Kanji test
I’m going to take a kanji test this weekend with my students.
Studying kanji makes me feel mad. How many kanji we have! Each kanji has several pronunciations and each has its meaning. If they get together, they create other meanings. Two or three simple kanji gather and make another kanji. For example, there is a kanji meaning ‘tree.’ When there are two ‘trees,’ it means ‘wood,’ and three ‘forest.’ How interesting and difficult!
Comments
Herm :: October 24, 2003
Wow! That’s really interesting! I’d like so much to study Japanese, but now I don’t have the money to take a course and it’s difficult to study it alone!
Ayumi Sawa :: October 26, 2003
Ruedi, the site you linked to is very interesting! I think that writing what one wants to say in Japanese and English is very good. First I read Japanese, and next English. I can very well understand what it says.
Stevens-san, the author of the Hajimemashou weblog, is an American who spent some years in Japan as an English teacher on the JET program. Now that she’s back in Texas, she writes nipponDAZE, a weblog which serves as a “Memory” of her Japanese days.
She’s also busy studying Japanese, and Hajimemashou is the place where she writes about the language she’s learning to use, about its differences and similarities with English, about the difficulties she experiences, etc.
I linked to Hajimemashou mainly because I was hoping she’d find the link in her server statistics, come over and tell us something about the joys of studying kanji. But since many Tawawa readers are fluent in both English and Japanese, some of you may also find it interesting to discuss the points Stevens-san raises on Haijimemashou . Go there and leave a comment!
Stevens-san, by the way, has posted a few comments to Tawawa, for instance on Yukari-san’s Female Firefighter (which is by far the most popular entry ever posted to Tawawa — it’s currently number two in a Google search for “female firefighter”). So, anyway — if you leave a comment on Hajimemashou, make sure you link back to Tawawa, so Stevens-san will know where you’re from =)
Wakako — how many kanji do your students need to know?
If you want to pass 3rd grade, you need to know about 1600 kanji. But I suppose most high school studets know more than 2000 or over. I don’t know how many I know.
M Sinclair Stevens :: October 27, 2003
Well, hello, everyone. I certainly enjoy reading your site and I’m happy that you like mine, such as they are.
If you like bilingual blogs, have a look at Mieko’s My Diary. I find that reading her English first and then looking at her Japanese has really helped me improve my understanding of how to express certain ideas in Japanese.
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Calling M.S. スティーブンズ!
(Public service announcement: this Web site is fully kanji/hiragana/katakana enabled. Have fun discussing specifics!)