kodansha kanji learner's course how to use

by Prof. Tanner Borer MD 9 min read

HOW I USE THE KODANSHA KANJI LEARNER'S COURSE
  1. Look at the character, CAREFULLY (differences may be more minor than you think)
  2. Read the basic meaning.
  3. Read the note on how to easily remember the kanji's meaning.
  4. Scribble down the character five-ten times (maybe more if it's one that's hard to remember)
  5. Read the compounds.

What is the Kanji Learner's course?

Jul 20, 2014 · how i use the kodansha kanji learner's course The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s course is designed for you to follow the kanji in sequence. I generally do the following eight things to not only get the meaning but to get the kanji to stay in my head:

What are the shortcomings of the Kodansha Kanji Learner's course?

The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course is an innovative and highly effective system for learning and remembering kanji, or Sino-Japanese characters. The book contains 2,300 character entries, including all 2,136 Joyo Kanji ("regular-use kanji") plus 164 of the most useful non¬–Joyo Kanji. It offers a sophisticated, pedagogically sound method for remembering the basic meaning (s) of …

How to improve my kanji skills?

This guide updates and unifies the instructions across all components of the KLC series, including the main KLC textbook (The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course or “KKLC”), the KLC Graded Reading Sets (GRS) ebook series, the KLC Green Book (writing practice workbook), and the KLC Wall Chart. The instructions given below are grounded in academic research on language …

What is the KLC sequence in Japanese?

Jul 20, 2017 · The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course : A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering 2300 Characters Author: Andrew Scott Conning Publisher: Kodansha USA ISBN: 1568365268 Date: 2013 Pages: 722 Format: PDF Size: 73.2MB. Kodansha’s widely acclaimed Kanji Learner’s Course (KLC) is a complete guide to mastering all the kanji needed for genuine literacy in Japanese.

Is Kodansha kanji Learner's course good?

Overview. The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course is an innovative and highly effective system for learning and remembering kanji, or Sino-Japanese characters. The book contains 2,300 character entries, including all 2,136 Joyo Kanji ("regular-use kanji") plus 164 of the most useful non¬–Joyo Kanji.Dec 6, 2013

What is KKLC?

Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, often abbreviated to KKLC, is the other big book-based method of learning kanji. It takes an approach that is much closer to how Japanese people learn kanji at school. As outlined in the introduction, this method is designed to be as pedagogically sound and comprehensive as possible.Apr 26, 2019

What kanji should I learn?

The jouyou kanji are what kids in Japan learn first. They're the most common kanji you'll see, and if you learn all of them, you'll be able to read at least 80% of the Japanese language you find anywhere.

What is RTK Japanese?

RTK (remembering the Kanji) is a three volume Book written by James Heisig intended to teach the 3007 frequent kanji used in the Japanese Language.

Motivation

After I finished the class, I didn’t really use Japanese for about a year, until I rented an apartment in Tokyo and lived there for two months. Daily life was jarring, to say the least! I could get around, but not anywhere near as easily as I thought I should or would be able to. It was my vocabulary.

Choosing the System

I agonized over how to approach this for a week or two, reading reviews of and considering about a dozen different systems and courses, until I found the Andrew Scott Conning’s Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course. Why did I like this book so much? Well, there are a few reasons:

How I Study

Hopefully by now I’ve convinced you of the merits of this book, or at the very least laid bare my thought process. If you’re as convinced as I am, let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about a study plan.

Wrapping Up

This whole post comes with a caveat, of course; This is a system I’ve found that works for me, but it may not necessarily work for you! I set aside a little more than an hour almost every single day to do this, and on the days I can’t find the time to learn new kanji, I still cram in as much review (both Anki and Memrise) as possible.

How to learn kanji?

With the KLC method, you will learn kanji in the context of extensive reading. Be prepared to spend at least half your time on reading exercises. Set your goal as learning to read, not “finishing” the kanji. Start your day’s routine by using the KKLC, the GRS, and the Green Book to review recently learned material.

Why do we use KLC sequence?

The KLC sequence deliberately groups related kanji together, so that you can attach significance to their contrastive features as you learn them. This saves you from learning kanji in a way that fails once you encounter confusingly similar kanji at a more advanced stage of study. This problem of differentiating similar kanji plagues those who learn kanji in a less comprehensively planned sequence.

What is the purpose of GRS?

The GRS will allow you to internalize kanji and important kanji-based vocabulary with little need of flash cards. Do not bother to make “sentence cards” out of GRS exercises, which fulfill the same purpose. The rest of this post explains the recommended study process in detail.

Can you memorize kanji?

Except for such regular on-yomi groups, do not trouble yourself to memorize the readings of individual kanji. Instead, memorize the readings of words. Note that by learning a kanji’s kun-yomi words, you will memorize its kun-yomi (readings) automatically.

Should I make a flash card for KLC?

When NOT to make any flash cards: Provided that after one review pass you can remember a kanji’s general meaning and 1-2 of its vocabulary words, you should almost never bother to make a flash card for KLC material. This is because most of the important kanji and vocabulary will come up repeatedly later.

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Top reviews from the United States

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Eleven months ago, I started studying from zero. I've now achieved N4. This is my progress report

I started studying in late August last year, so I'm coming on a full year. Since then, I've completed the following:

Best Website for learning Japanese while pretending to work

Just trying to kill time at work. Looking for an online type course I can do that won’t be too suspicious. Preferably with quizzes cuz I probably won’t be able to take notes at my desk

Practice your Japanese vocab (or kana) while fighting world hunger!

I found this post on r/EnglishLearning (I'm actually an English native but I sometimes go on there to help others or learn a few things myself) and the post was about a site called freerice.com The site can help teach you about a variety of different things but if you go to the categories section and scroll down, there will be a section for Japanese. The site works by donating 100% of it's ad revenue to the world food program.

How do you deal with burnout?

Recently I have zero interest in studying, makes me feel tired and unmotivated. I know I want to continue but I feel so sluggish and zero energy. How can I overcome this bump on the road?

I'm releasing my Anki deck for Japanese: 30,000 cards sorted by frequency with native speaker pronunciations

Several years ago I made a comprehensive Anki deck for Japanese. There are three subdecks: nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Each card has the following:

When reading manga, I frequently come across words that omit the kanji and are instead written with only hiragana. Why is this?

I'm not talking about certain words that have a separate grammatical function when written in hiragana, but just regular verbs and adjectives. It honestly gets a little confusing at times. Is there a semantic/grammatical meaning I'm too beginner to understand? Thanks in advance :)

Best Website for learning Japanese while pretending to work

Just trying to kill time at work. Looking for an online type course I can do that won’t be too suspicious. Preferably with quizzes cuz I probably won’t be able to take notes at my desk

Eleven months ago, I started studying from zero. I've now achieved N4. This is my progress report

I started studying in late August last year, so I'm coming on a full year. Since then, I've completed the following:

Practice your Japanese vocab (or kana) while fighting world hunger!

I found this post on r/EnglishLearning (I'm actually an English native but I sometimes go on there to help others or learn a few things myself) and the post was about a site called freerice.com The site can help teach you about a variety of different things but if you go to the categories section and scroll down, there will be a section for Japanese. The site works by donating 100% of it's ad revenue to the world food program.

How do you deal with burnout?

Recently I have zero interest in studying, makes me feel tired and unmotivated. I know I want to continue but I feel so sluggish and zero energy. How can I overcome this bump on the road?

When reading manga, I frequently come across words that omit the kanji and are instead written with only hiragana. Why is this?

I'm not talking about certain words that have a separate grammatical function when written in hiragana, but just regular verbs and adjectives. It honestly gets a little confusing at times. Is there a semantic/grammatical meaning I'm too beginner to understand? Thanks in advance :)

Progress report: A year of Japanese

Every once in a while a progress report like these gets posted here. Personally I always find these motivating and interesting, so I decided to post one as well. The added bonus is that I can use you, the community, as an accountability buddy during my journey.

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