introduction and first post

Kanji Keith here, writing the introduction for the 2009 Kanji Challenge. My friend, Ahmad, had the idea to make this Kanji Challenge in order to create a group of Kanji learners to provide support and encouragement to each other in learning the Kanji. Not only do we intend to learn a bunch of Kanji, we are also going to do it as quickly as possible!

What do we mean by learn?

Our goal is to be able to read the characters only. We are not interested in writing them. Who really writes Japanese characters anyway? That is a skill which is not used when reading. And we want to be able to read Japanese. If we were to write in Japanese, it would be on the computer 99% of the time anyway. We can always work on writing by hand later if it should become a desired skill.

We might not learn the Kanji perfectly. Maybe we'll forget a lot of what we learn. Kanji characters can have many readings in Japanese. Some have only one reading. Many have two readings. Quite a few have 3 or 4 readings. And some have too many readings to count. But I think what we want to do is learn the most frequent readings, and not waste time trying to nail down every reading perfectly.

What are the guidelines to the challenge?

We are discussing that right now, so we'll have an update and new post soon. We'd like to get the challenge started real soon. One point is to learn 2009 Kanji characters. Ahmad thinks he can do this in 2 months. As for me, I'm going to have a headstart. I think I already know around 1200 characters real well. So I need to learn 800~900 more. I'm thinking about spending 2 hours a day to learn 30 a day. I think it would probably be best to break it up into 4 sessions of 30 minutes each. I'll be discussing more of what I'm going to do in future posts.

So everybody is welcomed to join the 2009 Kanji Challenge. It doesn't matter where you are starting from. If nobody joins us then I guess it'll just be me and Ahmad. But we'd really like some competitors, I mean, co-learners to take on our challenge.