Kanji Pictograms and ‘Mandagrams’ Hinder Learning
This post was prompted by ‘Mandagrams’, but I came across Kanji Pictogram books when I first started learning Kanji for Japanese. The seemed kind of cute and make a lot of sense for some simple characters like ‘mountain’ below.
It’s interesting to know how characters were originally created and what they were based on. A lot of the simple characters do tie to what they look like.
However they are absolutely useless beyond 10 or 20 characters, and I believe they actually hinder learning if people start relying on them after then.
Taking the example above, the main feature is that the left-hand part is made to look like a tail. What about other characters that have this part?
For example 猫. This means cat. So yes you could say they both have a tail on the left-hand side. And a lot of animal Kanji have this left-hand part. But a lot don’t, as in 獄 ‘prison’.
What’s better is to learn the Chinese radical system. It’s slightly harder at first but it helps you with all aspects of Kanji learning: pronunciation, meaning and stroke order. By building up your knowledge of radicals you can make intelligent guesses about kanji you’ve never seen before. Something you can never do if you’ve just memorised that something with a tail looks like a monkey.
It boils down to if you want to be able to learn a few Kanji to impress people or get an unintentionally offensive tattoo, or if you want to actually learn the language.
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