If I am able to stick to this 5 Kanji a day analysis, it should take me about 255 days to finish sorting the rest of the unsorted Kanji.

I am trying to think about the best use of my time and best ROI for content, marketing, getting my message and content out there, all while building my portfolio and extras for my graduate school application.

I’m thinking of applying for grad school in Korea to study linguistics, focusing on Korean and Japanese linguistics. It would be something related to comparative linguistics, I think.

I think YouTube videos provide a great deal of ROI so I think I’m going to be making videos about the sound groups in Chinese characters

Originally, I wanted to sort 50 unsorted Kanji a day, but it takes way too long to even analyze and sort just one Kanji.

Then I moved on to 25 Kanji a day, and that still took too long.

And after that I moved on to 10 Kanji a day, but I realized that I have too many projects that I need to get done, and while sorting out unsorted Kanji is a big priority, I can’t spend all my time just doing one project with a low return on time investment.

Now I’ve settled on 5 Kanji a day, since it will allow me to keep going and making progress, while not taking up that much time. 

In addition, I will work on editing and republishing my previous Kanji sound group pages and work more on Instagram and YouTube.

Okay, today I wasn’t able to analyze as many Chinese characters compared to yesterday.

I’ve been spending a lot of time outside because it’s the summer.

However, when I’m outside, I’m just using my smartphone and looking at random stuff.

Instead of just randomly browsing my phone, I can analyze Japanese vocabulary and comparing the Japanese and Korean readings of Chinese characters.

Analyzing Chinese characters and sorting them individually is quite labor intensive, and it actually requires me to use online resources, whereas analyzing Japanese vocabulary doesn’t necessitate me being connected to the internet.

One thing that I’ve been wanting to do regular YouTube videos and Instagram posts and I need to get into a routine.

Okay, so the current set of Kanji that I’m working on and organizing is from 1027 to 1257.

These are all characters that are from very common words in the Japanese language.

Many of these characters are not able to be grouped into sound groups.

Many commonly used Kanji are of pictographic or ideographic origin, and do not have a sound signal.

I thought that this set of around 200 Kanji would be easy to get through and sort into groups, but interestingly, it is actually easier to sort less commonly used Kanji into sound groups.

Basically, more complex Kanji tend to be formed by a formula like this:
– 1 sound clue + 1 meaning clue,

Whereas more commonly used Kanji are formed like this: 
– a direct picture/drawing of the thing
– 2 meaning clues (with no sound clue) 

So basically after I get through this set of Kanji, it should hopefully be easier to sort the more complex Kanji into groups.

In James Heising’s book series, he chose a total of 3000 Chinese characters for students of the Japanese language to learn.

Because certain Kanji appeared more than once in his books, there are total of 3218 entries.

He grouped 1666 of these Kanji into “sound groups”, but the more I studied the Kanji, I realized that it is possible to group many of the 1553 “ungrouped” Kanji into sound groups as well.

So now I’m going through the remaining 1553 Kanji and sorting them into groups.

It takes a long time to analyze each individual Kanji and sort them, so I want to sort 50 of them day, which would take me about 30 or so days.

But I think a more realistic schedule would be sorting 25 Kanji a day, which would take me about 2 months.

And once I get into the flow, it gets pretty easy, so I’m going to put off analyzing Japanese words until I finish sorting the Kanji.

One thing that I have to do is focus on working little by little every day.

The problem is that I always want everything to be done asap.

It’s the feeling of instant gratification. 

Or to be specific, the desire to experience that feeling of instant gratification.

Because I’m working on multiple projects, all of which with long timeframes, I want all of them to be finished.

But I think that all of my projects have long timelines, and I need to just set a reasonable and realistic schedule and stick to it.

So tomorrow, 6/25, I have a day off and I’m going to get a lot of stuff done and plan out my schedule. 

Well, I already do have a schedule, but I think I need to add more and make it more detailed.

Something that has been the core issue of my work has been this:

Should I focus of analyzing data and creating data as much as possible, and then only publish after I have gathered a lot of data?

Or should I just publish data as I go?

Well, like many things in like, it seems like something in the middle works pretty well.

If I just keep analyzing data, I can’t see what the data will look like in it’s final form – on my website.

However, if I just publish everything immediately after creating the data, I can’t really get into the flow of analyzing data.

I can get into the flow of analyzing data and the flow of publishing separately, but not at the same time.

So I think what I’ll do is analyze 10-25 sets of data at a time and then publish them so I can get into the flow of publishing as well.

Also, one thing that drives me crazy is when I publish data, but then  i realize I’ve made a mistake with the template, so I have to go back and edit all the previous pages.

There has got to be a way to make one “parent” spreadsheet where if I edit that template, it automatically edits all of the “child” spreadsheets that have individual data in them.

Okay, so one of the things that both gives me great pleasure and drives me nuts at the same time is having to rewrite all my data.

The reason is that as I’m working on organizing my data, I end up realizing that there is a better way to organize the data.

Another thing that I end up realizing is that I can add more data to the template that will make comparing Korean and Japanese better.

So what that means is that I have to go back and edit all of my previous pages and previous data.

It’s a lot of work and I probably should figure out a way to do things more efficiently.

 

Overall Word Analysis
  Japanese 漢字 Readings Korean 漢字 Readings  
Kanji + Kana 公園 公園 Hanja
Hiragana / Katakana こうえん 공원 Spoken Form – Hangul
Spoken Form – Pahanngana 콩으엔ㄴ
Core Form – Pahanngana 콩엔 공원 Core Form – Pahanngana

 

Piece-By-Piece Breakdown
Japanese Korean
Sino-? Native? Foreign? Kanji Kana Pahanngana (Spoken Form) Pahanngana (Core Form) Pahanngana (Core Form) Hangul (Spoken Form) Hanja
Sino-Japanese こう 콩으
Sino-Japanese えん 엔ㄴ

 

 

Overall Word Analysis
  Japanese 漢字 Readings Korean 漢字 Readings  
Kanji + Kana 元気 元氣 Hanja
Hiragana / Katakana げんき 원기 Spoken Form – Hangul
Spoken Form – Pahanngana 겐ㄴ키
Core Form – Pahanngana 겐키 원기 Core Form – Pahanngana

 

Piece-By-Piece Breakdown
Japanese Korean
Sino-? Native? Foreign? Kanji Kana Pahanngana (Spoken Form) Pahanngana (Core Form) Pahanngana (Core Form) Hangul (Spoken Form) Hanja
Sino-Japanese げん 겐ㄴ
Sino-Japanese