Lists of kanji, and draw-and-recognise sites

Soon after posting yesterday I wondered why on earth I'd forgotten that there's a precomposed a-with-tilde at U+00E3, which reminded me to mention:

• Shapecatcher which lets you draw a Unicode character (not a Chinese/Japanese/Korean glyph, unfortunately), and it will try to match it to the right code point;
• Mouse Chinese Input Method - draw a Chinese character and it will try to recognize it and give translation/pronunciation;
• List of Jooyoo Kanji on Wikipedia: very useful if you remember characters by their Heisig names; you can click on a table heading to alter display order to by-number-of-strokes, which is useful for looking up unfamiliar kanji;
• Kanji Information on Jim Breen's site: lists of Heisig keywords, all 3007 Heisig kanji, old and new kanji shapes;
• Detexify, which allows you to draw anything and it will try to match it to a LaTeX symbol.

 

Targets

Well, my original idea of going for the N1 or N2 level of JLPT by December has been shelved as a bit silly.  I'd still like to do one of the higher levels some day; July or December next year might be a more sensible target.  But I don't want to do any level of the JLPT which I'd have to struggle for; I want to achieve a level comfortably, without having to swot up on specifically test-related activities.  The test is a measure of achievement but isn't the achievement itself—I want to achieve reading and listening fluency (to a lesser extent writing and speaking fluency) and I don't want to have to teach myself to the test in order to pass.

I've been listening to quite a bit of Japanese radio over the last month or two, with virtually no comprehension but a bit of recognition of particles and verbs and numbers (telephone numbers being particularly easy to pick out, as announcers always read them in a certain rhythm, just as English-language announcers do).  I've never achieved decent listening comprehension of any language other than English, and I think getting good at listening will definitely be the biggest challenge.  Soonish, perhaps when I've more or less finished Teach Yourself Japanese, I'll start listening to easy-Japanese podcasts.

Rough plan for the next few weeks: try to finish Teach Yourself Japanese (I'm about a third of the way through; the rest of it will take tens of hours of effort but exactly how long will depend on how much backtracking and revision I do.  I want to really nail the grammar of the spoken language and get a useful starter vocabulary, but I won't be trying to remember every single word I come across).  Then start on Reading Japanese.  The first few chapters are all about the kana, which I've done before and which I've forgotten before; hopefully it won't take too long this time around and it will all finally stick.  There are lots and lots of reading drills and I'll try not to skip anything.

After then... we'll see.  I often flick through the awe-inspiring later reading passages in the Miller Japanese reader and tell myself that if I ever get that far, I'll definitely be able to call myself a reader of the language.  Miller claims as much in his introduction: ... when the student has successfully read the greater portion of the selections in this volume he may turn to other modern Japanese texts in the full expectation that he will be able to read them, and he should not be disappointed. I like such solid promises as it shows the author has given some thought about what he's trying to deliver, whether he achieves it or not.  So maybe I'll have a go at Miller, finally; alternatively I might have a go at working quickly through Bowring and Laurie, which I've been dipping into occasionally and whose style I rather like.  The advantage of having thrown the provisional schedule out of the window is that I've got the liberty to do what I want, rather than looking worriedly at the calendar and feeling resentful about not having progressed much with kanji yet.

Hmm, kanji.  While doing Reading Japanese I intend to have another go at Heisig, and keep it up as a side project.  The pure Heisig approach of learning all the kanji in one go before learning anything else turned out not to suit me; for all the liberty it affords the student I found it duller than actually doing the exercises in a textbook—probably this just shows that I'm undisciplined.

Japanese streets

From time to time, whenever I'm waiting for a computer to finish doing something else, I'll spend an idle few minutes wandering around a random area of Japan on Google Street View, mainly in order to look at the signs by roadsides and on shops.  It's a painless way of getting exposure to written material in a useful context; it's also an interesting lesson in how much of Japan looks very different from one's preconceptions of what Japan ought to look like.  Like many people in the West, I have vague images of City Japan and Country Japan.  City Japan is a Blade Runner-ish set of skyscrapers gleaming with neon and glass, and Country Japan is well-tended formal gardens with temples dotted around.  But drop the little orange Google Street View man almost anywhere in Japan and you'll see something else: low-rise buildings, a lot of rather shabby concrete, surprisingly narrow streets.  The abundance of overhead wires (far more than you'd ever see in Britain) makes me think of small-town America, or at least one of my possibly-false clichés of small-town America, no doubt influenced by Wichita Lineman.  It all looks quite prosperous, but ugly—much of Japan looks no better than the post-war areas of relatively decent housing anywhere in Britain, on a more cramped scale.  When I started reading Alex Kerr's books about the failures of modern Japan I thought his opinions on modern Japanese city architecture were surprisingly harsh; but Street View rather supports them.  On the other hand it's really striking to see vending machines out in the open, on every street, in working order.  Anywhere I've ever lived, such exposed machines would be vandalised and stripped of their beer/coffee/Pocari Sweat loads the first night they were installed.

Watching video with little comprehension

From time to time I watch Japanese-language video on YouTube.  At this stage I have very little comprehension of what's going on, but some people swear blind that at some level it's causing linguistic connections to be made in my brain, and that eventually it will pay off.  I find it very difficult to concentrate on the audio when watching foreign-language video... what really catches my attention is the speed with which the (foreign-language) captions appear and disappear.  This applies even when I'm watching content in a language that I can read to a sort-of-adequate level, such as Russian—when a caption flashes up for a few seconds and then disappears, I'm not going to be able to read all of it.  This really shows the difference between being able to read moderately well and full fluency.  Similarly, the constantly-repeating banner ad text on Russian-language newspaper sites defeats me until I've had the chance to look at each frame of an ad a few times.

I hope, within the next month, to master most of the kanji.  I've sort-of done the first few hundred of them several times and then run out of steam; the desire to really complete the general-use kanji (including the new ones that were added last year) is a good motivator.  Embarrassingly, I have 'learned' the hiragana and katakana a few times but have forgotten about half of each of them in between each learning session.  That's something else I need to get down pat this month.

Anyway, back to the Asahi Shimbun channel.