What this blog's about

I came to Japan on March 17th 2004 from Australia to teach English because I didn't know what else to do with my life. Since then I've married a Japanese girl who gave me a daughter in May this year. So I decided it's finally time to get serious about my Japanese study. One essential aspect to studying Japanese is kanji, the Chinese characters that are used for writing. There are a few thousand that you need to know to read Japanese. For starters, the government recommends learning a set of about 2,000 kanji known as the joyo kanji.

I've been studying the joyo kanji on and off for the four years I've been here. I have a shaky grasp of about 200. For those of you who don't know what kanji are, they are pictures that represent a meaning. For example, the kanji for mouth is a square: 口. Some kanji can be pronounced in only one way, some in more than one way depending on the sentence. Kanji may be used individually or with other kanji to make a single word. The number of strokes used to write a kanji ranges from one to over a dozen. Many kanji share the same pronunciation. Many kanji look extremely similar. 2,000 is a lot of kanji. In short: studying the joyo kanji is hard work!

And yet I've become obsessed with it, above and beyond my need to learn Japanese. The challenge is huge, but finite, unlike studying the language in general, which I could do forever and still not be perfect (heck, I'm not perfect in English). I'm also interested in memorization techniques, and this seems like the perfect test.

So I've devised a system to memorize the kanji. First, using a book called Kanji ABC to help me, I've given labels to every little group of lines that is used to make kanji. In addition, each of the kanji has its own meaning already, obviously. What I am then doing is imagining people (from my life or from the media) that match the labels of the kanji images and people that match the meanings of the kanji, and I'm joining those people together into a little story to remember the kanji. And I'm writing it all down in notebooks.

This blog will serve to keep track of my thoughts during the road to 2,000, as well as anything roadblocks and milestones.