Author Archives

Burnout and Language Learning

Burnout is the greatest enemy of learning any language. It takes a goal like fluency that motivates you, that drives you, and turns it into something you hate. I think most of us have had that moment when we’ve worn ourselves down trying to memorize as much as we can in as little time as [...]

How long does it take to learn 1 Kanji?

All the tools I’ve seen out there are about learning Kanji Now! Fast! Locking it in your brain forever! Special mnemonic techniques! Learn hundreds of Kanji in a few days, remember them forever! While it would be lovely to flip a switch and immediately understand another language. These things take time. So I’ll ask the [...]

Learning Kanji From Context

Tae Kim has a great final post up on the “Remembering the Kanji” books. The best part isn’t when he discusses the merits of RTK but when he describes the process he went through in learning Kanji. I may have mentioned this before but I never studied kanji; I studied the words that are made [...]

Stop Studying Japanese!

How do you study? Simple. You are given the answers to a set of questions and you review those questions until you know the answers. The key is that you are given the answers. And that’s the problem. True learning doesn’t come from being given the answers, it comes from discovering solutions, connections, principles and [...]

What does it mean to “know” a word?

What do you get when you review a word with flashcards or a spaced repetition system? When you can go through a list and give all the correct answers, what have you accomplished? Do you know the words or are you simply adept at reciting answers? What does it mean to “know” a word? At [...]

Flashcards: The Bane of Human Existence

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 [...]

What Did Your Last Test Teach You?

I’ve never been a fan of tests or reviews for the simple reason that they are rarely used to move you forward. Did poorly on a test because you had difficulty understanding the material? That’s nice, the class will be moving on now. Reviews, Tests, Quizzes and the like are typically used to determine what [...]

Starting with Heisig

Keep it simple. It’s amazing to me how many people learning Japanese do everything within their power to not read anything in Japanese. As though there is this magical point when they have memorized enough Kanji, drilled enough vocab, and crammed enough grammar, reading fluently will spontaneously occur. Now, to be fair, reading Japanese requires [...]