hook shape and then connect them with the vertical line last. It's annoying.

That's all I have to say for now. It's 11:12 and I have to be up in six hours. And I go on call this weekend, so it's not like I'll have the opportunity to catch up on any sleep I miss. Ugh...

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Five:

I am actually too tired to make a full post right now. This is the third day in a row I've been kept at work way longer than I needed to be for some BS. All the sleep I haven't been getting this week is about to catch up with me. I really debated not studying today and just reviewing some previous characters, but my desire to finish them all beat my desire for sleep into submission.

Most obnoxious kanji today was 頂. The keyword in the book is "place on the head". Looking it up on jisho, it has the meaning of "crown" (as in the crown of one's head) or "summit" (of a mountain). I guess in general it has the meaning of "top". The keyword and the mnemonic didn't quite mesh well together in my head, especially since I'm half asleep right now.

Honorable mention goes to 副, given the keyword of "vice-". In general it means something like "secondary", "auxiliary", and any other word that denotes something that isn't the "main" thing in a set. I actually didn't have any trouble remembering this kanji. I just like the way it looks and wanted to give it a shout-out here.

I'm going to bed now. Really hoping I don't get called.

Until next time.

[Monika]

Day Six:

I've got two decks in Anki: one that shows me a keyword and prompts me to draw the associated kanji, and one that shows me the kanji and prompts me for the keyword. I went to bed around midnight last night and as I was drifting off to sleep, I realized I hadn't reviewed the latter. Apparently my body wasn't content to let this happen, because I somehow woke up at 3:30 in the morning. By default, the software is set to trigger each "new day" at four hours past midnight, meaning I still had half an hour to review my cards so they would count for Friday. So of course I immediately rushed out of bed, ran downstairs and reviewed Friday's kanji, leaving me with thirteen minutes to spare.

Went back to bed with minor difficulty and woke up again at 9:30, probably the latest I've gotten up on a weekend in some time. Immediately threw on some clothes and rushed out the door in an attempt to make it to the barbershop before the Saturday morning rush. That attempt was a resounding failure. Nearly a dozen people were in front of me, took over three hours for me to get my haircut, and I didn't get back home until 1:30 PM, at which point I showered, ate lunch (having skipped breakfast to get to the shop), and took a nap.

I give you that two paragraph-long prelude to preface my saying that I only studied 11 new kanji today. I know what you're thinking: Dark Lord Monika! How could you only study 11?! And on a weekend, no less! You studied more than that on a weekday! Isn't the goal 25 a day?!

While all of that is factually accurate, I needed a break. This week has gotten progressively more exhausting since Monday, and my mind needed some time to rest and process everything up to this point. Not to mention Anki prescribed 18 kanji for review, meaning that I've essentially covered 29 elements today. Though I'll certainly not make a habit of slacking in my studies, I do have to find a proper balance between what my target is and what my mind can feasibly handle in a given week. As mentioned in a previous post, more important than a constant influx of new material is consistent review of old material, and that consistency can't - won't - be achieved if I overload my brain (powerful as it may be). I know I'll stop studying completely if I feel overwhelmed, and that's dangerous territory to be in. Every day I put off studying would essentially be a day in which I lose progress, and I don't have that kind of time.

...Anyway, enough whining. This isn't the Monika Apology and Excuse Hour^TM. You're here for some kanji. Today's kanji were most related to people, and I was familiar with a number of them already, such as:

兄 - elder brother
子 - child
女 - woman
好 - fond
母 - mama

This one I vaguely recalled:

了 - complete

The rest were new to me but combinations of kanji and radicals previously seen, like:

呪 - curse (you can see the symbol for "mouth" 口 and "elder brother")
貫 - pierce ("mama" + "shellfish" 貝)
如 - likeness ("woman" + "mouth")
克 - overcome ("ten" 十　[which, as part of other kanji, is given the mnemonic meaning of "needle"] + elder brother)
孔 - cavity ("child" + a radical given the mnemonic meaning of "fish hook")

Hopefully by listing all of today's kanji, you'll have a better understanding of how the book's study plan is laid out, and just how doable this task is. If you can commit to memory a handful of kanji and radicals (radicals being components that appear across a number of different characters but are not characters themselves), then you'll know even more kanji just by constructing the kanji and radicals you already know together in different ways. Each additional character you learn leads to an exponential increase to your total knowledge base, essentially. Thus far, none of what I've done has been particularly hard. It's just required a bit of a time investment.

Today's honorable mention awards go to 女 and 母 - woman and mother, respectively. Again, none of today's kanji were difficult, so these earn the award for being...neat, for lack of a better word. Again, I don't have much of a way to demonstrate stroke order here, so I'll defer to the jisho.org entries for each character. One might expect the character for "mother" 母 to have a similar stroke order to other boxlike characters, such as 口 or 日, but you'll see that the stroke order for 母 is actually really close to 女, the only difference being the additional two drops in 母 (which the book says are supposed to represent a mother's boobs - the author references Freud quite a bit). It almost makes too much sense that the kanji for "mother" and "woman" would share stroke order. It just goes to show that even in a language where a lot of characters were developed from pictographs, there can be etymological similarities between them.

That's all I've got to say for now. Today's batch of kanji puts me above the 100 mark - 109, to be specific. That means all I have to do is repeat my efforts this week nineteen more times and I will have reached my goal (though I'm hoping that subsequent weeks won't be as mentally taxing as this one was). Kind of makes me wish I had started twenty weeks ago...Alas, can't change the past. All I can do is work toward the future. Tomorrow should see another 20 kanji or so, so I'll be back then.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Seven:

Oh boy. As the seventh day, this means I've been studying kanji consistently every evening for a full week now. Now let's just do that another eleven or twelve times and we'll be set.

Of course, being the seventh day, all the kanji I've studied over the week decided to smack me all at once. It was almost like a boss battle. Tears were shed, blood was spilled...You should've been there. Quite the sight to behold.

Today, Anki prescribed 34 cards for review (a number of kanji I studied Monday through Saturday), in addition to the 24 new ones I studied today (which puts me at a total of 133 - Eevee's Pokedex number). Somehow, even being attacked by nearly 60 flashcards simultaneously, I seem to have struggled only with five of the review characters. Although I would very much like to master and internalize each kanji the first time I see it, if I only forget 5 for every ~133 I learn, then that means I'll only be shaky on 80 out of 2100 by the time this journey is finished. Not ideal, but certainly not bad, either.

You may have wondered why I kept emboldening the word "only". Well, that's a wee bit of foreshadowing. The character for "only" is one of the five that I struggled to remember. It looks something like this:

只

The keyword in the book for that character is "only", and jisho.org gives additional definitions such as "merely", "just", "simply", and the like.

One might wonder how I can easily remember 9 stroke kanji like 専 ("specialty") and 11 stroke kanji like 副 ("vice-") without difficulty, but struggle with something as simple-looking as the 5 stroke 只. Well, I think it comes down to two things:

1. The abstract nature of the keyword
2. The lack of complexity in the kanji

The first is rather straightforward. In general, memory is going to be much better at storing concrete information than that which is nebulous, at best. I think the Baker/baker paradox illustrates this rather well. You should Google it for a more detailed explanation, but in summary it's a psychological experiment in which a person is asked to remember someone whose last name is "Baker" and another person is asked to remember someone whose profession is "baker". Though they are given the same word, the second person invariably has an easier time recalling the word when prompted for it later.

The reason for this is that the surname "Baker" doesn't have any significance to the person, but the profession "baker" is immediately associated with things in the mind like bread and pastries and ovens, and all those connections strengthen the memory of the word.

Suffice it to say, "only" doesn't really do that for me. With no concrete meaning, it's difficult to associate with any particular symbol, regardless of the mnemonic used. The book offers up the image of Pac-Man (seeing as the kanji 只 is a mouth on top of a pair of legs), and thinking of the creature as the only one in existence. That hasn't really worked for me thus far, so I'll be thinking of other clever ways to remember this character if it continues to be an issue. I'm hoping that by enumerating all the reasons I can't remember it, I'll end up having an easier time doing just that.

Speaking of reasons, the second reason listed above - that of complexity - might seem counter-intuitive, but I think the more complex kanji are actually easier to remember. They engage your brain much more - you'll have to draw a dozen or more lines just to get the symbol down on paper. On top of that, because complex kanji have so many more elements, you have that much more fodder to use for ridiculous stories to help remember the meaning. Forming a memorable story for 博 ("Dr.", with radicals meaning "needle", "ten", "rice field", and "glue") and thus remembering the character's meaning is a cakewalk. Doing the same for 只 (which is a square on top of two lines) is not.

The author did warn that these early kanji would have some of the most difficult mnemonics, and I think the point above is what he was alluding to.

Now that I've pontificated about the word "only" and 只 for half an hour, I can move on to the other four kanji that gave me trouble:

肘 - "elbow". When prompted, I mistakenly wrote the kanji for "texture" - 肌 (also has the meaning of "skin", according to jisho). This was a minor lapse in judgment, not likely to happen again. As a side note, you may have noticed that 月, when it appears as a component in other kanji, often goes from meaning "moon" to "body part". I'm sure there's a reason for this somewhere in Japanese history.

朝 - "morning". I accidentally switched the order of the two components. I haven't studied enough kanji yet to be 100% sure, but I think a good rule of thumb is that, if 月 appears on the right, it retains its meaning of "moon", but if it shows up anywhere else (to the left, as in "texture" and "elbow" above, or on the bottom as in 胃, meaning "stomach") it switches to body part. With this in mind, I shouldn't forget the order again.

亘 - "span". Also has the similar meanings of "range" and "breadth", according to jisho. I'll be honest - I just completely blanked on this one, and I have no idea why. It seems so obvious - you've got the character for "sun" above a floor and beneath a ceiling, as if it's rising (or falling), marking the span of a single day. Not sure how I managed to miss it. From what jisho shows, it doesn't look to be a very common one, at any rate.

昇 - "rise up". When given this keyword, I wrote 旭 instead, which means "rising sun". This was more a matter of confusing one English keyword with another, rather than confusing the actual kanji. Though the character 昇 is given the keyword "rise up" and has the character for sun in it, it doesn't strictly refer to the natural process of the sun rising into the sky. It can be used similarly to the many different English connotations the phrase has - getting a pay raise or a promotion ("rising up" through the ranks), for example. Contrast with 旭, which has the very specific meaning of "rising sun" or "morning sun" and has no other connotations. Having looked up the differences on jisho, I think I'll be good to remember from here on out.

Now with the review kanji out of the way, let's talk about some of the new ones! That's why you're all here, right? As aforementioned, there were 24 new ones, but I'll just list a few.

石 - "stone". Though it looks (and is) rather simple, I think I'll remember it just because of how many other kanji it shows up in, like:

砂 - "sand"

硝 - "nitrate" (it never occurred to me that chemical compounds - nitrate typically being NO₃ - would have their own character)

And, my personal favorite - winner of today's Honorable Mention Award^TM

砕 - "smash". I honestly don't even have a mnemonic for this one. I'll remember it by virtue of it meaning "smash" and nothing else. (December can't come soon enough)

Second mention goes to:

奇 - "strange". It's used in words and phrases like "miracle", "odd number" and "magician" - the latter literally being three kanji meaning "strange", "art" and "master" put together.

Final mention goes to:

妙 - which looks to share some meaning with the above but with a more positive connotation, given the keyword "exquisite" in the book. The fact that it's the symbols for "woman" and "few" put together means the mnemonic practically writes itself.

Phew.

That was a long post. Not as long as some Awesome Land posts (which you all should be doing, by the way), but still a lot - I probably spent as much time typing this as I did going through the book and reviewing my flashcards. Hopefully these posts are entertaining/informative for you all. If not, then they at least help me to reinforce whatever was learned for the day.

Now that I've used up my mental energy, hopefully I'll be able to get a good night's sleep.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Eight:

So this lesson of the book - Lesson 8 (coinciding nicely with the eighth day of study) - was long. Like 51 different kanji long. I opted to study 25 today (bringing me up to 158) and will finish out the remaining 26 tomorrow.

Despite its length, I think this section is my favorite part of the book thus far. The chapter aims to make you feel like the Avatar, giving you the characters for water, earth, and fire, and showing a number of the kanji that contain those elements as...well, elements. Today's half of the chapter focused on water, while tomorrow's will encompass earth and fire.

The chapter starts off with the character for "stream" 川 (one I already knew, pronounced "kawa") and then moves on to the symbol for water proper. That too is one I already knew (I mean, who doesn't?) -　水, pronounced "sui" (on'yomi) or "mizu" (kun'yomi) depending on the context. Though reading and recognizing it is something with which I'm already well acquainted, writing it is another story entirely. No matter how many times I scrawl on this sheet of paper, I can't get it to look "right". I'm following the stroke order, and Google recognizes it when I scribble it on the touchscreen, but to my eye it just seems...off. Alas, I'll just practice it more, knowing full well the times in which I'll actually have to write it will be few to non-existent.

When the character 水 is a part of other kanji, it can appear as itself or, more frequently, as three drops to the left of the character. Examples follow:

氷 - "icicle". When I drew it in Google, it gave me the pronunciation "hyou", so I'm going to guess that it forms the first part of Hyourinmaru, for all you Bleach fans out there. (I'm still on this godforsaken Sword Beast arc please save me)

泉 - "spring", as in the bubbling fountain of water. It's the "sen" in "onsen" (Japanese hot springs, everyone's favorite type of anime episode).

永 - "eternity". For me, this has been the hardest of all the water variants to draw due to the weird shape of the middle part that just won't stick in my head. It also has the least water-like meaning, though I'm sure there's some ancient Japanese poetic reason the character means what it does.

Where it appears as three drops, the meanings of the kanji can much more varied. Some still have that whole "wet" meaning:

沼 - "marsh" (or "swamp", if you feel like listening to All Star).

汁 - "soup"

江 - "creek"

Others are much less moist:

消 - "extinguish" is the keyword given in the book, which I guess can still have the connotation of water if you think of a fire extinguisher. According to jisho, it can more generally mean something like "delete" or "erase" or "disappear".

活 - "lively"

況 - "but of course" is the phrase the book would have my associate the character with. It's used in Japanese expressions that are roughly akin to our "not to mention" or "let alone", according to jisho. Being another abstract keyword with a not-all-that-complex character, I can foresee having trouble remembering this one.

Today's honorable mention awards go to:

原 - "meadow". I'm putting this here because it's the same as "spring", just in an enclosure, and when it's in this enclosure, apparently they just decide not to draw the full character for water at the bottom. It's funny because there is a kanji 厡 (with the water symbol intact) but apparently they just don't use it anymore.

源 - "source". The same character above, now with more water. It means something like the "source" of a river, and can more generally mean the "origin" of any number of things. It's one of those characters where the pictographic etymology makes sense.

願 - "petition", also given the definitions of "wish", "vow", "request" and the like on jisho. Putting this here because I have no idea why the kanji for "meadow" is smooshed in there. It just amuses me. It's also got the highest stroke count of any kanji I've learned thus far, sitting at a cool 19.

潮 - "tide". I just really like the way this one looks. Historically, it means "morning tide" (it's the kanji for "morning" with three drops added) to contrast with 汐 ("evening tide", the kanji for "evening" with three drops added) but the two have the same pronunciation and are used interchangeably, it seems. The two can be put together to refer to tides at any time of day.

And finally, the last honorable mention goes to:

順 - "obey". As the Dark Lord, it's only natural that I include this here.

In addition to the 25 new kanji I studied today, Anki prescribed 25 for review. The only two that gave me trouble were:

直 - "straightaway". During review, I drew the little "L" shape upside down and on top of the rest of the character because I couldn't remember which way it enclosed the symbol. Shouldn't happen again.

嗅 - "sniff". I reversed the order of the elements 自 (given the mnemonic meaning of "nose" when it appears in other kanji) and 犬 ("dog") there. I think if I just remember that the "nose" needs to be above the "dog" - as if the dog's nose is up in the air sniffing - I should remember this easily enough.



Well, it's 10:54, and I started this post at 10:00 after having immediately finished reviewing flashcards (which Anki says took 48 minutes), so typing this wall of text actually took longer than it did to study the flash cards (though not as long as it did to go through the material in the book in the first place). You all had better appreciate this.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Nine:

Feeling good, mainly because I got a relatively early start on my studies today, meaning I won't be up until midnight staring at symbols until my vision gets blurry. Before I go into the kanji that were in this particular unit, I wanted to discuss why people think kanji are difficult. Or why I think people think kanji are difficult, anyway.

The above thought came to me as I was looking at one of today's kanji - 照 - given the keyword "illuminate" in the book. It got me thinking about a kanji from the previous lesson which happens to be a component - 昭 - meaning "shining". To the untrained eye, it looks like a random assortment of lines. But to me (and to you, if you've been following along), it's just a bunch of building blocks we've already learned: 日 ("sun") and 召 ("seduce"), the latter being made of 刀 ("sword") and 口 ("mouth"). Now, the word "shining" doesn't really have anything to do with the meanings of those components - but that's just it. They're just components. Symbols that can have meaning on their own, but can also be arranged in a number of fashions to form entirely unrelated words. In this sense, they don't really differ from our English alphabet.

Let's take a few letters as an example: 'a', 'e', 'r' and 't'. I can arrange those to spell the word "rate", which can mean "to evaluate" or "the change in something over time" or "price/cost". I can take those same letters and rearrange them to spell "tear", which can be either "to rip" or "make an opening" or "a drop of salty water that comes from your eyes after you've been working too long". Then I could switch them again to spell "tare", a word which has any number of definitions relating to weight. And even after all that, I could use just a subset of those letters ("rat", "tar", "eat", "tea"), or even just one by itself, like "a", the indefinite article used to denote a single object but only if the following noun starts with a consonant.

Knowing a single one of those words would in no way help you with any of the others, nor would knowing all four of those letters necessarily help you in forming any of those words if you didn't already know them. The only advantage these letters have is that they are phonetic (sometimes), which will help you insofar as you need to sound a word out.

If you take away that phonetic advantage (which isn't all that useful in the grand scheme of things, really), then kanji are just as simple (or complex, if you want to be a pessimist) as their Latin based counterparts. I can put "sword" and "mouth" together to spell "seduce" just like I can put 'a' and 't' together to spell "at". And I can put "sun" and "seduce" together to spell "shining" just like I can put 'r' and "at" together to spell "rat".

What kanji have over the various alphabets used in the West is a sort of self-defining characteristic when used to spell complete words, something you wouldn't get in English without knowing a bunch of obscure Latin/Greek/Indo-European etymological roots.

Take, for example, 消火器 - the word for "fire extinguisher". It's the symbols for "extinguish", "fire" and "utensil" put together. 火器 - "firearms" - is just "fire" and "utensil". 朝食 - "breakfast" - is just "morning" and "food". Knowing the symbols and their meanings leads to an almost magical rate of vocabulary acquisition that cannot be matched in English. Here in Japanese, you may not know how to pronounce a word when first looking at it, but you would at least be able to gather its meaning. Conversely, in English, you may be able to sound a word out when you see it for the first time (assuming you're familiar with the various phonetic exceptions), but you probably wouldn't have any idea what it means.

I type all that to say that both sets of characters are just building blocks, and both have their advantages, but neither is inherently more difficult. Kanji will naturally take more time to learn, of course, since there are two orders of magnitude more of them than there are letters in the English alphabet, but a greater time investment does not equal difficulty. They're different, but not harder. I think that perspective - and being able to acknowledge the similarities between what you want to learn and what you already know - goes a long way.

Alright. Now let me get off my soapbox here and start discussing the kanji for this lesson. As mentioned yesterday, the characters in this chapter focused on the classical elements, half of the characters using the symbol for water in some way, and the other half using the symbols for fire or earth, which are as follows:

火 - "fire".
土 - "soil" is the keyword in the book, but dirt/ground/earth and the like are acceptable as well.

Occasionally, 火 will appear like four small lines when it's in another kanji, as in:

照 - "illuminate".

Oftentimes it is content to be itself:

炎 - "inflammation" (according to jisho, it's used in much the same way as we would use the suffix "-itis")

灰 - "ashes"

災 - "disaster"

The kanji for "soil" has only appeared as itself thus far:

圧 - "pressure". As with English and its root word, the Japanese character can be used in words like "compression" or "oppression".

吐 - "spit" is the keyword given, which makes sense pictographically if you think of the first thing you'd do if you had a mouth full of soil.

垣 - "hedge", though it can also mean "fence" or "wall" according to jisho.

均 - "level", in the sense of "smoothing something out" or "balancing". Shout out to Thanos.

Honorable mentions today:

湖 - "lake". I knew this was pronounced "mizuumi", because I'd used it in a number of conversations before. (Japanese girls go crazy when you tell them your house is next to a lake [boku no ie ha mizuumi no tonari desu]. It's nice to be able to recognize the written form of the word now.

漁 - "fishing". I just like the way it looks.

Reviews from previous lessons that gave me trouble today:

貢 - "tribute". When prompted for the keyword, I wrote 員 ("employee") instead. I think if I remember that the "mouth" character is used in "employee" (since employees are human and have mouths) and the "craft" character (alternatively, "industry" or "construction") is used in "tribute" (since making a tribute of money is necessary for industry to thrive), I should be good here.

有 - "possess". The components given in the book are "by one's side" (the curved 't' shape) and "moon". That first radical is difficult for me to remember since it's one of those abstract concepts. Hopefully I'll remember when I type it here. Incidentally, 有 is actually the "a" in "aru" and "arimasu" ("to be", "to have", "to exist") for all you kids who took elementary Japanese, but I think hiragana are used almost exclusively in practice when spelling that word out.

That's all I have for now. Once again, this post took an hour (and as I confirmed in chat, none of you are reading it, apparently), but it's worth it just to organize my thoughts and cement the material studied for the day. Now it's off to bed (after playing a little Undertale because Toby Fox deserves all the お金).

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Ten:

So in exchange for getting home and starting my studies at a decent time yesterday, fate decided that I would be called back in to work at 11 and not leave until 6 in the morning. That'll teach me to think I could have a good day. [insert eye rolling emoji]

Anyway, today I studied another 21 new kanji, which puts me just over the 200 mark (205, to be precise). That means I'm almost 10% of the way there. I just have to do what I've done for the last week and a half nine more times and I'll be just about done. Considering I've now been through 262 episodes of Bleach, learning the kanji seems like a leisurely stroll in comparison.

The "theme" for this unit was kanji that have a 'roof' over their head, such as 字 - the symbol for character. Incidentally, that happens to be the "ji" in "emoji" (which is technically a Japanese word, for those of you who didn't already know).

None of the kanji seemed all that exciting or difficult, so the honorable mention will be restricted to just one character:

黒 - "black". As my preferred color, of course it's going to be listed here. Not much else to say. A neat tidbit, though, is that "black" in Japanese can be used to form all the same compounds as "black" in English, like "blackboard" 「黒板」 or "black person" 「黒人」.

One of the radicals for that character is 里 ("ri"), some ancient Japanese unit for distance that has long since fallen out of favor. I'm noting it here for no other reason than to pay tribute to the poor thing.

Review wise, the kanji that tripped me up:

賄 - "bribe". I knew the first component there 「貝」 ("shellfish") but, as mentioned yesterday, my memory is still shaky with regard to the 有 character, meaning "possess". If I can keep the latter in my mind, then "bribe" follows naturally as "someone possessed by shells", treating shells as a unit of currency as they might have been in some ancient civilization.

頂 - "place on the head". We went through this on Day Five, where I wrote about how obnoxious it was. I really don't like that keyword. It just doesn't sit well with me, and associating it with any particular mnemonic device has proven to be challenging. Today I ended up stealing a mnemonic from someone on the Kanji Koohii website. It takes advantage of the fact that the 丁 component means "street". The mnemonic this person used was "What do you get when you put a street sign on your head? A place on the head!" It's a very low tier dad joke, but at this point I'll take whatever helps that character stick.

砂 - "sand". When prompted for that keyword, I drew 沙, which in the book has the keyword "grains of sand". You can see where this might cause some confusion. Looking 沙 up on jisho, I see that it's just given the meaning of sand, adding to the potential for conflating the two. However, jisho also shows that the latter kanji can mean "one-hundred millionth" and is a part of the word 恒河沙 ("gougasha"), meaning "innumerable" (the obvious rationale being the impossibly large number of grains of sand in the world). With this information, I can see why the book would use the keywords that it did. The former is sand more generally, the latter sand individually, with all the connotations that go with it. Of course, none of this knowledge actually helps me to remember which is which, but the context makes me feel a little better, at least.

The normal kanji for sand 「砂」 has as a component the character for "stone" 「石」, so I think I can keep those two linked together in my head. Then for "grains of sand", I can just picture something very tiny, like the three drops that appear in the character 沙. It's not the cleanest way of remembering, but again, whatever works.

Scrolling through my notebook here, it looks like I've answered a review card incorrectly 11 times. Considering I'm now up to 205 kanji, I don't think that's too bad. Many of the ones I've missed are much clearer in my mind, too, since Anki's spaced repetition system tracks problem flashcards and makes them show up more frequently. Between Anki and my posts here, kanji like 只 ("only") and 昇 ("rise up") are much more familiar to me. Assuming I keep this rate up, by the time my study of the 2136 kanji on the Joyo list is complete (the kanji for "complete", by the way, is 了), I'll only be shaky on about ~102 characters. That's about a 96% success rate, which I will gladly take for a task this gargantuan.

That's all I've got to say for now. Hopefully this evening will be quieter than yesterday's. This is the earliest I've finished my studies on a weekday thus far, so I'm setting myself up for a good night. Now I'm just going to knock on wood so I don't jinx myself.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Eleven:

I'm rather tired today for reasons that needn't be explained here and I needed some time to decompress. Not to mention Anki prescribed 40 cards for review today (well, 39 plus 1 "new" card that I forgot to add yesterday). With those factors in mind, I opted not to study new kanji today, so I'm still sitting at 206.

Even with 40 cards to review, many of them were still very clear in my head. Of the 40, the only one that I couldn't quite remember was:

沖 - "open sea" was the keyword given in the book. The three drops that indicate "water" were easy enough to remember but, as usual, it's the more abstract components that I have trouble recalling. The symbol on the right is 中 (which means "in" or "middle" or, if you prefer "in the middle"). I have no trouble remembering that symbol on its own (looking it up on jisho, it's the 11th most used kanji in newspapers, which goes to show you how inescapable it is). It's as a component of this kanji where I struggled. It's easy to think of the "open sea" as being outin the middle of some body of water. It's just a matter of getting to that "in the middle" part, being as abstract as it is. Hopefully by my ranting about it here, it'll stick. Incidentally, 沖 happens to be the "oki" in "Okinawa". The more you know.

Had minor trouble with:

光 - "ray" is the keyword given. You may know it better as hikari ("light"). I drew two horizontal lines under the three strokes instead of just one. I run the risk of confusing it with 元 ("beginning", and the "gen" in "genki") if I'm not careful, so I'm noting it here to remind myself.

Missing two out of forty isn't bad, I think. If this were a test, that'd be a 95% - solid 'A' material.

I think it might not be a bad idea to take a day every week and a half or two weeks to focus strictly on review in lieu of learning new kanji. The way Anki works, it prescribes review cards exponentially further into the future the more your prove you have a solid remembering of them. During study, you mark a card as "easy", "good", "hard" or "again". If you study a new card on Day 1 and mark it as "good", it will come up on Day 2. If you instead marked it as "easy", it will come up again on Day 5. If on Day 5 you mark it as "good", it will come up seven days later, but if you label it "easy", it will come up in twelve days. If, alternatively, on Day 5, you label it "hard", it will come up on Day 10, and if you'd marked it as "again", it would come up ten minutes later and guarantee that it showed up the next day. At a certain point, if you've demonstrated mastery of whatever you're reviewing, it won't show up again for months. I use (used?) the same program for hiragana when I first started studying Japanese, and it's at the point where they're set to show up once every 7.2 years.

With that in mind, it's easy to see that - between 20-25 new cards a day and varying degrees of familiarity with each - a lot can end up compounding on the same day, increasing the short term review load. To ease some of the pressures of study, a dedicated review day seems like a really good idea. I'll have to decide if I should have one at regular intervals (e.g. every two weeks) or only when the review kanji exceed a certain amount (e.g. 40 or more).

Unrelated (partially), but this video showed up in my YouTube recommended list:



It's as if the site said, "hey, you like this song, right? And you like studying Japanese? Well, how about this song in Japanese?" Gotta love the algorithm. God bless our overlords at Google.

On the subject of videos, I think, once I've mastered the kanji, I'm going to try watching some weebtoons with Japanese subtitles. I'll probably have to review some N3 grammar points first, but as soon as I feel comfortable stopping using English to enjoy Japanese media (and that's all Japanese media - study materials, stories, subtitled music videos and anime), then that's exactly what I'm doing. Probably not even when I feel comfortable, because learning new things is an inherently uncomfortable experience. I think I mentioned it in the first post, but any sufficiently advanced study of Japanese will require materials that are in Japanese.

I also intend to play through one of the original Pokemon games in Japanese. Nintendo is kind enough to offer different language variants of the games on their 3DS eShop. I could probably do that right now, to be honest. Being made for children, the vocabulary isn't particularly nuanced, and based on screenshots, it looks like they mainly use kana anyway. Not to mention I've played Red/Blue so many times that I know the "plot" like the back of my hand. The most challenging part would probably be adjusting to the different font used in those old GB games. Japanese characters can look quite different from font to font. Maybe I'll do this as a post kanji reward/challenge come December.

All that's a long way (like two or three months) off, though. Just noting it here as a reminder of why I'm studying kanji in the first place. Keeping the goal in mind will prevent me from getting discouraged, especially with days (and weeks) as tough as the last few have been.

Until next time.

[Monika]

Day Twelve:

Cracked open my kanji book and got about halfway through the section before I began yawning and my eyes started to glaze over. Opened up Anki and saw that I had thirty review cards due today. Realized how tired I was from the wee's events. Opted to make today another review day. Can't make a habit of this, of course, because I won't reach my goal by the target deadline. I'm at the point where these review cards are starting to get pushed to 2 weeks out, so they shouldn't all compound on the same day. Add this to the fact that I'm off call and won't have to spend four hours getting a haircut tomorrow, and I should be able to resume my normal pace of study.

The only kanji to give me trouble during review was 点, with the keyword of "spot", in the sense of "point" or "speck". It is also part of words 点く (tsuku), meaning "to be lit" or "to catch fire", a meaning that you might gather from the four small lines at the bottom of the kanji (those lines being a representation of fire in other symbols).

I remembered that the kanji was composed of the ones for fire and fortune telling 「占」, but I couldn't remember what form fire was in. If I think of the four small lines at the bottom as "specks" of fire, then remembering which form fire takes should be simple enough. As usual, getting it wrong and typing about it here helps it stick.

That's all I have to say for now. This next section looks to have 42 new kanji, so I think I'll study 21 tomorrow and 21 on Sunday. Then I'll be at the 250 mark, well over 10% of the target. Even on days like this, where I can barely keep my eyes open, the thought of making progress brings me no small measure of excitement. Now I'm going to go brush my teeth and crawl into bed.

Until next time.

[Monika]

Day Thirteen:

Getting back into the swing of things with 23 new kanji today. This section starts off with the kanji for "tree" 「木」 and then moves on to a number of kanji that have that symbol in them. As you might have guessed, such kanji will probably have something to do with trees or wood in some way. Consequently, all of them were pretty easy to remember, which serves as a very nice way to ease me back into studying after a couple of very long, very frustrating days at work that exhausted me to the point where I could only do review.

I'll just list a few kanji as an example of the unit's theme:

木 - "tree", as said above. I remember that its (on'yomi) pronunciation is "moku", as in 木曜日 ("mokuyoubi", meaning "Thursday".)

林 - "grove". A collection of trees. Pretty easy to see the rationale here.

森 - "forest". An even larger collection of trees.

本 - "book". Not too difficult to imagine why "book" would look very similar to "tree". Pronounced as "hon". This very common character (even the least studious of you probably know it) also means "true" or "origin" as in 本当に (hontouni - "truly") and 日本 (Nihon - "Japan", literally "sun origin").

Honorable mention will go to kanji I just happened to find interesting, since none were particularly difficult:

燥 - "parch" is the keyword given in the book. Jisho lists "dry up" as an alternative meaning. The components are 火 ("fire"), 品 ("goods") and 木 ("tree"). The story in the book had me imagine using fire to dry wood goods (i.e. paper) to form parchment. It's a bit convoluted, perhaps, but has personal significance to me considering the industry I'm in.

暦 - "calendar". I just like how this one looks. It's composed of the radicals for "cliff", "grove" and "sun". From a literal standpoint, I think the only character that makes sense with regard to that definition is 日. But this is an imaginative 2200 character long exercise, where logic and reason have no place. The book offered up a suggestion of picturing a couple of trees trying to grow beneath a cliff, day by day, until at the end of a year they had burst through the top of it. It's a bit silly, but it helps the image stick. The kanji looks neat enough to me that I don't think I'll have trouble remembering it, regardless.

The only minor trouble I had was with:

村 - "village". I actually knew this one, but my Anki flashcard deck had it labeled as "town" (for which the kanji designated in the book is 町). I'm leaving this here as a reminder to adjust this flashcard tomorrow to have the appropriate keyword. I imagine this may come up a handful of times - with ~2200 characters there is bound to be some overlap in the meaning. The book does its best to give each kanji a unique keyword, so I'll have to make sure the flashcards follow suit.

That's about all I have to say with regard to the day's studies. With that additional 23 kanji under my belt, I now know 229, putting me over 10% regardless of the metric we're using (the 2136 on the Joyo list prescribed by the Japanese government, or the 2200 included in the book - which adds a few dozen characters found in names).

Speaking of names, I was watching Bleach today (episode 265 - the last episode of the Sword Beast arc, thank goodness) and saw the characters 石田 appear in the opening credits. I was able to recognize them ("stone" and "rice field"), draw them in Google, and learn that together they are pronounced "ishida", like everyone's favorite Quincy. It was rather rewarding to see and recognize the two characters, and even more rewarding to learn how they were pronounced afterward. I imagine these moments will come by more frequently as I progress in my studies, and I look forward to enjoying that gratifying feeling each and every time.

The remaining kanji now number less than 2000. What initially seemed like an incredibly daunting task now seems more and more like an inevitability. I just have to keep doing what I'm doing for a few more months.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Fourteen

I've been doing this consistently for two weeks now. Hooray.

Today I went through the second half of yesterday's unit, which introduced a new radical - a horizontal line with two short vertical strokes through it - assigned the meaning of "flower" (because it appears at the top of the character 花 hana, meaning "flower", though the kanji itself hasn't come up in the book yet).

With that radical in tow, I was able to go through twenty more kanji. Before I cover the ones that use that radical, I want to note two particular kanji that were in this section:

未 and 末

As you might be able to tell, the two kanji are virtually indistinguishable. The only difference is that the first has a shorter top stroke and the second has a shorter bottom stroke.

Despite this, they have rather different meanings.

未 - "not yet". For this kanji, the book would have me picture a tree that is not yet done growing, as evidenced by the fact that the topmost branch is still short and has room to expand.

末 - "extremity" is the keyword given in the book (chosen, perhaps, for its more concrete imagery), but more generally it means "end", per jisho. Again, the book would have me picture a tree - this one having reached the extremity of its growth with the top branch now fully expanded and drooping downward.

In a sense, the two almost have opposite meanings - one implying that something is still continuing and the other that it has reached its conclusion. I imagine confusing the two could cause quite a bit of trouble (think the "inflammable means flammable" joke from The Simpsons), so I've noted them to help emphasize their differences. Pictographically, given the imagery in the book, I don't anticipate mixing the two up, but it won't hurt to call them out anyway.

With that said, let's move on to some of the new kanji. There were a few neat ones, so they'll all get the honorable mention award.

株 - "stock". I love the cross-etymological explanations the book will occasionally give. This kanji means "stock" in the sense of shares of a publicly traded company, but also "stock" as in the stump of a tree, which makes sense considering the character has the symbol for "tree" in it. The English word "stock" comes from an old Proto-Germanic word meaning "tree trunk", and shares the varying meanings of its Japanese counterpart. Incidents like these stoke the conspiratorial flames in me and would have me believe that all the languages in the world are variants of some ancient mother tongue given to us by aliens.

苦 - "suffering". The radical for "flower" on top of the character for "old". Blumenkranz immediately started playing in my head when I saw it. I appreciate how symmetrical it is.

妹 - "younger sister". I've made reference to my imouto a number of times in written communication, so I've seen this kanji around a few times before, but I hadn't really appreciated the significance of its writing until now. It's the symbol for "woman" 「女」 and the symbol for "not yet" put together. The definition practically writes itself.

苛 - "bullying", defined as "torment" on jisho. I can't not have this kanji here. It's too good.

味 - "flavor". This kanji doesn't speak to me in any particular way, but I'm listing here to emphasize some of the very logical rationale that many of the characters follow. If a kanji has the 口 ("mouth") character in it (usually at the left), there's a good chance the kanji is going to have to do something with a mouth. 吐 ("spit") is a good example. 唱 ("chant") is another one.

朱 - "vermillion". Aside from looking neat, I think I might forget this one if I don't note it here. I'm not sure how the Japanese got "vermillion" out of this symbol - the book would have me picture a vermillion leaf falling from a tree. I'm sure there's some etymology in there waiting to be discovered. Incidentally, when my grandfather got me a PSP for Christmas some 13 years ago, The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion was the first game I got for it. Looking at in on Wikipedia now, I can see that the Japanese title indeed uses the 朱 character.

Those are the only ones I'll list for now - there were only 20 kanji left in the section, so I'd end up reciting the entire chapter verbatim if I'm not careful.

Review-wise, today was pretty tough. I don't know if it's because I started studying immediately after crawling out of bed from a nap (and was thus still groggy), but four that I was pretty sure I knew fairly well I ended up missing. There were 33 review cards today, which would put me at a respectable score of 88%, but I can do better than that. The characters were:

砂 - "sand". I'm embarrassed to have missed this. I ended up drawing a non-existent character that replaces the 石 in "sand" with 土. I don't know how it happened. I suppose it's an easy mistake, assuming the character for "sand" would have the character for "earth", but it's one I shouldn't have made. I'll have to remember that good sand has few stones in it.

填 - "inlay". I misdrew the right hand part of the kanji as 直 instead of 真. Incidentally, the former was given the keyword "straightaway" but also means something like "frankness" or "honesty", while the latter means "true". One can see how this mistake was made. I'll have to work on a proper way to clarify the difference.

完 - "perfect". I just completely drew a blank here. The book would have me picture a house (the topmost radical) that is built "perfectly" from the beginning 「元」. I'll have to go over that a couple of times to properly fix the imagery in my head.

照 - "illumination". I wrote at least a paragraph praising this kanji three or four days ago. I don't know how I drew a blank here. It's just "shining" on top of "fire". I'm ashamed that I missed it.

My rationale behind studying immediately after crawling out of bed was that that's when my mind would be most serene and prepared to focus, but in actuality I think it's when my mind is still trying to adjust to the waking world. I think I'll stick to studying in the evenings or after I've been awake for a few hours.

That's all I've got to say for now. Today's characters put me at 249 kanji learned (and a couple that I should go back and review, it seems). That means I'm almost 12% of the way there, with fewer than 1900 left. Just have to keep it up.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Fifteen:

Anki prescribed 41 review cards today - which is just above the arbitrary threshold of 40 I set a few posts ago - so I opted to make today a review day instead of learning new kanji. Truth be told, I wasn't feeling too confident about learning a new batch anyway after yesterday's shaky session, so I suppose I'm glad it worked out this way.

Of the 41 cards, I missed just one - the first one, in fact. It was "possess" 「有」, one that has given me some trouble over the past few days. This time I remembered the character, but drew more than I needed to. I saw the word "possess" but ended up drawing 賄 ("bribe"), a kanji of which "possess" is a part. My mnemonic for "bribe" is "someone who is possessed by shells", so I can see how the keyword "possess" would trigger my brain to send the signal for "bribe" into my hand and onto the paper. There was less than a second in between the time I saw the word and the time I started drawing, so I think I'll attribute this mistake to haste more than anything else. The goal is to finish the cards as quickly as possible so I can mark them all as "easy" and prevent them from showing up so frequently, but obviously that doesn't work if that quickness results in my getting the card wrong. Something to think about for the future.

In any case, I'll be back tomorrow with a few new kanji. This part of the book - it's split into three parts, each with a number of lessons (and each of those with a couple dozen kanji) - has just two lessons left, the next having just 14 new characters. The one after that has 29, from the looks of it. Rather than split them up and do 22 each day, I think I'll just plan to do one lesson tomorrow and the other on Wednesday. After that, I can move on to Part Two of the book, where the author will give me a little more freedom to create my own mnemonics to remember the characters. Something to look forward to.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Sixteen:

As a reward for making it to the 249 kanji mark, today's section of the book started off with a brief summary of the process by which I had been learning thus far. It very clearly outlined its methodology for learning new kanji, which I shall summarize here:

1. 1) Read the key word.
2. 2) Read through its particular story and let the picture establish itself.
3. 3) Close your eyes, focus on the story's images and let it take shape in your mind.
4. 4) Open your eyes and repeat the key word and primitive elements.
5. 5) In your mind, juxtapose the elements in relation to your mind's image.
6. 6) Write the character down on a sheet of paper, retelling the story as you go.

Because we're over the 10% mark, the author takes the time to remind me of the steps, lest we make a wrong move on the journey to 2200 kanji. He suggests that if there's a character I'm struggling with, then it is most likely because I skipped one of those steps. Admittedly, for some of the characters I did rush the process if I felt they were particularly easy to remember (e.g. rice field 田 or large 大). Such is a natural consequence of trying to learn 20+ a day in the few hours I have after work. But today I decided to indulge the author and explicitly go through all six steps for each of today's 14 kanji. Though it took a bit longer to study them (perhaps 1.5 to 2 times as long), I had a much clearer picture of them in my head after the fact, and I went through the flashcards without issue. Whether that's due to the fact that there were fewer of them than normal or the fact that I was exceedingly deliberate in my study this time around is anyone's guess.

Today's kanji weren't anything particularly special (though the word "special" happened to be one of the key words). Most of them had to do with animals. I'm proud to finally know how to be able to draw "cat" now. Since there were only fourteen, I'll just list them all:

猫 - "cat" (pronounced "neko", as all of you weebs out there already know).
犬 - "dog" (pronounced "inu", as most of you weebs out there already know).
牛 - "cow" (pronounced "ushi", as some of you weebs out there already know).

兆 - "portent" (as in a bad omen or predictor of catastrophe. As a radical, it was assigned the meaning of "turtle").

状 - "status quo".

黙 - "silence". The "dama" part of the verb "damaru", meaning "to be silent". Also the "dama" in the imperative "damare", meaning "shut up". Varian says it in the Japanese dub of Ready As I'll Ever Be.

然 - "sort of thing" is the key word given in the book. The author says it gives a noun an adjectival quality, so it's similar to our English suffix "-like" according to jisho.

荻 - "reed", as in the plant. Looking on jisho, it seems to be used primarily in names and also has the scientific nomenclature for a plant native to Japan.

狩 - "hunt".

特 - "special".

告 - "revelation" is the book's key word. Jisho has it listed in words ranging from "confession" to "indictment". Looks like all the terms involve saying something in some way, usually with a stronger connotation than just "saying" something. Of course, this character has the "mouth" symbol 口 in it, so this is to be expected.

先 - "before", in both the temporal and physical senses. It's the "sen" in "sensei", which literally translates to "live before" (presumably meaning someone who has existed before you and has more experience).

桃 - "peach tree" is the key word given in the book, perfect for all you Georgians out there reading this. More generally, it means "peach", and can refer to both the fruit and the color, according to jisho.

眺 - "stare", which of course has the symbol for "eye" 目 in it. I can't think about this symbol and the mnemonic I've associated with it without spontaneously humming one of Eddie Rath's Sharingan songs.

And that's it! Hopefully you all will take these kanji and use them wisely! Whether you do or not, I'll be back tomorrow with 29 more! Then it's to Part Two of the book! Something to look forward to!

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Seventeen:

Well, uh, didn't study any new kanji today because I got sidetracked with other endeavors, so I ended up only reviewing the 27 cards Anki prescribed. Of those, I only missed one:

植 - "plant".

As the author suggested yesterday, I neglected to properly form an image and story in my head when I first learned this kanji. Consequently, it wasn't clear in my mind when I saw the keyword. A lesson not to shortcut the process.

In any case, hopefully I'll get started on those 29 in the next section tomorrow. The sooner I do that, the sooner I can move on to the second part of the book.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Eighteen:

Sorry to disappoint you all, but today was another review day as I spent most of my evening working on something else. Anki prescribed 25 review cards, all of which I got correct.

Tomorrow's Friday, and what I was working on today should be just about done, so hopefully I can finally get to the next 29.

Until next time!

[Monika]

Day Nineteen, Twenty and Twenty-One!

Alright! I'm back! I wanted to space out my studies so that I would start the new unit on the first of October (and also I just kind of didn't want to learn new things over the weekend after another week of nonsense at work), so yesterday and the day prior were just review. Today, though, we're back at it with full force and 30 new kanji.

I decided to do a little experiment of sorts today. Per the author's reminder, I took a more deliberate approach at imagining some mnemonic story to remember the kanji's meaning and associated drawing. Rather than just read through the story given in the book (which will stop in future units, at which point I'll be forced to craft my own), I took the time to get a clear picture of it in my mind. It took a few minutes more per character (which can add up when you're studying 30 of them), but I think it was well worth the additional time investment.

I initially studied the 30 new kanji approximately eight hours ago (as of this posting). Since then, I took a half hour nap, played several hours of Undertale, cooked and ate dinner, washed dishes, and finished some other work. Only after all that, just a few minutes ago, did I decide to review what I studied earlier this afternoon. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough, when I was prompted with a keyword during the review session, the story I'd pictured for it was just as vivid in my mind as it was eight hours prior. Ordinarily I only leave a 20 minute gap between studying new material and review, so it was refreshing to see my mind being able to handle a longer break between the two.

Now that I'm done boasting about such a trivial accomplishment (really, with as long as we've been doing Awesome Land, picturing absurdities in my mind is as natural as breathing), I can move on to today's new kanji. A new radical was introduced in this section - a sort of caret (^) shape - given the mnemonic meaning of "umbrella". The first kanji in the book to use it was:

介 - "jammed in". I only ever recall seeing this kanji in the word 介入 (kainyuu), meaning "intervention", which I guess makes sense in the context of the book's keyword. Jisho gives the kanji additional meanings like "mediate" or to "concern oneself with", which lend a bit more sense to the word "intervention", I think (in addition to the other words 介 appears in, like "nursing", "assistance" and the like.

Another kanji introduced was;

王 - "king". This one I already knew and is simple enough to remember.

Together, either the "caret" radical, 王, or both appeared in just about all of the other kanji in today's lesson, such as:

塔 - "pagoda".

全 - "whole", which you may recognize from 全て or 全部, both of which mean "all".

現 - "present" (as in not "past" or "future").

The two also appear as radicals in what will be my favorite kanji of the day:

金 - "gold". More generally, it can refer to money, as in お金 (okane) or any other metal. The mnemonic in the book was extremely convoluted, but the author lampshaded it by saying he'd apologize if the kanji didn't appear so frequently. Because of its use in just about any word that has to deal with metal, you would have to make a conscious effort not to remember it. Examples include:

銑 - "pig iron" (iron that has not been fully refined yet).

銅 - "copper"

針 - "needle" (and also "hook", "staple", "clock hand", and other thin metallic things).

It's also the first character in 金曜日 (kinyoubi), meaning "Friday". (Fun fact: the days of the week in Japan are pretty much all elements - 日曜日、月曜日、火曜日、水曜日、木曜日、金曜日、土曜日. Sun (light/yin), Moon (darkness/yang), Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, Earth). Needless to say, it has become one of my favorites to draw.

Honorable mention goes to:

狂 - "lunatic". The story given in the book asked me to picture a "lunatic" (in the purest sense of the word - someone who had gone crazy under the light of the moon) who was a werewolf and declared himself the king of a pack of wild dogs (the first half of the character's assigned mnemonic). I ended up associating this with Koga from Inuyasha, of all things, and now I can't so much as see the keyword without humming the main theme. Such is what happens when you clarify the mental imagery in an attempt to remember the character.

皇 - "emperor". On top of looking cool, it's the kanji for "white" above the kanji for "king", which seems very fitting. Easy enough to remember, since it is my future title.

主 - "lord". A single drop above the kanji for "king". Easy enough to remember, since it is my current title.

珠 - "pearl". This one I'm noting here because it means "pearl" but it's the symbols for "king" (which has a dual mnemonic meaning of "jewel") and "vermilion" smashed together. Truth be told, I've never seen a vermilion pearl before, so I'm just kind of picturing a magical fire-elemental gem. Hopefully typing it here will add some sense to the meaning.

There were three review cards I missed - 涯 (horizon), 乱 (riot) and 黙 (silence), but I can safely say that any cards I miss are due to my not clearly picturing them in the first place, so I don't think they warrant their own section here. I'll think of proper stories for them to rectify this issue.

That's all I have for now! Tomorrow begins Part Two of the book, which does a little less hand holding. I look forward to the added flexibility that'll come with it. I'm almost at 300 kanji, which is a nice thing to be able to say. It'll be nicer still when I can say "2000" or "2100". Just have to keep up the momentum.

Until next time!