DanielFilan comments on What are you learning? - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Viliam_Bur 15 September 2014 10:50AM

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Comment author: polymathwannabe 15 September 2014 12:20:43PM 2 points [-]

Some years ago I started Japanese, but the kanjis have been a nightmare.

Comment author: DanielFilan 15 September 2014 12:37:50PM 4 points [-]

You might be interested in Remembering the Kanji, a guide to using mnemonics to systematically memorise the meaning of all the kanji. I found it helpful while reinforcing it with flashcards + going to high school Japanese class. Wikipedia page for Remembering the Kanji

Comment author: Micaiah_Chang 16 September 2014 04:00:08AM *  3 points [-]

Along the lines of Remembering the Kanji, but significantly more entertaining is KanjiDamage, which features more yo momma jokes than necessary for learning Japanese, but is moderately entertaining and also provides example compound words and usage.

It also has a premade deck for Anki, if you wish to overcome the initial overwhelming barrier of having to make them. Inferior to making them yourself, as the cards tend to be too dense, but better than loafing around.

Incidentally, even if you do not end up using it, check out the Dupes Appendix which disambiguate homonyms which are also synonyms.

If you plan to practice by reading web pages, I highly recommend Rikaisama for Firefox and Rikaikun for Chrome.

These extensions automatically give definitions upon mousing over Japanese text. Highly useful as a way of eliminating the trivial inconvenience of lookup. I will warn you that EDICT translations (the default back end to rikai) tends to give a very incomplete and sometimes misleading definition of a word (seldom used meanings of a word are presented alongside the common ones without differentiation) but it's still better than nothing. I would advise moving onto a Japanese-Japanese dictionary as soon as possible (probably a year or so down the line depending on commitment).

Comment author: polymathwannabe 15 September 2014 01:58:12PM 2 points [-]

I have all 3 volumes. I need the discipline to sit and open them.