日記

A kanji update - How to Japanese - July 2024

This is How to Japanese, a monthly newsletter with something about Japan/Japanese and a dash of いろいろ.

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It’s been three years since I restarted my kanji study. A year ago, I wrote about the experience and all I’d gathered from it. Given that it’s been another year, I thought this would be a good time to write an update on where I am and how/if/whether my thoughts have changed.

The good news is that I stand by everything I wrote. I think it’s helpful to create moments of active learning during kanji study, a part of your Japanese studies that focuses on passive recognition skills. Finding and committing to an Anki deck over an extended (but not overextended) period of time is a useful way to pace yourself to fluency. I think it’s important to give yourself breaks and to build those breaks into your study plans. And you should absolutely prioritize doing something with Japanese (reading/speaking/writing/listening) out in the wild over SRS any chance you get.

The bad news is that I have not looked at my Anki deck a single time since writing that newsletter, other than the occasional login to ensure that the decks aren’t deleted from AnkiWeb. (If you are inactive to too long, all your data will be removed from the service.) As you can imagine, my ability to write kanji has suffered greatly. I can also feel my recall of the pronunciation slipping as well. It doesn’t feel great!

I could provide a number of convincing excuses, dear reader, and an even larger number of less convincing ones, but I don’t think that would be helpful for you. Instead, I’d like to offer one piece of overall advice and one specific kanji solution/alternative.

The first is that if your Japanese study stretches into multiple decades (and mine is now in its third decade, which is almost unfathomable), it will go through seasons. You’ll have times when you’re obsessed with one author or another, one show or another, one band or another. You’ll have a JLPT season or two (which hopefully do not end like a season of Game of Thrones). And you’ll hopefully have seasons when you spend time in Japan, perhaps even living here. This is all to say that you have to ride the waves when they come. If you’re feeling inspired by kanji study, by all means focus on that. If you’re only ever able to pick up the Japanese novelization of bad American action movies from the 1990s, then by all means read those. Just read something, watch something, talk to someone in Japanese.

The language is hard enough on its own. There’s no sense in punishing yourself for choosing to do one thing over another…once you’ve reached a degree of fluency. Until that point you are, to a certain extent, at the mercy of the one requirement to gain fluency: doing something substantial each day (something written, something spoken, something read, and/or something heard) that enables you to take that next step.

Once you’ve reached a foundational level of functional fluency, there’s no longer as much of a need to crack the whip. Ease up and let your study happen naturally. I’ve found that I have an endless patience for Murakami, particularly his writing from the 1980s. My fandom has waned, but I can feel the energy required to devour his travel writing bubbling beneath the surface, contained only by my desire to also maintain a regular reading practice in English, to write, and to play the occasional 100+ hour video game. What is your Murakami? Tap into that as much as you can.

I do have one suggestion that I think might be an interesting alternative to Anki for kanji study.

I experimented with this myself and maintained it for a few months before being derailed by a trip back to the U.S. last November. And that suggestion is this: Keep a written 日記 (nikki, diary) in Japanese and write one 400-character manuscript page each day.

To me, this feels relatively substantial. It usually took me between 10-30 minutes, depending on how much I had to write about that particular day. The goal wasn’t to write kanji from memory but rather to write any kanji at all. I looked up kanji as I needed, and because life is repetitive and boring (or is that just me?), the same topics came up and, as predicted, it turned into a natural SRS system. I did try to experiment with new words and phrases whenever I could, but I also didn’t force it, especially on days when I was tired or wanted to do something else and just needed to get the exercise over with.

Part of the motivation (which clearly wasn’t quite enough, ha) was that I bought 原稿用紙 (genkō yōshi, manuscript paper) notebooks to use, the same kind that authors across Japan (including Murakami) used before word processors. Norwegian Wood was 900 manuscript pages. The notebooks I bought each have 50 pages, which means that Murakami had probably 9-18 notebooks (assuming they have 50 and 100 sheet notebooks?) per draft, and we know that he went through multiple drafts. His suitcases must have been full of notebooks.

As far as what I wrote about, I tried to do automatic writing. The goal wasn’t to create beautiful writing, but rather to let my thoughts pour out onto the page in Japanese. This becomes easier the more Japanese you know, but the only way you can get better is by just doing it.

For those with less grammatical familiarity, I’d recommend taking the same approach as I did with kanji. Spend time Googling grammar patterns as necessary until you’re able to construct a sentence. This will take a minute. Probably longer than the few seconds I needed to look up a kanji. But I’d say it’s worth it. You could start with 200 characters, half a manuscript page, if a full page feels too challenging at the moment.

But this strategy could even work for someone who’s a beginner and doesn’t know many phrases at all. Just write out what you do know, and keep doing it. Every day. That’s what Japanese students do, essentially. Writing what you know will build an increasing familiarity, and by the time you begin expanding the phrases and words in your active vocabulary, the fundamental patterns and kanji will feel like second nature.

But more than anything, don’t beat yourself up. Find a balance. The early seasons of your Japanese study will necessarily need to be more dedicated and intense. Once you shift into higher gears, the engine should hopefully have to do less work to maintain momentum, and you can let yourself coast to a certain extent…unless you happen to be doing a graduate-level degree related to Japanese, in which case, you’ll have to find a source of rocket fuel to launch yourself into a different stratosphere.

For now, though, put the pen to paper and see what results. I’d love to hear from you if you give this a shot! 

いろいろ

• Check out the blog for a link to the podcast and analysis of exactly how much a draft of Norwegian Wood would have weighed. How heavy were those notebooks?

• Shadow of the Erdtree is perfectly whelming (neither over nor under), but the ending is a bit of a letdown. I’m going to have to Google the ways to complete all the NPC quests and whether it’s possible to get a more interesting ending. Alas. But I’m excited for NG+!

• A reserved seat on the Keihan Line Premium Car from Osaka to Kyoto or back is one of the best ways to spend 500 yen in Japan. Yen for yen, maybe even better value than a Shinkansen Green Car seat. I think the Hankyu Line has implemented similar cars on their lines. Look for the kiosks near the Premium Car entrance on the platform.

• The New York Times put up a list of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Perhaps surprisingly, Murakami got no love from the voters. His 21st Century books would be: Kafka on the Shore, afterdark, 1Q84, The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Killing Commendatore, and soon we’ll have The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Murakami may have lost the cool factor he had in past decades. Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84 took 78 and 79 on the reader vote, and only one judge (Morgan Jerkins) included Murakami (Tsukuru Tazaki).