Aguro

Thanks to my JLPT study, today I’ve finished studying the last level 8 Jouyou kanji. With this, I’ve actually completed all the Jouyou kanji! The amount of Jouyou kanji is 1945, which is the year which Indonesia declared its independence! Yay!

The last kanji is 髄 which is used in words such as 骨髄 (kotsuzui, bone marrow) and 真髄 (shinzui, essence). It’s interesting that there is a Japanese cosmetics sold in Indonesia named しんずい (shinzui). If you can stand some gross images click here to see what a marrow looks like.

This is just only the beginning. There is so much in mastering a kanji: its multitude meanings and readings, and most importantly proficiency in using words containing the kanji. I’m still far from that. Well, but still each small milestone must be celebrated :).

I still have 100+ kanji to study for the JLPT, but perhaps I should try a mock test soon and see how well (or nasty) it would turn out…

I hate studying from a kanji list. I believe one’s study should be as personal as possible, and that’s why I advocate reading real materials and studying any kanji you find there.

However for the JLPT there is no choice but to study all kanji that will appear in the test. I have compiled the list of JLPT kanji, so the next task is to study them. But how?

Even among those kanji, I still make a simple prioritization. I will first learn all grade 8 Jouyou kanji. Next will be jinmeiyou kanji, or kanji authorized to be used in names (aka grade 9). The last will be the leftovers.

I have to learn 5 more grade 8 kanji, 109 new jinmeiyou kanji, and 4 leftovers, totaling 118 more kanji. With my special boosted JLPT rate of learning 6 new kanji per day, I should finish them in 20 days…

In taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, one thing you must master becomes evident: kanji. It is no use if you can speak and listen fluently but not able to read what’s written on the test paper. Moreover, the first section (character/vocabulary) go so far as to be a kanji quiz. Witness these first 3 questions from a level-4 test:

問1・来週　金曜日に　電話を　ください。
（1）．来週 １．らいしゅう ２．らんしゅう ３．こいしゅう ４．こんしゅう
（2）．金曜日 １．かようび ２．どようび ３．きんようび ４．もくようび
（3）．電話 １．でんご ２．でんわ ３．かいご ４． かいわ

The test essentially asks you, “how do you read this and this?” When you know the characters and the words, the answer is absurdly easy. All is not lost when you don’t have all the knowledge required since intelligent guessing can be attempted, but that’s for another topic.

The point is, if you have kanji mastery many questions will be reduced to a trivial recall. Normally I don’t recommend studying from artificial lists and instead encourage people to just read real materials and learn the kanji they find along the way. However for test takers, a kanji list would be beneficial, if not necessary.

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Today marks a quite significant day on my kanji study. With the kanji 班, I have finally encountered all elementary school kanji!

Why is it so significant? Well, that’s because I don’t study from the jouyou kanji list but by reading real materials. The kanji that I study are kanji that I found in novels, magazines, blogs, encyclopedias, newspapers, computer games, and other such sources. By studying that way, I have a context by which each character is used, and that increases retention and understanding. So, this small accomplishment is actually just a side effect of my reading activities, not a deliberate consequence of exhausting some artificial list.

There are actually only 1,006 elementary school kanji compared to more than 2,800 characters which I have recorded. It’s interesting that I needed to know almost three times as much to complete this set that is supposed to be elementary. Well, I can proclaim for one thing that 誰 (dare, who) which isn’t on the government’s list is actually more elementary than the last kanji 班 which I encountered.

The kanji itself 班 is read han and means group. Of course the word “group” seems to be elementary, but there is already other kanji which is used often for it, 団 (dan). I found 班 in the word 首班 (shuhan) which means “leader”. Head (首, shu) of the group (班, han) means leader. Makes sense…

The word comes from the Japanese Wikipedia article on WW2:

There are still more kanji to learn, especially with JLPT on the way… Stay tuned for JLPT study tips…

Taboo Chinese character?

When I read articles on the online Mainichi Shinbun, I found a very interesting phenomenon. Often, when the article talks about a person or place’s name from China, a kanji not used in Japan appears. I don’t know what the criteria is, but for some Chinese characters they just put a ※ placeholder and then describes the character somewhere in the article.

Take for example an excerpt from this news article:

北京五輪第４日の１１日、バドミントンの女子ダブルス準々決勝で、小椋久美子、潮田玲子組（三洋電機）は第２シードの杜※、于洋組（中国）にストレート負けした。

　（※は女ヘンに、「青」の月が円）

You can see a Chinese player’s name written as 杜※, and below it is described that ※ stands for a character with “女 on the left, and 青 on the right but the 月 part of 青 replaced by 円). Phew, what a great way to describe a character :).

(strangely, on this Chinese Wikipedia page, you can see that the name is written 杜靖 which doesn’t match the description. Simplified characters in action?)

The reason for this which I could think of is that the publisher fears that Japanese people won’t have the installed fonts. However, I think it’s pretty silly anyway. In Windows XP, when we install CJK support, won’t Chinese fonts also get installed? The mainichi site uses UTF-8 anyway, so it’s not an encoding issue.

Anyway, for describing kanji they use radical terminology like へん (hen) etc. I suggest you visit Eve’s writing about radical terminologies to learn more.

(as a bonus, the article’s title has the word オグシオ in it. It stands for the オグ in 小椋久美子 (Ogura Kumiko) and シオ in 潮田玲子 (Shiota Reiko). What a cute way to name a badminton pair…)

I 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 (that’s for another post) but about the physical process of it.

The basic equipments are a pen and a book. I prefer books with Cartesian lines in it but a more common horizontal-line-only book works fine.

I see squares

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Currently, the kanji subcommittee of Monbushou is reconsidering the relevance of Jouyou kanji with regards to the kanji actually used in the wild. They have released a second draft on June 16th which proposes the inclusion of 188 kanji into Jouyou kanji. Among the proposed kanji are pronouns such as 誰 (dare, who) and 俺 (ore, I), kanji used for place names such as the 畿 (ki) in 近畿 (Kinki), and other frequently used kanji such as 頃 (koro, time) and 岡 (oka, hill). They also proposed dropping some rare kanji such as 勺 (shaku, an old measuring unit equivalent to 18.039 mL). from the list.

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The amount of cards we have to review every day on Mnemosyne depends on a lot of factors. One of the factors is of course how many new cards we add daily.

Earlier, I was so keen on adding items to Mnemosyne that I could add more than 20 Japanese words and 10 kanji every day. But Mnemosyne is one hell of a beast. If we feed him with lots of cards, Mnemosyne will in turn ask lots of cards the next days. It means that you have to spend even more and more time facing your SRS. At one time, I could reach 400 Mnemosyne cards to review each day!

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What a better way to start this blog than to do word and kanji dump? It has been quite a trademarked item at my old blog anyway, and I’m looking forward to continue it here! Just to give some context, my first ever word-dump-like post was in 2005 where I dumped 80 grade 1 kanji and was all crazy with carefully-selected statistically-sound government-approved list. Moving forward almost 3 years, I’ve studied more than 2500 kanji and changed my method to hunt-anything-you-find-in-the-wild-and-ignore-everything-else.

Since the last dump almost 2 months ago, I’ve gathered 47 new kanji and 96 new words. This totals to 2,656 kanji and 11,032 words. I still haven’t found three grade 5 kanji and one grade 6 kanji, in which this batch doesn’t help! Anyway, I have a plan to make a graph of my kanji acquisition once I reach 3,000 kanji, so keep an eye for it.

Sources for the kanji are varied, with ones deserving mention including the novel 「薬草を探せ」 - 光の戦士 まやちゃん 物語 その1 (’Search for the magical plant’ - the tale of the light warrior Maya-chan book 1), something that seems to be a high-level ranting on Aozora Bunko I randomly found about Confucius and Mencius, and the social networking site mixi.

Here are the kanji:

孔架猟秩寮傑升孟浩采巽甫兜嶽痒漉膳麓畫劃冲呑肘獰趙蔽鰻鼡畏猥體隈苫吠椀煽俎轍枡舛桀桝磔沌縷婁擱

And the new words:

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