For any of you who are academically inclined and want to read further into Kanji learning, with particular focus on strategies, motivation control and self-regulation from the the perspective of an ESL learner from an alphabetic language (such as English etc) then please have a look at these.
I studied in Tokyo as an exchange student a few years ago. One of my professors Dr Heath Rose (from Australia) was working in the Dept of Global Business and during his many years teaching ESL in Japan wrote his PhD on Kanji learning: Strategies, Motivation control and self-regulation. It was completed in Japan and submitted to The University of Sydney in 2010. Ironically, it wasn’t until years later that I found out that my professor was essentially a kanji expert, and his motivations for going into the subject came from his own struggles with the writing element of the language.
He’s now an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Oxford University. (Heath Rose —). His main research area is in the realm of second language teaching and learning, so if there are any budding post-grad students out there, he is seeking doctoral applications for; *Self-regulation and language learner strategies, *Teaching and learning of Japanese and Chinese as a foreign language (with a particular interest in the written language).
[Kanji learning: Strategies, Motivation control and self-regulation. PhD Heath Rose ]
Now for the more lazy or people who for the people who just don’t have the time (its quite long), Heath published a book which is essentially just a summarised version of his thesis. I will post the link to get it from Amazon below.
The Japanese Writing System: Challenges, Strategies and Self-Regulation for Learning Kanji
It provides fascinating insight and hopefully you can get something out of it. The main gist of a lot of his analysis is that learners who reach an advanced level of proficiency, use an array of strategies and techniques. For example, they don’t just rely on the Hesig method using mnemonics, they employ many strategies and often. There is no silver bullet to reaching proficiency, but of course each learner is independent and find some things which work for them and some which don’t.
Please let me know your thoughts below on your own strategies and motivational techniques, how do you remember kanji when reviewing/writing?