日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 6

If you have a question about the language, ask it and fellow 4channers might see it and answer it for you.

Japanese - Ask questions thread
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1174719097/1-40

日語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread2 質問
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1206158123/1-40

日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 3
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1267485093/1-40

日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 4
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1302350850/1-40

日本語 Japanese Ask Questions Thread 5
http://dis.4chan.org/read/lang/1330050873/1-40

>>270
To compound, you should have decks of anki cards that look like this. On one side of one card you should have 恵方 and on the other えほう, "favorable direction." When you see the kanji, you should be able to read and define it. On another card you should have "favorable direction" on one side, and 恵方, えほう on the other. In this way you are developing the two key functions of interlingual literacy. One one hand you can read a word and be able to read it out loud while also understanding its meaning, and on the other hand you will be able to take a word you want to say that you can conceptualize and write it in Japanese and know what it says. This manner of learning is far more integrated than learning the puzzle pieces of a language, because as everyone ever has discovered, we don't learn things as fragments but as complex symbols which we psychologically link to other symbols in their value (read: Gestalt theory, data entry model of the human psyche). It's both impossible and useless to learn kanji as just fragments, because they will not have been assigned a value this way, and there's no point in learning the ingredients that would allow you to make pasta noodles before you learn how to boil prepackaged pasta and make a sauce. If you do learn how to make pasta from scratch, congrats, your hard work will make you a linguist, and now you can put your skills to work by writing dissertations and teaching bored students how to design the ideal cookbook instead of going out and working in a five-star restaurant. I mean, unless that's your sort of thing, but most people learn Japanese so that they can eat that night, if you comprehend my extended metaphor.