Why No New "Kanji a Day?"

I was supposed to be posting all the kanji I'm learning every day in this space. But you know what? I'm jumping around too much. I'm not doing them in a particular order, and so far, about 90% of them, I actually did study while I was in Japan, all those years ago.

I underestimate how many I studied; I must have gone through at least 500 while I was there, at least, recognition-wise. Now all that is required is to drum all these up from memory, and learn how to write them -- that I never learned to do -- just to read them -- and memorize all their readings.

But it's basically a job of catch-up. I know so many that fall outside the realm of "Year one," "Year Two," etc. that it's pointless learning them again in order.

Writing them has just become easier, thanks to a couple of iPad apps that I highly recommend, plus a stylus. I use JiShop for kanji recognition and a bit of handwriting; you can pen in a radical and it will automatically list all the kanji with that radical (but you have to be pretty precise with your penwork) -- and it will look those kanji up and give definitions, readings and compounds for them, plus break them down and give you three different examples of stroke order. Highly recommended. I think it's less than ten bucks, but worth ten times more.

Then there is Midori, which is a great app that also lets you write kanji, except it's even more picky than JiShop, so it really gets your stroke order in gear.

That's another thing I realize I took from my earlier Japanese kanji studies -- I must have learned how to use the correct stroke order, because to write a character like 口 requires you to throw away everything you've been taught about drawing things, because just this box has an odd stroke order (only three strokes makes the whole box) that just wouldn't occur to you if you weren't taught it. And that stroke order applies EVERY time you have to draw a box, which is OFTEN.

And I have to admit, writing kanji is half-writing, half-drawing, which is definitely an odd thing to do for us Westerners.

My stylus is a useless piece of shit -- a Wacom Bamboo -- but I suspect anything you get is going to be a pathetic stand-in either for a pen or a brush. Since then, I got a Trent Arcadia from Amazon, which has yet to arrive, but I suspect despite the good reviews it will be very similar to the Wacom.

Still, I'm plugging away -- since I wrote the last post on kanji I must have mastered at least 20 more kanji. So get to work, people, 'cause we're gonna have a test!