Starting Your Kanji
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” – William Shakespeare
Now that you’ve learned the first 10 nouns vocab, it’s time for one more little thing… and that “little” thing is kanji. Don’t worry, it’ll only be a few. Now that you’ve learned how kanji is learned on TextFugu, and now that you’ve learned the 1-2 stroke radicals, it’s time for you to start learning kanji as well. As I told you earlier, kanji is a separate section on TextFugu, which means you can actually jump ahead if you’d like, though it will be integrated into the regular seasons as well. At first, I’ll tell you how to study each kanji. After a while, though, you’ll get pretty good at it, and although I’ll still provide the mnemonics and such, you’ll need less hand holding. I’ll be really hand-holdy for a while, though, so please wipe the sweat off your hands first, yeah? To start, we’re going to take it nice and slow. A mere FOUR kanji await you. That’s it. FOUR. So easy. There’ll be bigger batches in the future, but for now, it’s time to get your feet wet. Open up these four “kanji narratives.” I’d recommend ctrl/cmd+clicking them into separate tabs, and take them one by one, in order (order’s pretty important here). Then, when you’re done, come right back here.
| Kanji | Meaning | 音 (on) | 訓 (kun) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 一 | one | いち | ひと.つ, ひと |
| 二 | two | に | ふた.つ, ふた |
| 七 | seven | しち | なな, なな.つ |
| 九 | nine | きゅう, く | ここの. ここの.つ |
Cool, you all done? Awesome. Let’s create your “Kanji” deck on Anki. This deck is purely for you to be able to practice and remember the meanings of the kanji as well as the main reading for it (usually on’yomi, sometimes kun’yomi). There’s even an option for practicing identifying the radicals, which will get a little harder with time (though it will also get easier in some ways too).
Since this is a new deck, you’ll have to unzip this file, open up Anki and then go to File>>Import. Even though it’s the first import of the deck, you need to still import it otherwise audio doesn’t work properly later on. So, File>>Import and then choose a name for it (I’d recommend “TextFugu Kanji” because that’s what I’ll be calling it from here forward). It should import without a hitch, and then you should have yourself an awesome “TextFugu Kanji” deck in Anki (later we’ll import more kanji into the deck). Next, you should download the next vocab deck. This vocab deck is from the kanji you just learned (above). You should import this deck into your “TextFugu Vocab” deck and then go through your reviews / the new vocab. Since the deck you’re importing this into already exists, you should only need to open the “TextFugu Vocab” deck then go to File>>Import and then import the .anki file.
Go through the kanji and vocab deck and study what there is to be studied (there isn’t much, really). Make sure you know it well and then once you do, move on to the next page (real grammar stuff now, promise!).