Japanese Students/Fluents, Give me Your Advice!

I'll have to agree with nabhan - you should be at a certain point before you start dealing with kanji. I'd think that you should have kana mastered before you move on to kanji.

Anywho, I found using books/comics/etc. with furigana (the kana found above kanji) infinitely helpful. The first time you read through something, you know what the word is, so it doesn't inhibit you. But you can always go back and look things up for yourself. And please look things up! I always go in a cycle of reading, looking up, recording, then reviewing new kanji. It might not seem like it at first, but review enough and they'll stick.

This is how I've been going about learning: Firstly, this program helped me a ton with kanji recognition... but any sort of flashcard thing will do. But simple repetition (writing them over and over again) helps me with actively recall them. Giving myself exposure to them (reading Japanese texts, etc.) helps me to get a feel with how they're used. Textbooks help with with technical things like stroke order and meaning, but seeing them in real-world context makes a world of difference.

So... there are no shortcuts, but you can do it if you work hard enough.

That being said, good luck with your studies!

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Minion

But you don't read the symbols, you read the entire word at once as if it were one long streched out character. That's why you can rearrange the letters of words and still read them.

Yeah, but English words are easier to recognize because there are only twenty-six possible characters that they can be composed of. Add a few thousand and you can see where the difficulty comes in.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

While that's true, there are still are over two hundred radicals with even more variants that occur in different positions, and apply for different things (sound, meaning). There's always that sheer number thing you've gotta deal with. You don't have that in English.

How ya doing, buddy?