Archive for June 21st, 2009

I just received about 2 days ago,”Kanji and Kana: A Handbook and Dictionary of the Japanese Writing System” by post which I ordered through Amazon.co.uk last week. So thus began my Kanji training.

Although I’ve tried to learn a little kanji before this, but it is only now that I really sit down and write, write, write, write. Done about 18 of them only thus far. But boy, does my right hand feel tired. In fact I came online to update my blogs just to relax a bit. So far the character with the most strokes I’ve written is “Yo” – with 18 strokes. At this point I do wonder why do they bother writing a tough character with 18 strokes when they can just write ‘yo’ which is much easier. Why memorize 2000 characters when you just need to memorize 26 letters of the alphabet to write just about anything. Well, I suppose it is part of the identity of the language itself. Which makes it unique.

The only problem that I know I may face is forgetting the characters that I’ve learnt when I learn more and more new characters. I suppose that is the time when flashcards would come in handy. I am still thinking about making them myself or just buy them. Flashcards don’t come cheap. But making them are rather time consuming.

Anyhow, to get or not to get flashcards is not an issue that I should concentrate on at the moment. Learning the language and know how to read and write is. Well, good luck to myself and all who are learning this wonderful language.