Kanji Slamming

It's finally beginning to pay off! I think. For the past month or so I've been "hanging around" with kanji a lot . . . that means, trying to study it, getting distracted, trying some new, odd method usually with iPad apps -- I think I now have about eight different ones on my iPad Mini -- but it's the addition of a little stylus pen-thingy that seems to have broken the blood-kanji barrier.

Plus, add to that the sheer amount of tines I've been looking at these kanji, now over almost 30 years . . . I've learned them, forgotten them, learned them and forgotten them so many times it's just not countable/uncountable . . . and now that I've been concentrating on them again they have somehow magically begun to stick.

I bought this rather overpriced app called "Kanji LS" and now that I have the very pathetic "stylus" which when writing kanji is like trying to play the guitar with Antarctic-recommended mitts on it seems to have clumsily come together enough so that I can actually write a kanji and then see how close I came to being right! These five example being the ones I'm proudest of, since all I got as hints for these kanji were English meanings. I was merciless on this exercise, counting as "Wrong" any kanji whose stroke order I wrote incorrectly so that i will be forced to meet up with them later.

Also, remember that all these kanji are among the first 80 or so that six-year-olds learn in school in Japan so you can put into proper perspective what a pathetic "feat" it truly was . . . but I'm proud of it! Hell, I even ran out to show Brigitte one of the ones (the one for "sound") I got right. She was properly impressed.

I may just start a kanji competition with my students. Maybe for money!

BUT I mainly just wanted you to take hurt and understand that if I can do it, you can too!

These are just five of the ones I got right. To my credit, out of the 80, on my first ever complete run-through, I got around a 60% score, meaning that I was able to WRITE the kanji with only the meaning of it given in English, which usually means that if I can write the kanji, i have remembered its on-yomi and kun-yomi readings as well, and could probably read it correctly in an unfamiliar compound.

So . . . kanpai to me (my student Mathieu and i polished off a couple of small bottles of saké last week to celebrate . . . um . . . the Emperor's gardener's 93rd birthday.

Anyway. Read 'em and weep! (Do weep, because a couple of my attempts look like a 4-year-old's).

I almost nailed "Ki!" but neglected the little tail that goes on the "roof" segment. My "bamboos" were unforgivably slanted but I gave myself a pass anyway. The only hints I got for each one before trying to write them were the English words you see at the top of each panel.