Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Kanji Mastery"
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| [a] Fascinating RF |
I gave a lecture today at Earlham College. It was part of the fiftieth anniversary conference of the Japan Study program, and the scholarly celebration went on from Friday until today. About a dozen former resident directors attended, and it was wonderful to relive experiences with that superb little program at Waseda University in Tokyo. The memories of catching the train at Takadanobaba Station and swirling along the Yamanote line toward Shinagawa for a little book buying was palpable, as was the recollection of riding four stops while sitting next to Little Bo Peep, who was ready for a Sunday afternoon in Harajuku.
My task in the last lecture of the last session of the conference was something like this: to give a sense for the challenges of learning about Japan and Japanese from the point of view of an American anthropologist and historian. It also allowed me to discuss the content of my blog entry from yesterday. It was called: Kanji Mastery.
When I finished, there was time for a few questions, and many of them were fascinating. One, in particular, has led me to add this addendum to my Kanji Steps to Mastery introduction. A professor of Japanese asked an excellent question that can help us understand some of the challenges of learning kanji for non-native speakers. And let's be clear. If we are learning in North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Australia, or (almost) anywhere else in the world, we are (almost) always non-native speakers. It's really a very simple concept. For many of us, Japanese is not our first language.
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| [b] Everywhere RF |
Simple concept; profound connotations.
The question went something like this. "Why do you speak of 3,500 kanji as the goal for 'mastery' when Japan has accomplished a ninety-eight percent literacy rate on the foundation of the 1,006 kanji required of all students in first-through-sixth grades in Japan?" Moreover, "The rest of the 常用 kanji list is, even for well-educated people, not nearly as foundational, and high literacy rates are grounded in those key 1,006 characters they all learn by sixth grade."
It was a terrific question, and a profoundly accurate one. I take no issue with any of it...except the implication that it will work as well for non-native speakers. I said as much in my answer, but hope to expand a little bit upon it here, precisely because it gets to the heart of what the professor who asked it and I (and all other teachers) want to accomplish in the classroom. I am grateful for the chance to clarify my overly-glib statement that you need 3,500 kanji to be on the true path to mastery.
You do, but it deserves a better explanation.
Let's start where there is basic agreement. There are a thousand or so kanji that are so central to the written language that everyone needs to learn them thoroughly and review them (this will be inevitable in the process of just living in Japan) so often that they will never, ever be forgotten. More than that, though, they are so foundational that many combinations of kanji (we often call these "words") need to be known. It has been said of native speakers in East Asia that it is not only the number of characters they know that is most important. It is rather the depth with which one knows the characters that creates the biggest difference with outside learners. For example, the non-native learner of Japanese might learn 京, "capital." She might well (and very soon) learn the names of two major cities in Japan, 京都 (Kōytō and 東京 (Tōkyō). The difference between the non-native learner and the Japanese reader who has been surrounded by the language pretty much since birth is that the visitor knows maybe a half-dozen combinations. The Japanese reader might well know fifty or more.
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| [c] Depth RF |
This matters. Depth matters.
In other words, students of Japanese as a second language need to find ways to learn those combinations that native speakers know just by going to school and then continuing to read throughout their lives. This series of posts presents a series of strategies for gaining that depth. My colleague was right, though. The first thousand kanji are the key.
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The second part of the answer is a little more complicated. You see, it would be nice to be able to say that learning a thousand kanji really well would actually get the job done. The problem is that the student of Japanese growing up in, say, Montana, cannot (by definition) live in Japan for her whole life. Even if she moves to Japan after college, her foundations will be different. Even if she reads all of the way through primary school, junior high, and high school textbooks, she will still be an adult who spoke English at home and started learning Japanese at a later date (often in high school or college).This has enormous implications.
It is also why I say that students need to learn 3,500 kanji and know things such as "radicals" and precise dictionary definitions even better than their Japanese peers often do. You see, the "foundations" problem just keeps getting worse and worse as the years go by...unless we shore up our foundations. When we get toward the tail end of the jōyō kanji list, the native speaker still has a marked advantage. The outside learner usually knows a given character only in passing—let's use 霧 as an example—with at most a combination or two once seen, perhaps on a sign or a newspaper. The native speaker has seen it many times from elementary school onward (anytime there was a foggy day, in fact), even if she didn't really know some of its nuances (vagueness; foreboding) until later. It was around, in the culture, sort of like the words "adumbrate" or "contumely" in English. They aren't hard; we just don't use them very often. How many non-native speakers of English do you know who would recognize "limn?"
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| [d] Imagined RF |
A few. And that is my point.
Those few have done with English what I ask of Japanese language students. They have combined breadth with depth, and have come closer to simulating the experience of native speakers than they ever could had they just studied in the same manner taught in American (or British) schools. They have used their advantages as students d'un certain age* to gain depth that some native speakers lack. They have set their aims high enough that they have ended up in very solid linguistic territory, able to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of (English) speakers, readers, writers.
*The jarring use of a third language here is meant to reinforce my point; it is tough for native speakers, but learners have to take an aggressive approach to mastering all the stuff that can appear on a printed page.
So, as we get started...let's review:
[1] You need to know a thousand kanji really well—with the kind of depth that only people living and reading in Japan can do. This is enormously difficult and slow work. Very few books teach kanji at an appropriate level of depth. I'll discuss strategies in this series of posts.
[2] You need at the same time to push your breadth of knowledge beyond what even some Japanese readers know (contumely, limn). All the while, you need to continue developing added depth for these "new" characters.
It is hard work, but you will be on the road to mastery. Let's get started on the Twelve Steps to Kanji Mastery.
Click here for the other half of the "Kanji Steps to Mastery" introduction:
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| [e] Passage to Mastery RF |
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