Writing kanji: doing it the traditional way
A go player once blogged along the lines of “For an effective study, it’s not enough to see on the computer screen. To really feel the flow of the game you must pick the stones and lay it out on a real board.”
Those are wise words indeed, and applies all the same to kanji writing study.
On the early days of my kanji study, I only put “reading” questions on the flash card program Mnemosyne. Those are questions such as:
Q: 火
A: ひ (fire)
When given the question (e.g., “火”), it tests whether you know its reading and meaning. However it doesn’t test your writing ability at all.
Of course, my naive hope was that “if I know how to read it, I’ll know how to write it”. However that certainly isn’t true. For one thing, I know lots of logos (Windows, Firefox, Ubuntu, UGM, ITB, etc) but couldn’t draw them. Practicing reading will only improve your reading ability, and to be able to write there is no way other than to practice writing.
So, realizing that I forget how to draw many kanji, I started putting “writing” questions in Mnemosyne such as:
Q: ひ (fire)
A: 火
(The questions are per kanji, not per word. Therefore there are no questions such as だいがくせい (大学生) because it asks for 3 kanji)
Initially, when faced with writing questions I would draw the kanji on computer using my own program StrokeReplayer. However, writing using the mouse is clumsy so I resorted to the traditional ink and paper:
I’m really feeling the flow of the kanji…
April 21st, 2007 at 10:34 am
Numpang nimbrung nih Mas…
Hm… Saya walau sudah hapal hiragana, masih juga tertatih-tatih membaca deretannya. Masalahnya, kalau menulis, suka lupa urutan strokenya atau cara penulisan. Sementara ini, “konvensi pribadi” yang saya pake “dari kiri ke kanan” dan “dari atas ke bawah”. Kalau untuk urutan stroke, biasanya saya pake “mode berputar” (maksudnya, semua huruf saya anggap ditulis dengan lingkup lingkaran).
Wah, kalo Kanji baru diajarin di level 4. Kira2 awal yang baik bagaimana ya Bos?
April 23rd, 2007 at 8:53 am
>> Saya walau sudah hapal hiragana, masih juga tertatih-tatih membaca deretannya.
Tinggal masalah jam terbang aja. Kalau sering latihan baca lama-lama lancar. Aku inget, waktu awal-awal belajar hiragana dulu aku nyetel mp3, kuset kecepatannya jadi 50% (pake WMP), dan kucoba ngikutin dengan ngebaca hiragana di liriknya.
>> Masalahnya, kalau menulis, suka lupa urutan strokenya atau cara penulisan.
Aku sesekali ngecek lagi stroke order kana, untuk memastikan aja apakah yang kugunakan masih benar. Soalnya bisa saja, kita sudah menghafal yang benar, lalu di tengah jalan kita (nggak sengaja/lupa) menggambar dengan stroke order semaunya sendiri, dan pada akhirnya stroke order “konvensi pribadi” itu yang kita anggap benar :)…
>> Wah, kalo Kanji baru diajarin di level 4. Kira2 awal yang baik bagaimana
Menurutku, cara terbaik memilih kanji yang akan dipelajari adalah mempelajari kanji yang memang muncul di media tertentu, misalnya lirik lagu. Jadi, ada konteks nyata saat mempelajari kanji tersebut. Ya, jadi nggak usah bergantung sama daftar semacam Jouyou Kanji.
(aku pernah nyoba keduanya, mempelajari berdasarkan apa yang muncul di media tertentu vs mempelajari kanji di daftar seperti Jouyou Kanji. Lebih menyenangkan yang pertama)
June 6th, 2008 at 10:45 am
[...] kanji: doing it the traditional way This post has been moved to singularity.agronesia.net: “Writing kanji: doing it the traditional way”. Please visit the new [...]
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:17 pm
[...] have written on my old blog about how important it is to practice kanji writing using Mnemosyne. Here I will describe the process in more detail, not about the way questions are crafted [...]
December 29th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
I learn by drill writing too, but I do whole words instead of single kanji.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Great! I’m actually starting to do that too, following a kanji-kentei practice book. But of course with the enclosed context sentence