Photo by Sapphireblue
A lot of learners let their perfectionism become their Waterloo. Don’t let your lofty goals get in the way of actually getting the job done!
Imagine someone named Jake. Jake likes to be very thorough when studying kanji, and so he has decided to memorize every single combination that a kanji appears in. Well, if you’ve ever taken a gander at the Nelson’s dictionary, you know that Jake could spend most of his adult life memorizing just 4 characters. Still, Jake is intent on becoming some kind of kanji wizard, and the results will not be pretty. Jake will either a) burn out completely in a few weeks, or b) become utterly consumed by learning Japanese to the dismay of all those around him.
If you have ever considered learning every single kanji or every single combination in existence, here are some tips on how to channel that “perfectionist” energy in ways that will really pay off for you in the long run, so you won’t end up like Jake.
- First, plan to learn all the combinations at some point, but concentrate only on the most important ones for now. Tell yourself you will go back and add the others later. If you are a real perfectionist, you will really do it.
- Remind yourself that your brain can only take in a limited amount of new information at a time, and that it will take some time for new information to solidify before you have really learned it. That means that if you do try to memorize too many kanji too quickly, you’ll probably weaken your grasp on them all to some degree.
- Channel your perfection into stroke order. I cannot emphasize this enough. This is far more important than knowing some obscure combination, and stroke order is nearly impossible to re-learn once you learn it wrong.
- Embrace your ROM (Read Only Memory). You don’t need to know how to write absolutely every compound you come across (even native Japanese speakers have to look words up sometimes), so decide which ones you are OK with knowing passively. (If you’re taking a Japanese class then you won’t have this luxury. Sorry.) In my case, I made sure I knew all the kanji in my address even though some were obscure, but I was perfectly OK with not knowing how to write きれい in kanji (奇麗 for you nerds).
Have you overcome any perfectionist tendencies? Please share your experiences in the comments!
I completely agree with your article… I often try to work too hard and finally finish learning less that if I would do it calmly one word at a time
I also think that stroke order is extremely important… There’s actually a really interesting discussion going on about this topic under my article at http://nihongoup.com/blog/how-to-write-kanji/