Saturday, May 26, 2012

Opinion on Kanjidamage

This is a response to a comment I received in a different post.
 >What's your opinion of Kanjidamage?

To be honest, I like some parts of it and I dislike others
For reference, http://kanjidamage.com/kanji

Like
-Makes learning fun
-Teaches common kanji compounds along with the word
-Breaks them down into root words so they are easy to remember.

Dislike
-Sometimes childish, makes me question if it's accurate
-The order you learn kanji is kind of fucked up, similar to heisig, they group them by radical and teach them like that. The bad news is that you will learn some rare kanji at first, like 姦(8) 旨(24) 昆(25) 唱(26) You know, now that I look at these, a big bunch of these ones at the beginning are ones I learned around the 1500 mark.
Meanwhile, ones like     建, 事, 書, 高, 調 are at the 1600 mark. Thats a big problem, because those are common kanji used for simple words.

Simply based on that last reason alone I would not recommend it. Its the same problem with Remembering the Kanji. Instead of learning in order of frequency, you learn in order of the radicals.

This is why I recommend going in order of JLPT 4->3->2->1. 4 and 3 are basically kanji I see every day, where as kanji in 1 (that are not in 2, 3, 4) are so rare I have seen them only a few times in my life. Some of those I have still yet to see at all.

Anyways, if you want to use kanjidamage, I would just recommend using their individual pages for the information (compounds, radicals, etc) but I would not recommend learning them in their order. Ultimately, you should be checking out several books/sites/methods for learning Japanese. Don't just learn from 1 book or 1 site, use a combination and see what works.

5 comments:

  1. Thank you for the response, I was the person who originally asked the question. I am currently reading Genki and wanted to know the best way when I start on Kanji.

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  2. It was made to simplify learning and familiarize people with kanji. Some managed to finish rtk in 15 days.

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  3. Learning by frequency is illogical. That's why nobody intelligent uses it.

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  4. What is your opinion on the Pimsleur Approach?

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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