Well, by doing something I thought was meaningful. Here’s an excerpt from the webpage the original motivation for making Furigana Injector (ふりがなインジェクター).

“That’s not the way to learn kanji”

Keyboard input has supplanted handwriting in all developed societies. History is history.

The generations of japanese who finished their schooling in handwriting but joined a workforce using PCs typically think their kanji recognition is notably below the level they believe is normal. They are measuring themselves against normal place to get standards, the previous generation, but at this time it also means the pre-computer generation. What I am saying, in summary, is that the prevailing opinion that rote-learning is the one true method of kanji learning is an opinion that is shortly going to be out-of-date.

“You wuss. Show some grit and do it like the Japanese do.”

To overcome the ‘great kanji leap’ the native japanese reader has had two advantages and one absolute incentive. The two advantages are being exposed as child (more allocatable neurons on hand) and being exposed 24/7 to a japanese language environment. The absolute incentive is that there is no alternate option for them if they’re to graduate from school, get a job, communicate intelligently with friends, and so on.

Having spelt out the native japanese reader’s past advantages, we can see that adult learners of japanese as a second language have no opportunity to obtain the first advantage. The second advantage can’t be obtained without sacrificing career and a serious amount of income. And the incentive is not an absolute one for those who already have a different mother-tongue.

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My sentiments exactly. Except for me it was Chinese. I didn’t mind the sacrificing career part but the sacrificing a serious amount of income part wasn’t planned. I still plan on taking on the task of learning Japanese but for those 2,000 some Chinese characters, kanji in Japanese, I’ve learned, I’m not set on learning another way of pronunciation. 順其自然. I’ll learn what I can. I will take on furigana though.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under Thoughts, Study, 北京. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.