My current reading in Lexis has spurred me to create this:
See it turns out that our brains tend to store words in groups based on different relationships (homonyms or synonyms or opposites or in category relations). In a word association test people's responses to words like "black" or "mom" or "table" are pretty predictable. This means that the way I've been trying to store my Japanese is terribly hard on my brain as most of the words are not related. Just random word, random word, random word. Well, no longer. Above is a collection of Kanji (Chinese characters) that are all related by the radical 言 which means "to say." This, I am told, is the best way to expand your base. That and reading
I'm almost done with my second book in Japanese, that Murakami one I was talking about some time ago. Japanese is easy to read fast because of the kanji. That is to say, you can look at a word or word compound and recognize the meaning a lot quicker than in English (as English is based on a pesky, unpredictable phonetics structure rather than a solid meaning-based structure of Chinese characters.)
