漢字の勉強、頑張ってください。

I admire you.

皆さん、えんじょのために、ありがとうございます！

"そして、これのレッスンをちがいます"
- I tried to write "And, the lessons are different." I would like to have written "Also, the lessons are different to most other Kanji books", but I was too tired to work it out!

ちがいます （違い）= being different?

ありがとうございます、khastieさん！でも、なぜですか？
＝）

It is because you continue your writing even though you are busy :-)

> Also, the lessons are different to most other Kanji books.
そして、そのレッスンはほかのおおくの漢字の本とはちがっています。
How are they different?

> ...because you continue your writing...

そうですか！　どもありがとうございます。　＝）

> How are they different?

I wanted to write in Japanese how they are different, but it would take me too long to work out! 笑

Most books and methods I've seen for learning Kanji use flash cards, mass repetition, and variations of this sort of thing. Often the student, whether self taught or with a teacher, will end up learning through translation, which can sometimes make things more difficult to learn and recall in the future.

Eg, "人　＝　ひと　＝　person". Going through this thought process of "人 is ひと　is person" while reading/writing can be frustrating.

(They say that memory is associative... When you think of 玉 does a round shape or something similar come to mind? When I think of "ball" a round shape comes to mind. Maybe this is why learning through translation can be bad?)

This Kanji Handbook is mostly in English. Actually, there is no kana used at all. Just Kanji, Romaji, and English.

It has English phrases for sets of Kanji characters, and some words in the phrase have the first letter replaced with the Kanji. Eg, "No 人erson will 入nter a house on 火ire".

It then has a big picture of the Kanji showing stroke order. Beneath this is the pronunciation (romaji) and related words.

The book suggests practicing the Kanji symbol on a pad at least 25 times, then writing the phrase they have. Then you write your own phrases in the same way.

After this, you write some phrases in Japanese which use the symbols.

I think what the book is trying to do is correlate the Kanji with what your brain already knows (by writing "人erson" you can instantly associate 人 as what your memory knows for "person", instead of thinking "人 = person"). It's hard to explain...

While following the book's method for the first time the other evening, I noticed something very interesting: while writing the phrases and my variations of them, I had unknowingly started to drop the end of the English words which started with Kanji. Eg, I started to write "人" instead of "人erson".

I find this interesting because even if I forget that "人" is pronounced "ひと", I can still read it and my brain knows what it means without necessarily thinking about the English word, "person".

I will have to see how it goes, but I think it will make learning and remembering easier than flash cards!

Here is a picture of a symbol: http://pocket-ninja.com/kanjihandbook.jpg

There are 2 symbols per page.

I want to try and spend an hour every day on Kanji, but we'll see if I can keep that up around everything else!



Sorry for the super-long comment. :)

I see. Thank you very much for the detailed explanation.
That sounds like a great idea. Good luck with your studies!

These are a little different but also interesting.
Pictographic design of food-related Kanji
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3436/3947942004_f00f641489_o.jpg
http://tamachan.img.jugem.jp/20080925_516173.gif