SymXuX Japanese Journey
Overview of my current progress
This is my first post, if you never went to the ‘about me’ where I introduced myself(Please go check it out if you got the time, お願いします(onegai-shimasu/Please), I am SymXuX. You can call me ‘Sym’ or ‘XuX' or whatever way you want, just no offensive nicknames(Thanks :3).
Anyways, to get straight to the point, in this post, as suggested by the title, I will be sharing about my current progress in learning Japanese.
Firstly, I have been learning Japanese for a year but I have been making a lot of progress only recently. The reason behind that is that a year back, i have only been learning the different writing systems for the language, which is mainly ‘hiragana’ and ‘katakana’ and some basic vocabulary using those readings. Afterwards, I went on to learn the grammatical concepts of the language and the sentence structure which I personally feel is the wrong approach to learning Japanese. However, please don’t be misunderstood as there can be many approaches to learning the language and learning the grammar/sentence structure can be one of them.
But why do I feel that it is the wrong approach to take? Let’s just take English sentences as an example. When constructing sentences, there must be a subject, verb and a object, this is the sentence structure, yet this is only about 20%(my own gauge) of the whole sentence. But in order to fully construct a sentence, you need to have the necessary vocabulary to fit into the sentence.
From this example, my point is that you may get how the sentence structure works, but ultimately without having any knowledge to any vocabulary, you won’t be able to form a sentence. And in Japanese context, to learn vocabulary, you need to learn the respective kanji first.
If you still do not understand, you can refer to this link :
https://www.quora.com/Should-I-learn-kanji-alongside-the-actual-vocabulary-and-grammar
Which will tell you why you should learn kanji first
To continue about my progress, basically so far i have learnt over 100 kanji(漢字), and over 300 vocabulary(単語) over 2-3 months which I would say is quite slow. But since I do not have much time due to studies, thus right now I can only progress slowly. However, I will still continue to push forward regardless of the challenges I face(time constraints etc.).
25 November 2018
