serious trouble learning kanji
 

I'm just beginning but am finding the whole process confusing.

For example, one of the words (on smart.fm) I'm asked to memorize is "少ない". I look up "少" and it's kun-reading is "すく.ない"

if "少" = "すく.ない" then wouldn't
"少ない" = "すく.ないない"? It seems redundant. I noticed there's a "." in the definition, I guess signifying "すく" is the root? Is that what I should memorize when I'm learning "少".

In other words, when I'm learning kanji for the first time and come across "少" should I just memorize these three things

1) what the kanji looks like -> "少"
2) what it means -> small, few
3) its root -> "すく"

is that the proper process for a beginner. Is memorizing "すく" enough because when I come across it next time, in actual text, it will always have a suffix which finishes it off and becomes a word?

Just to reiterate, I don't get why when I look up a kanji kun reading it gives me a finished word. If the kanji = that finished word, why wouldn't writing that kanji be enough in actual text. There's always suffixes attached, leading me to believe the actual kun reading or root or whatever is smaller. What do I actually need to memorize right now as a beginner? Thanks

The . is there to tell you where the kanji reading ends
少ない
すく・ない
means that 少 in this case is read as すく

In my opinion there is no "proper process", I personally just learn readings as I come across words.
After a while you start being able to guess what readings to use with some decent accuracy.

Depending on the word the reading might change, and this is where you would look at the kana that makes up the rest of the word.

For example:
少ない　（すく・ない）
少し　（すこ・し）

I tried to memorise on and kun readings for each kanji but it was driving me insane.
I personally find that simply reading every day does the trick.

I'm not sure if I mis-understood your post but I hope this helped you a bit.

In my opinion, you should do this:
1. buy Kanji in Context (tremendously good book)
2. If you're a beginner, 10 kanji/week. Intermediate, 20. Advanced, 30. Put that many (in the order given in Kanji in Context) into Anki, a flashcard program on the computer.
3. Also add all the vocab words exactly as they appear in KiC under the kanji you've added.
4. Review from that.
5. Also write each kanji you're learning many, many times.
6. Enjoy learning 10–30 per week and being a Kanji Master Man.

As a biggener, self-studying Japanese, I'd like to thank you for this advice ^^

Good luck with Kanji, aphextwin.

If you go with Anki and load it up every day, you'll regret ever skipping a day of studying, because you'll suddenly have twice as many cards to review. I went on a two-week trip, and when I came back, 200 kanji had accrued, and it took forever to get caught up again, because these were 200 kanji I was unfamiliar with, and I was in the process of learning them when I went on vacation.

Just do it every day. As a beginner, you may be spending 10–20 minutes is all. Add 10 new kanji a week, then set it to show you, say, 5 new per day. For the first two days, you'll be learning new kanji. The other five days will be constant review. Once you've got around four times the number of kanji in your deck as you are learning per week, you'll really feel like you're permanently learning instead of just re-learning the same 10 kanji every day.

Quoted for truth. I was working my way through Heisig over the summer, but being the impatient guy that I am, I usually managed to add 50 cards a day (that was way too much, btw.) and after a week or two, if I missed a day I'd have about 150 cards to review. Stay on top of it. Anki really is helpful, you just need to use it daily.

Dude, 50 cards/day is sick.

Well, first let me say you are misunderstanding ”すく・少” is not a word by itself. "少ない” is a word. It means "few". It is an い-adjective, because it ends with an い (this will affect how you structure the word based on what you want to say) so for example, being an い-adjective, if you wanted to make it negative, as in "not few" the word would change to 少なくない/すくなくない。　Where the い in the regular (affirmative) adjective changes to a く for the negative.

Anyway they give you that whole word as an example, probably to give you something practical to relate the reading to, since すく・少 written as is cannot be used in the language. Think about like this.. if you knock the "ly" off of "slowly" does it still form an adverb in English? No of course not.

Anyhow, what worked for me was, rather than memorizing readings for individual Kanjis, I simply studied vocabulary words and memorized the kanjis associated with each new word. Now this is less systematic, but it was easier for me because I always had something practical (a real word I could use when speaking/writing) to help me memorize it. If you desire to be able to hand write stuff though, memorizing kanji one by one, might be better, but I personally do not see much point in putting lots of effort into hand writing things, because of our friend the computer. Just reading and recognition is what is truly important in my opinion.

Thanks a lot guys, I read all the advice and though I still don't quite understand kanji, I feel like I'm on the verge of an "ahha" moment so I'll see where I am in a week or two.

Yuriyuri, in your example...
少ない　（すく・ない）
少し　（すこ・し）
... you said that if you came across the second of these in a newspaper or wherever, you might look it up because it's a new word and with new words, the reading of the kanji might change, right? But then, what's even the point of kanji, because if every time you see a new word with the same kanji character there's a chance the obscured non-hiragana part might have changed and you need to look it up, that seems really counterproductive and like a bad way to organize a language. Why not just use hiragana always if the very root kanji that's supposed to simplify things changes from word to word? I understand the language just is how it is, so I should get used to it, but I guess I'm not seeing the convenience of kanji.

Also, I've heard people say how after you get familiar with kanji, sometimes you'll come across a new one and kinda know already what it's about or might mean. Could someone tell me a bit about how you infer that, is it just by the "primitives" or "radicals" used?

Kyle, I'm gonna try Anki and try your pacing, but I just today started "Remembering the Kanji" so might stick with that for a while. Memorizing readings, meaning, and symbol was seriously not working. Maybe it will after I get a bit more used to the language, but for now I like Heisig's idea of just learning all the kanji, how to write them, and their meanings, and then learning the readings later on. I think breaking it up that way will help me, at least for now. That's the same thing I was doing when I played Slime Forest Adventure (memorize the kanji's appearance and a mnemonic) and it seemed to work great. It's only when I started trying to learn meaning, reading, and appearance at the same time that nothing seemed to stick. Anyone have any opinion of this method of breaking up the tasks?

One last thing: If I studied the "Core 2000" and turned off the kanji setting so that everything appears in kana, would that be a really bad idea? I am basically trying to learn as much grammar, structure, words, etc. as possible in a short period of time so I think studying it will just help me in general to speak basic japanese and understand more, but if going through the Core 2000 in kana will somehow lay down bad memories in my brain or if it's just bad in general to learn that way without also learning the kanji at the same time, I might reconsider. I'd ideally just like to learn a lot of words and sentence patterns and then later on learn match the kanji to the individual words.

Alright, thanks in advance for any help : )

Long strings of Hiragana are very hard to read. Itwouldbeliketryingtoreadenglishwithoutanyspacesbutevenworse.
Kanji speeds up reading because entire ideas are represented in Kanji and not just phonetic sounds. Fluent speakers might have to look up Kanji every once in a while when reading books or something, but fluent English speakers have to look up words they don't know too. Not too different.

Well, when you recognize certain Kanji in Kanji compounds you could have a vague idea of what the word is about (sort of...) Like 外国語学部
外国 is foreign country
語 is language
学 is school
部 is department
外国語学部 is Foreign language department.

Not that easy for most compounds however. Figuring out what a Kanji means is more difficult. 海　漢　温　 all have the radical for "Water" in them, but only some have anything to do with water at all.

The last part is directed at Kyle, so I'll let him answer. My advice would be to not turn Kanji off though.

To add to Jesselt's explanation about Kanji, you may feel like it is a pain now, but after about 800 or so you will wonder how anybody could learn Japanese without it. It will become your "friend" and a learning tool to help you gain a large vocabulary more easily and be able guess the meanings of unknown words while reading.

Also about the knowing kanji through other kanji.. there are some instances like words with 心 (heart) in them as a radical, usually have something to do with emotions or feelings. Often times though kanji that have similar radicals will have similar pronunciations, like many kanji with the radical 青 will have せい as a possible reading.

1. I have no opinion on Heisig's method, although I've heard both good and bad things from others.
2. I think turning off kanji would be an awful idea. For example, I'm at the point now where knowing the kanji makes learning words easy. For example, I've never ever had to use the word 自閉症 (autism) in Japanese. However, it is very easy for me to remember how to read, write, and say it because I know the meanings of all three kanji, and they just make sense for this word:じへいしょう (self+close+sickness).

Had I not learned the kanji, there's no way I'd know a word like that, because the kanji are mnemonics for a significant portion of compounds you'll learn, and without the kanji, remembering a word will mean you're just memorizing a series of meaningless kana. I mean, it's ridiculously easy to remember 飛行機 for airplane (fly+go+machine) or 飛行場 for airport (fly+go+place) because I know the kanji individually.

If I just had to memorize ひこうき or ひこうじょう, it would be tons harder. The hardest words for me to learn are simple Japanese verbs and adjectives (not 漢語 verbs like 用意する and such) because there's often just one kanji, which deprives me of a mnemonic to learn at first. For example, 勇ましい. How the hell do you remember that is いさましい? You have to memorize the single use of いさ as the reading for 勇. Obviously, you also have to learn the reading of it ユウ, but that reading is used all over the place.

As another example: 使. There is only one time you'll read it as つか, and that's when you're using the verb つかう. However, you use it often as シ, so it is very easy to memorize: 使用 、天使 (angel: heaven+use)、etc.

Think of kanji as Greek or Latin affixes. Would you rather know what "pseudo" means and then learn words like "pseudopod" and "pseudonym," or would you rather say "oh OK, that word starts with the 'soo' sound, then the 'dough' sound, then 'pod'"? Learning what "pseudo" means gives you a gateway to learning tons of other vocab very fast. Basically, attach "pseudo" to a lot of stuff to make that new word mean "fake" whatever. Kanji lend themselves to the very same vocabulary explosion.

You should develop all your skills together, including kanji knowledge. Without it, it will be like playing basketball with only four guys on the court.

Haha, very nicely said.

Hmm, very interesting. Thanks a lot, everyone, for your continued help. Hopefully in a couple weeks all these concerns of mine will be outdated.

That made perfect sense. Thanks for typing it all out for me.

You're welcome. I find that the general caveat "don't try to compare Japanese to English" is a good rule of thumb, but an experienced speaker of both can often make things easier to comprehend with actually accurate analogies like that.

At some point, maybe I'll talk about o-/go- honorific prefix usage and how detecting what are on- and kun- words is so very easy to comprehend (if not do) once you get a good English-Latin analogy going on.