There are some people out there who insist on studying individual kanji. Let me tell you why that’s a bad idea with the most basic example.
電 means ‘electricty’, and can be used in compounds like 電気 (electricty; light), 電器 (electronic[s]), 電波 (electro-magnetic wave, more commonly referring to mobile phone reception), etc.
卓 means ‘table’, and can be used in compounds like 食卓 (dining table), 教卓 (teacher’s desk), and 円卓 (round table).
So what does 電卓 mean, then? Well, let’s think about these individually: electric + table = electric table. What kind of table is electric? Oh! I know! It must be like a コタツ (a heated table that Japanese use to sit around and eat a lot of mikans in the winter) of some sorts.
WRONG. It means ‘calculator’. Game over.
6 Comments
January 29, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I’d suggest something along the lines of “Why relying on the literal meanings of individual characters for establishing meaning is bad for you“. Absolutely no harm in knowing the literal meaning of many kanji because they provide - in combination with the context - useful hints if you don’t know the word.
With something like 電卓, more likely than not it’s going to crop up in close combination with something like 計算, which (in my case at least) would give me a big clue that the provisional meaning I’d assigned to 電卓 didn’t make any sense and it would be time to dive for a dictionary.
January 29, 2008 at 10:25 pm
I still don’t think it’s a good idea, especially right off the bat. Students should be learning kanji in compounds at least, and ideally they should be learning them within entire sentences. I’m not saying they should be learning set phrases, though. They should be learning the language “in action”, if you will.
Later on, if you want to do something like take the 漢字検定, then studying kanji individually might be something to consider. But there are so many words that I “learn” (perhaps a better word would be “absorb”
through sheer exposure. It’s the same in English - I mean yeah, we have spelling tests in primary school, but anything over a grade 6 level we learned to spell from having just read it in books.
Besides, production is second to reception. We hear and read a lot more than we talk and write. After hearing and reading enough, you’ll naturally be able speak and write a large percentage of content.
February 4, 2008 at 12:59 pm
It would be odd to learn English by first studying Latin, Greek, German, and French roots that become parts of modern English words. On the other hand, as a supplement they could be helpful reminders of meaning.
Same thing in many ways
February 4, 2008 at 1:23 pm
That’s a great comparison, Claytonian. In fact, all of those subjects are generally learned at a university level, especially Latin and Greek.
February 17, 2008 at 11:09 am
I think language lends itself to arbitrarily being broken up into certain bits. All languages have “words,” some, like English, have “letters,” Japanese has “kanji,” and they all have “sentences.”
Our brain on the other hand breaks things up differently. When listening, the main thing we hear are probably “phrases,” or several words put together that commonly go together. When we try to read, a similar thing happens, where we see big pieces of stuff. That is why people can read so quickly.
On the other hand, when we are learning to read (and this is very apparent when learning foreign languages like Japanese), the number of pieces we see is a LOT. We see every single stroke in the kanji, and it is really hard to remember when you saw that stroke on top of this stroke, with that one on the left, etc. Therefore, building up our reading ability is easily done by making the pieces we see bigger and bigger. I think this is best done by studying the kanji primitives. Whether you use something like Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji or just a book about primitives, I doubt that really matters. But until you realize that all kanji are made up of a few basic parts, learning to write something like 電車、食卓、電卓、etc. is going to take a VERY long time. Trying to learn how to write or read even a single kanji without understanding that is difficult, learning 2000 is akin to torture. Trying to learn an entire sentence? Forget about it!
July 2, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I looked up what Henshall’s “A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters” had to say about 卓 (Character 1553 found on page 49
and he makes mention of the 冠 of 卓 at one point being written as though it was “a variant of a slumped figure ヒ.” He goes on to say “this has led to a theory that it indicated a lame person (reinforced by the fact that the pronunciation of 早 was the same as that of a word for cripple).” He states that this interpretation isn’t “at all convincing, though it is a theory favored by authoritative Japanese scholars.”
Perhaps, whomever decided that 卓would be the second part of the compound meaning “calculator” had a grudge against those pathetic souls who couldn’t do the math on paper or in their head? Haha, its one hell of a stretch interpretation wise, but its fun to give it a shot.
I have to agree that, at least at first, words should be put in bunches to get the student’s mind thinking topically instead of focusing on the individual parts of kanji too early. That being said, kanji study, I feel, should always accompany the study of compound words, as well as set phrases. In my experience, becoming comfortable with kanji by themselves has been a huge part of the learning process.
Once that familiarity was established, at least for me, I started to push myself towards understand the many individual parts of kanji, what they represent and how they interact with each other. Of course, that is all easier said than done, and it has been a lot of work, but I think this method does lead to a near-Japanese understanding of the words rather than leaving one with simple English based understandings of the words.
I am probably the least among us skill wise, I’ll be the first to admit that, but I think this course of action will lead me to a fuller understanding of the language.
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