Hey guys, I'm The Tallest Building Ever, but since that's a ridiculously long username, people call me either
building or
TTBE for short!
I'll tell you a little about myself and my interest in foreign languages!
In high school, I decided to take Japanese. I did really good but the teacher and I butted heads a lot and I was more interested in Japanese culture and history than the rest of my class, who really only cared about learning Japanese to watch Anime. Don't get me wrong, I like my Anime, but these kids ONLY wanted to talk about anime, and thought they were japanese because they liked sushi and japanese candy. Any time the teacher brought up culture or history in the class that was unrelated to anime or Jpop/Jrock, they'd ignore her and start drawing their OCs on their notebooks.
I quit the class after a year and continued to study on my own, watching shows and reading books and listening to Japanese music. I avoided learning Kanji(Japan's rendition of Chinese Characters) for the longest time until I came across a book called "Remembering The Kanji" by James Heisig.
It takes a very obscure approach to learning to write characters. Basically, his philosophy is that you'll be able to learn the characters better if you associate them with words in your own language first before adding the Japanese pronounciations to them. It also helps you remember the characters by taking all the parts of the Kanji apart and making a little story out of it.
Long story short, I started making the flashcards as directed in the book and I studied on the train to work every day(an hour each way). This was cool. I was actually having lots of fun learning all these characters and I completely remembered every single one almost effortlessly! I learned 700 Kanji in 3 months and then I met my boyfriend(his Username is Bolaw!), whose family is from Hong Kong, and they all speak Cantonese.
Basically, Japanese got eventually thrown out of the picture and a year later I found myself really wanting to learn Cantonese.
I took a stroll through my favorite book store, and I happened to find out that the guy who wrote my Kanji book also wrote one for Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese! I got so excited and traded my Kanji Book in for the Traditional Chinese one and started learning these characters all over again(It feels like a review for me, but I have some Japanese words in my head attached to the characters and some of the meanings are a little different than the Japanese ones, so I decided to start over.).
If you look at these books with an open mind and just try it out, you'll probably find that these books are really helpful to you as well. Like I said before, they don't teach you pronunciations, but the authors both write quite a long essay explaining their reasons for this.
So go check them out! You can find the first few chapters to try out for yourself for FREE here.Make sure to read the first chapters before going to try to learn some of these characters yourself, because he explains his method extensively and it's very helpful.
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