Stage 2 - small victories

Watching a movie I realized I am at stage 2 in my kanji learning. I now see lots of kanji I recognize - I forget what they mean or the reading, but I get a small high off recognizing what were once tiny Jackson Pollock postage stamps. If the subtitles had purple or bubblegum pink backgrounds, I would probably do better.

Anyway, context, it’s a bit weird how simple environmental factors come into play. And it’s important to find other opportunities to experience the kanji.

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What movie was it and what’s stage 2? :slight_smile:

Anyway, good job!

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The more you study the more you’ll recognise.

I feel the same way when I encounter a sentence in the wild and there’s usually two responses:

  • I should know this but I can’t understand it
  • I don’t know why I understand this but I do

Both are equally rewarding because it highlights things you know and things you need to know. :slight_smile:

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Dunno about movies, but the stages of reading are:

  1. Why are there so many kanji?
  2. Why are there so few kanji?
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Interesting… I never knew there were any stages :sweat_smile: . I thought it was a spectrum like on WaniKani, defined by % of kanji you can recognize and/or read.

Well, my post wasn’t about any official list of stages, more a poke at the fact that there’s always a point when you’re starting to read native material - especially native material intended for kids - where you’ve learnt enough kanji that the lack of its use in said material starts to become a hinderance to understanding, so you start to wonder why they have so many kanji if they don’t actually use the things.

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Yeah, sometimes the lack of kanji gets in the way. It’s a gripe I have with Genki at times when they give kanji for new vocab items in the Vocabulary section or before reading comprehension exercises, but when a new word pops up in the exercise itself, they write it in kana. Which is okay, but sometimes the kana-only verbs have a different meaning so I get confused :slight_smile: .

Definitely - and as hard as WaniKani is for me, it can become a safe zone. So, go kanji hunting a bag a few in the wild.

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