I’m pretty new to Japanese language-learning, and I’m only on Wanikani level 3. (Just got my subscription a few days ago, yay).
Anyway, I’m playing Pokemon X in kana-only mode (no kanji knowledge lol), and I was wondering if that’s a bad thing. My vocabulary is actually not non-existent, and for some reason, I have an intuitive grasp of a lot of the grammar although I couldn’t point out which tense or form it was if you put a gun to my head. (maybe it’s all the hours watching anime).
So basically what I’m doing is having Jisho open on my laptop and using it to understand the words I’m unfamiliar with (like 90% of them). This way, I’m learning some new vocab every day (I put it into Anki, in both the hiragana, kanji). Will this benefit me in the future, while associating kanji to vocab I already know, or with the vocab I might gain from this game?
Or do you think I’d be better off doing something else?
I use Bunpro for grammar, and WaniKani for Kanji. I’m around a quarter of the way through Bunpro’s N5 grammar, so I know some basic things.
I tried kana-only mode and it just wasn’t for me.
Then I had an issue with the kanji mode (yeah, I know), so I gave up.
As to whether it’ll be useful, everything’s more useful than nothing.
It’s just that a lot of the words you’ll learn in hiragana, you will rarely see them just like that, so you’re just learning pronunciation instead of reading.
I see. I’m using jisho to find the kanji form of the vocabulary I’m learning, and then I put it into Anki’s SRS so I can learn it. Even though I don’t actually know the kanji, I’m trying to get myself used to seeing it in the word and associating it to the pronunciation and meaning.
Even in kanji mode Pokémon doesn’t use that many kanji and kana mode is a nightmare for figuring out where words start and end so wouldn’t recommend it personally
I would switch to Kanji mode. You’ll get more practice in looking up Kanji using radicals. The WK radicals are close enough to the standard radicals that you can look things up but there are differences. It’s best to get used to it now.
Discover that google keyboard now has a Japanese handwriting option, or that Chinese handwriting input works for Japanese on iOS and never use it
I was going to answer the question, honest. It’s just that @furohashi beat me to it.
For clarity though, you pick the components that you see in the kanji from the radical lists and if you’re lucky it finds the kanji. It takes some learning and trial and error to use efficiently though.
I got quite a bit of use out of that when I was in China, but now, I just find romaji and pinyin much faster as far as input methods.
In fact, I think that if you learn any kind of stroke order, you should just learn all the radicals and then build Kanji from those. You may get overall stroke order wrong but it’ll be good enough anytime you need to actually write anything and it makes searching through the radical list easier since they’re ordered by strokes.
Agreed, phonetic input is faster when you know how to read the thing. Handwriting/OCR is often the fastest way when you don’t though.
In my experience the google keyboard copes really well with “alternative stroke orders”, as well as accidental dots, repeated strokes and random scribbles.
What he said 