How do you take something that’s fun to learn and make it soul crushingly boring? Make flashcards.
I’ve made flashcards by hand with my hideous handwriting (the technical term is “chicken scratch”). I’ve bought thousands of Kanji flashcards. Good cardstock, cheap cardstock. Curved corners and decks of paper cuts waiting to happen. All of them filled with all sorts of fantastic information about the kanji character - and even a few compounds it appears in!
All these cards did one thing and one thing only: They made me want to learn Japanese less.
Every card took something fun, learning about the Japanese language and culture, and reduced it to painful, boring, mind numbing repetition.
I still can’t believe that I ever thought that you had to memorize every On and Kun reading for a Kanji to be able to say you “know” it. You realize how many readings 上 has, right?
But you know what’s worse? Knowing every reading and every translated english meaning doesn’t mean you know that character. It means you’ve memorized a list of bits. It means you successfully forced the data into your head despite your brain’s best efforts to prevent it.
The average child falls about a 1000 times when learning to walk. If you want to stunt that learning process, sit the child down and attempt to explain the mechanics of walking.
But here’s the kicker: The child wasn’t learning to walk. He was just trying to go faster. If he can go faster, he can explore more, discover more, play more. The learning, the walking, came for free.
Flashcards are for learning. But true learning comes from exploration, discovery and play.
Japanese became fun for me when I stopped studying and started playing - The learning comes for free.