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The Power of Using 音記号 When Reading Kanji — 5 Comments

  1. This is great! I’d studied a little bit of this in Chinese as it works the same way, but hadn’t thought to explore it in Japanese much. Thank you for making so many quizzes and guides about it, it will surely be helpful to a lot of people! Anything that makes kanji learning a little bit easier even if it’s not a 100% foolproof rule or magic bullet like you said, is really helpful :)

    • Thank you for the comment. It is interesting that you heard about them through Chinese study. I never thought about it from the other way, but of course it would carry through, eh? My Japanese tutor introduced them to me and bemoaned the fact that she did not use them as a child coming up through the Japanese school system. They sure make life easier.

      • Yeah they really do! It would be great if they were taught in school systems in Japan and in the classroom for Japanese learners outside of Japan as well.

  2. Hi James & Ember,
    I noticed the patterns in my study of kanji but couldn’t find any study material that employed this method, so I created a FREE iOS app that transformed all of the 部首, 暗記 , & 漢字 into pivot radicals to allow a yoni to leverage your current knowledge base of kanji to learn the readings and meanings of many other kanji. For example, 尞 is not a radical and it’s not a kanji, so let’s call it a pivot radical and pivot it to learn the only four Joyo Kanji that have it. Why? All kanji in the 尞 pivot are pronounced リョウ ryou 100% of the time

    1亻Person who I work with? 僚 Colleague
    2 疒 Sickness should be ? 療 Heal
    3 宀 Roof over a ? 寮 Dormitory
    4 目 Eye can see ? 瞭 Clear

  3. Wow, I thought this 音記号 was the common way to learn Chinese characters –
    until now.. hearing it’s meant for intermediate and learners over lvl20.

    Without 音記号 I would have been able to memorize Kanji. In my mind, I’ve been forming circles and relations between Chinese characters, between their meanings and pronunciations.

    It’s interesting..
    How is your and the most common way to begin memorizing Kanji?? really interested!

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