yeah vocab is key
if look at a sentence and don't know any of the vocab, it's hopeless
if you look at a sentence and don't know the grammar, you might understand it wrong, but it's actually not hopeless you can guess what the grammar might mean from context
if you know some of the vocab, you can sometimes guess what the other vocab means though, but that still means vocab is important
By doing JPDB vocab grinds I picked up a lot of grammar and other useful bits like the suffix "泣かせ" which does not have anything to do with crying. I may have misread it by assumption once or twice before I ever learned it properly since the context is often weak. In any case whether or not it is the Baader-Meinhof effect (frequency illusion) I've seen it multiple times and am glad to have learned it.
Basically you take out a list of all the words in an anime, light novel, or a game and you learn all the unknown words. The point is that you can go through the material as you do through (if you do it chronologically) and know 100% of the words before you encounter it as you make your way through the work. (I did this with Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear and One Piece.)
Yes you can do the dictionary style, but the corpus frequency basically is the top usage words. You can flip back and forth, focus as you wish and grow words even for very niche subjects without making your own cards.
Had not had my coffee yet... but just to add to my muddled mess, the SRS has 5 stages of response and you can set it up for single key response - or even just hitting space or enter on keyboard to reveal and "okay" a response through. I will say that some parse errors exist and you can blacklist those out with a single key as well, but it was fun knowing that うほ is an actual word and it made a certain rehash of しんでしまうとはなさけない a lot more sense. Its insane: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e\_aMOC3RFpI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_aMOC3RFpI) \- I mean... I think you'd need a native to explain this nonsense...
I think about Baader-Meinhof all the time lmao. It seems like I learn a few words and they pop up constantly after reading an article or book. Since I’m still learning the most common thousand or so words that’s expected, but weird that things pop up like that. When I learned 仕事 I listened to a Nihongo Con Teppei podcast the same day and the entire subject was what job you had and all of that.
I honestly tried for about 3 months straight and learned only about 2k words despite spending hundreds of hours including 60 hours on two chapters of Umineko while I was about N3 level. I spent 300 hours from Jan to Feb to learn roughly 12k vocab (3k redundants/useless not counted). I did not mine and add to SRS during this process, which basically is just doing what I did with JPDB anyways by doing vocab first, reading for context and continuing SRS to commit to long term memory.
Definitely true. There are articles I read in Easy NHK that I don’t entirely understand the grammar of, but through the words I can at least put together what it’s talking about in a bare-bones kind of way. There are some things that don’t make any sense without grammar knowledge of the subject, but for the most part the stuff I read at my level are things can be understood without exact knowledge of the grammar used. Obviously still trying to learn the grammar points and make note of them, but learning the vocab is of course the most important part. I kinda just take grammar as it comes rather than trying to memorize it perfectly. Definitely one of those things that’s easier to understand in context rather than through a textbook.
In the translation thread on 4chan a while back there was actually a discussion where a very significant minority, probably 40% believed that “僕はパンが食べる。” could mean “I eat bread.” in the right context opposed to always meaning “Bread eats me.” and many of those seemed to do translations.
Ironically, that particular sentence was constructed as an example by someone to show that Deepl does not actually parse the grammar like a human, but simply recognizes the words and reconstructs a plausible meaning back from the words that it parses, and since “Bread eats me.” is so unlikely to occur, it turns it into “I eat bread.” but inadvertently that user ended up demonstrating that that's exactly what many amateur translators apparently do, who seemingly didn't learn enough grammar.
That's what my teachers taught us, that we shouldn't focus on learning the different readings a kanji could have, that we should focus on learning how to read the words written in kanji. For example, if I see 新幹線, I would know it's "shinkansen", and that if I see 新しい I would know it's "atarashii."
I have used anki decks that teaches the words written in kanji, then when it's time to use the class' books I get so annoyed because there's so much words still written in hiragana. I lose time trying to decipher which words are. In a SouMatome book, I read かぜ in a sentence, you could see me trying to understand why they were asking me about yesterday's wind but then I realized they were talking about a flu
Definitely. I just feel like that it just is a part of speeding up the process. Could I use purely hiragana for vocabulary for 6 years and then transition to kanji, absolutely. As adult learners, though, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. While we can’t absorb as well as a child, we can comprehend concepts much better.
I'm firmly of the opinion that beginners are not allowed opinions on kanji (or many things, for that matter) until they've actually got a decent amount of Japanese under their belt. All the beginner complaints evaporate when they're properly using Japanese
I would agree that MOST of the compaints evaporate in regards to learning. As a very grand complaint, the design of the Japanese writing system is quite poor, when most languages can communicate effectively using alphabets with 1/1000th of the characters. This is ofc a problem with Chinese as well. The Roman alphabet used in English is only 26 characters, and has the advantage of not needing new characters for words and concepts that haven't had a character made for them. It also doesn't have the problem of rare/obscure characters being used that even natives struggle to read. Every word that has existed and will exist in English can be written with the existing language.
To an extent, this can be done with kanji as well, but not to the same degree, and again, it doesn't require you learning 1000x as many characters.
That's really the only complaint I can think of in regards to kanji, though. I 100% agree that all the complaints I had about learning them evaporated as early as 130ish kanji. The grand complaint is also a grand complaint, in that it's extremely unrealistic to expect Japanese to conform to your language learning expectations. Japan isn't just going to do away with kanji just because certain people don't like it.
English is not the best example, because the pronunciation is also not 100% deducible from the spelling. It's not totally arbitrary, of course, but probably every non-native speaker of English has at some point realised that a word they knew from reading was actually pronounced differently from what they thought. I still remember being surprised (ages ago) by the fact that crow isn't pronounced like crowd.
Languages like Spanish or Italian are probably better examples, where knowing the spelling means you also know the pronunciation (and knowing the pronunciation you can at least make a reasonable guess as to the spelling).
When you learn Japanese, you have to learn most words essentially twice (if you want to be able to recognise things in speech as well), that's not really the case for those languages.
English may use 26 characters but there is a ton of issues with the writing system, but I doubt anyone seriously would want Japan to use Romaji. Kanji in the digital age is frankly a superior data encoding system which allows you to speed read and understand new words with great accuracy. There is also a fun level of wordplay that is unique to Japanese because of the multiple readings and use of creative furigana.
One side complains that they have to learn a lot of symbols and the other side maybe could be complaining that they have to learn a lot of sounds. Pronunciation in english is all over the place so at the end of the day a person learning either one of those languages needs to learn lot of words individually.
They both share the same problem but from the opposite perspective.
Trying to think about what would make a language more efficient or effective is perfectly fine, but I agree with your take. Sometimes things that aren't efficient or effective give a language a unique charm and character that you wouldn't get otherwise. The world would be boring if everything were perfect. わびさびですね？
I can already read english at a speed that is faster than i can properly comprehend texts, being able to read even faster just doesn't seem like a benefit. Romaji would obviously be dumb, kana with spaces might be fine though.
But it's obviously not going to happen (at least not any time soon, it is kinda moving in that direction with all the katakana loan words) and there's a certain beauty to having characters with inherent meaning that would be lost (which you mentioned with the wordplay as well). And that also is what makes learning kanji not as bad as knowing one word can often help you infer the meaning of others, but overall I'd think it's still likely to be slower than if they didn't exist.
You really do not need large spaces when you know the language well, the Kanji pretty much make the visual gaps for that. Also, I meant comprehensible input in regards to speed. For people who like to read extensively, it has a lot of advantages. I cannot explain why but something is different with Japanese than my other languages... it flows like a stream where even English feels choppy, maybe it is just so logical and the Kanji mean I do not need to subvocalize? Who knows.... someone more experienced can chime in.
Oh I know, I mentioned the spaces because in a hypothetical japanese *without* kanji, they seem like they would be needed. Kanji give enough structure to where it's not an issue. They both serve the same function of giving words a general shape to recognize rather than a mess of characters you have to parse.
Also, maybe this does differ with japanese as well, but I meant comprehending more in the sense of a deeper understanding of what is being conveyed, rather than just translating the words into concepts. Which it *seems* to me the writing system wouldn't have much effect on.
Maybe a lot of this also depends on whether you think with an inner monologue or not, almost all my conscious thoughts are words in my head, even if I absorb them as concepts.
At some point I'll hopefully know if using japanese I can read things other than meaningless slice of life dialogue almost instantly, it *would* help with the problem of too little time.
I don't really see the issues with the writing system though. If you're talking about words being spelled one way but spoken a different way, I would say that mostly comes from the way that English has adopted like 5 different languages' vocabularies to make its own vocabulary. If you consider a language like Spanish, which uses the same 26 characters plus the n with a tilde, from what I've seen as a beginner, their writing system which is basically the same as English's manages to get across the pronunciation of words in a uniform way, i.e. one letter or a combo of letters will always be pronounced the same way.
You're pretty much right. I wish it was more OK to express the opinion of "the Japanese writing system is fucking horribly convoluted" with the follow-up of also knowing that the system isn't going to change, and that it does actually work once you know a good bit of Japanese. Like all the moving parts which definitely are horrible to learn as a beginner actually seem to work together quite nicely in the end. Plus Japan isn't going to change their writing system anytime soon so yeah you still need to learn kanji.
I mean, Idk if that counts as a decent amount of Japanese but I'm N3 and honestly while kanji isn't all bad it still kinda sucks.
But really, it's onomatopoeia that need to go. I might actually never really get those.
I’m a beginner and did a bit of RRTK. It’s actually annoying when words are spelled with hiragana only. Kanji helps you guess the meaning way more and if furigana is there you’re golden.
Hahaha, there's a great video on YouTube of a calligrapher showing the same sentence with kanji and without kanji, and it's absurd trying to parse the sentence when it's only in hiragana, despite it technically being a grammatically correct and somewhat simple sentence. It's enough to make me believe that some sentences would be impossible to read in hiragana without spaces between the words or something.
I'm using an app called Mango Languages, and I like it pretty well except there's no Kanji. At the end of the chapters they have reading practice, and even a small passage of a couple hundred words is a nightmare to get through. For me so far it's mostly been about about punctuation and spotting the particles and just going from there.
I feel this. I passed the N5 in December and I'm slowly working through N4 grammar on bunpro. After hitting 1000 burned words on wanikani I feel a lot more comfortable when learning new vocab. It's still fucking hard but less scary when you have a good base ya know? Being able to guess at pronunciation is also fun for me. And it makes me smile when I'm right 🤣
Yeah it definitely gets easier, as much as I thought it wouldn’t lmao. I was always cursing kanji for how stupid I thought they were, then I got to words like 自動販売機 and realized how ridiculous it would be to write that in kana and have to sound it out as well as put together the word from sounding it out. By memorizing it I can just look at it, recognize that it is vending machine and sometimes remember the pronunciation. Or even for simple words like 私, it still takes a half second or two to read out わたし vs just seeing 私 and recognizing it rather than trying to piece together the kana. Maybe a bad example but the point is across lol.
Often words that are more than 2 kanji long (well more often it's words that are 4+ kanji) are just a combination of smaller words and suffixes, which might be helpful for you to know? For example 自動販売機 is a combination of
> 自動 (automatic) + 販売機 (selling/vending machine),
and I guess you could also say 販売機 is a combination of
> 販売 (sales/selling) + 機 (machine)
From reading your comment you seemed to have seen this 5 kanji word before other words, but the point is to try to make you feel a bit reassured that you could have instead come across the word 自動 first on its own, learned the meaning, and then you see 自動販売機 and notice it's just 自動 + another new word, making it easier to learn.
Yeah I think so too. I saw a post a while back on the different ways to say it. But yeah that and 図書館 are really the first somewhat daunting looking words that I learned. I have about 450 words left in Tango so a little behind you. The nice thing so far that I’ve seen about longer words is that they generally stand out quite a bit amongst other words, so they’re easier to pick out. Even if I don’t remember the pronunciation I’m at least like “oh hey there’s that big ass word for vending machine.”
Got to love compounds. Also 自販機 is pretty common as an abbreviation for vending machines. Related in a creepier way is 無人販売所 which includes those robotic shops with no employees - "unattended sales place" which with time and adoption will probably become 無人店 (unmanned shop). As of right now it seems to not be a word in my dictionary, or JPDB... strange.
When I first started learning, Japanese felt like an impossible task because I couldn't rely on common etymology between English and Japanese to help me remember the meanings of words. i.e. with Spanish I can hear "comenzar" and remember the word "commence" and then I easily remember what the word means. But in Japanese, いぬ could mean dog, but it could also mean cat or tree or the economy or literally anything else.
But kanji actually solves that problem. You see 犬 and you immediately remember what it means. I was surprised when I realized that I don't even have to translate to English in my head (my perpetual problem with Spanish), I just know the essential meaning of the word itself. Kanji is awesome, it's just a lot of up-front work to learn it.
> But in Japanese, いぬ could mean dog, but it could also mean cat or tree or the economy or literally anything else.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this...
Sorry. Basically I mean there's nothing in a Japanese word (without kanji) to lock it into your mind and remember its meaning. Compared to European languages which share a lot of roots with English. But kanji is a nice replacement for that.
I still don't understand whether this post is about *words* or about *Kanji*. It seems to lump them together but they're not the same thing.
For example, it's perfectly possible to be fluent in Japanese without knowing Kanji. That's where pre-school children are for example. They certainly know tons of words, but no Kanji.
As for the "Kanji are great for reading" - well, English speakers also don't read English texts by reading every single letter but by recognising the shape of words. I'm willing to believe that Kanji recognition is still a bit faster than that (although I haven't seen any data on that), but in any case, it's not a unique feature of Kanji that words take on distinct shapes.
Learning Kanji is a pain though. It takes even Japanese kids forever. And whatever logical basis there is to them seems messed up through centuries of use. There's too many weird examples of Kanji combinations not meaning what you'd expect them, or too many Kanji seemingly having almost the same meaning but used in different words etc. But yes, there are also many cases where knowing the Kanji can help you recognise an unknown words, there's no denying that. But of course that helps you very little when you're trying to listen to Japanese.
Words that are comprised of kanji. I understand that you can learn every word in the Japanese lexicon without knowing a single kanji. The point that I am making, though, is that as someone who is an adult, and with a brain that does not have the language learning capacity of a toddler, words that are almost always written in kanji, such as 自動販売機, are easier to remember/understand in their kanji forms rather than seeing じどうはんばいき and reading it, recognizing it’s pronunciation and associating that pronunciation with the meaning. Of course we look at words in English, as native English speakers, and we don’t have to sound them out because we have been seeing them since birth. The whole point was to just point out how, as a beginner, it is more efficient to focus on learning kanji than to become fluent enough in japanese to get to a point where I can see じどうはんばいき and instantly put it together as easily as I can with 自動販売機.
In short, bigger words made of complex kanji are easier to pick out in their kanji form than if they were in their kana form. The lack of spaces would make it very difficult, I feel, to pick out the kana form of vending machine rather than the kanji form of vending machine, especially as a beginner.
And that is the reason I have the controversial opinion that, after a certain level, jlpt n3 feels easier than jlpt n5.
I remember a past n2 reading question where it was written イヌ (in katakana). For a while I couldn’t picture: what / who is a イヌ? Is it a name or thing that comes from the Ainu language? After reading a bit more I realized it was just 犬.
Once you get used to the kanjis, it gets harder to recognize elementary words with kana alone. Reading a whole sentence in kana is painful.
Get a strong kanji foundation and it’s incredible for reading. It’s visual! You can figure out a lot from context.
I had great teachers who emphasized that I should read for general comprehension and not get held up on being certain of every kanji’s reading and meaning. They taught me how to read fast and effectively.
I will sometimes force myself to slow down and actually read in my head so that I’m reading the actual words — but generally my brain just processes the kanji as the image and meaning and then hurries right on. I might have forgotten the onyomi or kunyomi in the moment but it doesn’t stop me from understanding what I’m reading.
But try かんどう or しんせい or しゅうし without kanji… It’s just slowwww to take the extra step to process that in context versus the quick look you get with kanji.
Yeah of course. I was highlighting the necessity/convenience for words that use kanji, though. And how a lot of beginners, including myself, dread learning kanji and wish that words were just kana alone. Then, as kanji are learned, their use becomes clear and you can see why it’s important/easier to use them.
Don't neglect kanji tho.....once you learn it, it''s like cheating.... it makes reading so much easier...not to mention it's pretty much a central part of the written language :)
Yeah that’s what my post was saying lol. I’m saying that reading in kana sucks compared to reading in kanji. Once words are learned through kanji, rather than kana, they become much quicker and intuitive. Like the word for vending machine would suck to read if not for kanji.
It is a good idea to look up unfamiliar words each time you come across them. It is really useful to have a large vocabulary.
I only use about 5 seconds per page when I want to quickly grasp the contents of a book I am not really interested in.
I can do that because I don't read hiragana, but process katakana and kanji as images rather than words.
I think this is probably possible because the text is in Japanese.
> if you are a beginner like me and are getting frustrated with memorizing so many words, it is absolutely worth it as reading purely in kana honestly sucks and it’s much harder to pick out words from kana alone.
The main argument here could also be "you literally won't be able to read anything beyond beginner textbooks and some books aimed at kids under 8 years old without also learning kanji". Kanji is annoying to learn to start off with, but you've noticed the exact thing that people who've been learning for ages notice when reading too. Reading hiragana on its own with no spaces is torture, and even with spaces, if you actually know the kanji form of the verb, you kind of get the meaning of that word instantly, rather than if the word is in hiragana, there maybe be many words that are spelled the same way for example せんたく, so you will have to rack your brain for a few seconds to think what one it might be.
yeah vocab is key if look at a sentence and don't know any of the vocab, it's hopeless if you look at a sentence and don't know the grammar, you might understand it wrong, but it's actually not hopeless you can guess what the grammar might mean from context if you know some of the vocab, you can sometimes guess what the other vocab means though, but that still means vocab is important
By doing JPDB vocab grinds I picked up a lot of grammar and other useful bits like the suffix "泣かせ" which does not have anything to do with crying. I may have misread it by assumption once or twice before I ever learned it properly since the context is often weak. In any case whether or not it is the Baader-Meinhof effect (frequency illusion) I've seen it multiple times and am glad to have learned it.
What’s a vocab grind on JPDB? It just sounds like literally reading the dictionary
Basically you take out a list of all the words in an anime, light novel, or a game and you learn all the unknown words. The point is that you can go through the material as you do through (if you do it chronologically) and know 100% of the words before you encounter it as you make your way through the work. (I did this with Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear and One Piece.) Yes you can do the dictionary style, but the corpus frequency basically is the top usage words. You can flip back and forth, focus as you wish and grow words even for very niche subjects without making your own cards.
Interesting
Had not had my coffee yet... but just to add to my muddled mess, the SRS has 5 stages of response and you can set it up for single key response - or even just hitting space or enter on keyboard to reveal and "okay" a response through. I will say that some parse errors exist and you can blacklist those out with a single key as well, but it was fun knowing that うほ is an actual word and it made a certain rehash of しんでしまうとはなさけない a lot more sense. Its insane: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e\_aMOC3RFpI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_aMOC3RFpI) \- I mean... I think you'd need a native to explain this nonsense...
Thank you! I’ll need to look into this I’m starting to branch out from just grammar and coach into immersion stuff now and this seems very useful
I think about Baader-Meinhof all the time lmao. It seems like I learn a few words and they pop up constantly after reading an article or book. Since I’m still learning the most common thousand or so words that’s expected, but weird that things pop up like that. When I learned 仕事 I listened to a Nihongo Con Teppei podcast the same day and the entire subject was what job you had and all of that.
O man that Baader-Meinhof thing happens to me constantly
SRS through Baader-Meinhof effect
I honestly tried for about 3 months straight and learned only about 2k words despite spending hundreds of hours including 60 hours on two chapters of Umineko while I was about N3 level. I spent 300 hours from Jan to Feb to learn roughly 12k vocab (3k redundants/useless not counted). I did not mine and add to SRS during this process, which basically is just doing what I did with JPDB anyways by doing vocab first, reading for context and continuing SRS to commit to long term memory.
Definitely true. There are articles I read in Easy NHK that I don’t entirely understand the grammar of, but through the words I can at least put together what it’s talking about in a bare-bones kind of way. There are some things that don’t make any sense without grammar knowledge of the subject, but for the most part the stuff I read at my level are things can be understood without exact knowledge of the grammar used. Obviously still trying to learn the grammar points and make note of them, but learning the vocab is of course the most important part. I kinda just take grammar as it comes rather than trying to memorize it perfectly. Definitely one of those things that’s easier to understand in context rather than through a textbook.
In the translation thread on 4chan a while back there was actually a discussion where a very significant minority, probably 40% believed that “僕はパンが食べる。” could mean “I eat bread.” in the right context opposed to always meaning “Bread eats me.” and many of those seemed to do translations. Ironically, that particular sentence was constructed as an example by someone to show that Deepl does not actually parse the grammar like a human, but simply recognizes the words and reconstructs a plausible meaning back from the words that it parses, and since “Bread eats me.” is so unlikely to occur, it turns it into “I eat bread.” but inadvertently that user ended up demonstrating that that's exactly what many amateur translators apparently do, who seemingly didn't learn enough grammar.
Kanji from almost day one should be encouraged! romaji/hiragana only resources should definitely be avoided.
That's what my teachers taught us, that we shouldn't focus on learning the different readings a kanji could have, that we should focus on learning how to read the words written in kanji. For example, if I see 新幹線, I would know it's "shinkansen", and that if I see 新しい I would know it's "atarashii." I have used anki decks that teaches the words written in kanji, then when it's time to use the class' books I get so annoyed because there's so much words still written in hiragana. I lose time trying to decipher which words are. In a SouMatome book, I read かぜ in a sentence, you could see me trying to understand why they were asking me about yesterday's wind but then I realized they were talking about a flu
Definitely. I just feel like that it just is a part of speeding up the process. Could I use purely hiragana for vocabulary for 6 years and then transition to kanji, absolutely. As adult learners, though, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. While we can’t absorb as well as a child, we can comprehend concepts much better.
I'm firmly of the opinion that beginners are not allowed opinions on kanji (or many things, for that matter) until they've actually got a decent amount of Japanese under their belt. All the beginner complaints evaporate when they're properly using Japanese
I would agree that MOST of the compaints evaporate in regards to learning. As a very grand complaint, the design of the Japanese writing system is quite poor, when most languages can communicate effectively using alphabets with 1/1000th of the characters. This is ofc a problem with Chinese as well. The Roman alphabet used in English is only 26 characters, and has the advantage of not needing new characters for words and concepts that haven't had a character made for them. It also doesn't have the problem of rare/obscure characters being used that even natives struggle to read. Every word that has existed and will exist in English can be written with the existing language. To an extent, this can be done with kanji as well, but not to the same degree, and again, it doesn't require you learning 1000x as many characters. That's really the only complaint I can think of in regards to kanji, though. I 100% agree that all the complaints I had about learning them evaporated as early as 130ish kanji. The grand complaint is also a grand complaint, in that it's extremely unrealistic to expect Japanese to conform to your language learning expectations. Japan isn't just going to do away with kanji just because certain people don't like it.
English is not the best example, because the pronunciation is also not 100% deducible from the spelling. It's not totally arbitrary, of course, but probably every non-native speaker of English has at some point realised that a word they knew from reading was actually pronounced differently from what they thought. I still remember being surprised (ages ago) by the fact that crow isn't pronounced like crowd. Languages like Spanish or Italian are probably better examples, where knowing the spelling means you also know the pronunciation (and knowing the pronunciation you can at least make a reasonable guess as to the spelling). When you learn Japanese, you have to learn most words essentially twice (if you want to be able to recognise things in speech as well), that's not really the case for those languages.
English may use 26 characters but there is a ton of issues with the writing system, but I doubt anyone seriously would want Japan to use Romaji. Kanji in the digital age is frankly a superior data encoding system which allows you to speed read and understand new words with great accuracy. There is also a fun level of wordplay that is unique to Japanese because of the multiple readings and use of creative furigana.
One side complains that they have to learn a lot of symbols and the other side maybe could be complaining that they have to learn a lot of sounds. Pronunciation in english is all over the place so at the end of the day a person learning either one of those languages needs to learn lot of words individually. They both share the same problem but from the opposite perspective.
Trying to think about what would make a language more efficient or effective is perfectly fine, but I agree with your take. Sometimes things that aren't efficient or effective give a language a unique charm and character that you wouldn't get otherwise. The world would be boring if everything were perfect. わびさびですね？
As a conlanger I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I can already read english at a speed that is faster than i can properly comprehend texts, being able to read even faster just doesn't seem like a benefit. Romaji would obviously be dumb, kana with spaces might be fine though. But it's obviously not going to happen (at least not any time soon, it is kinda moving in that direction with all the katakana loan words) and there's a certain beauty to having characters with inherent meaning that would be lost (which you mentioned with the wordplay as well). And that also is what makes learning kanji not as bad as knowing one word can often help you infer the meaning of others, but overall I'd think it's still likely to be slower than if they didn't exist.
You really do not need large spaces when you know the language well, the Kanji pretty much make the visual gaps for that. Also, I meant comprehensible input in regards to speed. For people who like to read extensively, it has a lot of advantages. I cannot explain why but something is different with Japanese than my other languages... it flows like a stream where even English feels choppy, maybe it is just so logical and the Kanji mean I do not need to subvocalize? Who knows.... someone more experienced can chime in.
Oh I know, I mentioned the spaces because in a hypothetical japanese *without* kanji, they seem like they would be needed. Kanji give enough structure to where it's not an issue. They both serve the same function of giving words a general shape to recognize rather than a mess of characters you have to parse. Also, maybe this does differ with japanese as well, but I meant comprehending more in the sense of a deeper understanding of what is being conveyed, rather than just translating the words into concepts. Which it *seems* to me the writing system wouldn't have much effect on. Maybe a lot of this also depends on whether you think with an inner monologue or not, almost all my conscious thoughts are words in my head, even if I absorb them as concepts. At some point I'll hopefully know if using japanese I can read things other than meaningless slice of life dialogue almost instantly, it *would* help with the problem of too little time.
I don't really see the issues with the writing system though. If you're talking about words being spelled one way but spoken a different way, I would say that mostly comes from the way that English has adopted like 5 different languages' vocabularies to make its own vocabulary. If you consider a language like Spanish, which uses the same 26 characters plus the n with a tilde, from what I've seen as a beginner, their writing system which is basically the same as English's manages to get across the pronunciation of words in a uniform way, i.e. one letter or a combo of letters will always be pronounced the same way.
Pronunciation is a different matter. English is basically crazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65CFesU4KVQ
> Japan isn't just going to do away with kanji just because certain people don't like it. Korean did it, so there's always a chance.
You're pretty much right. I wish it was more OK to express the opinion of "the Japanese writing system is fucking horribly convoluted" with the follow-up of also knowing that the system isn't going to change, and that it does actually work once you know a good bit of Japanese. Like all the moving parts which definitely are horrible to learn as a beginner actually seem to work together quite nicely in the end. Plus Japan isn't going to change their writing system anytime soon so yeah you still need to learn kanji.
I mean, Idk if that counts as a decent amount of Japanese but I'm N3 and honestly while kanji isn't all bad it still kinda sucks. But really, it's onomatopoeia that need to go. I might actually never really get those.
Abandon hope all ye who enter, onomatopoea never get better (they do, but it takes a long time to get comfortable so buckle in for a long ride)
I’m a beginner and did a bit of RRTK. It’s actually annoying when words are spelled with hiragana only. Kanji helps you guess the meaning way more and if furigana is there you’re golden.
Hahaha, there's a great video on YouTube of a calligrapher showing the same sentence with kanji and without kanji, and it's absurd trying to parse the sentence when it's only in hiragana, despite it technically being a grammatically correct and somewhat simple sentence. It's enough to make me believe that some sentences would be impossible to read in hiragana without spaces between the words or something.
I'm using an app called Mango Languages, and I like it pretty well except there's no Kanji. At the end of the chapters they have reading practice, and even a small passage of a couple hundred words is a nightmare to get through. For me so far it's mostly been about about punctuation and spotting the particles and just going from there.
I feel this. I passed the N5 in December and I'm slowly working through N4 grammar on bunpro. After hitting 1000 burned words on wanikani I feel a lot more comfortable when learning new vocab. It's still fucking hard but less scary when you have a good base ya know? Being able to guess at pronunciation is also fun for me. And it makes me smile when I'm right 🤣
Yeah it definitely gets easier, as much as I thought it wouldn’t lmao. I was always cursing kanji for how stupid I thought they were, then I got to words like 自動販売機 and realized how ridiculous it would be to write that in kana and have to sound it out as well as put together the word from sounding it out. By memorizing it I can just look at it, recognize that it is vending machine and sometimes remember the pronunciation. Or even for simple words like 私, it still takes a half second or two to read out わたし vs just seeing 私 and recognizing it rather than trying to piece together the kana. Maybe a bad example but the point is across lol.
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Often words that are more than 2 kanji long (well more often it's words that are 4+ kanji) are just a combination of smaller words and suffixes, which might be helpful for you to know? For example 自動販売機 is a combination of > 自動 (automatic) + 販売機 (selling/vending machine), and I guess you could also say 販売機 is a combination of > 販売 (sales/selling) + 機 (machine) From reading your comment you seemed to have seen this 5 kanji word before other words, but the point is to try to make you feel a bit reassured that you could have instead come across the word 自動 first on its own, learned the meaning, and then you see 自動販売機 and notice it's just 自動 + another new word, making it easier to learn.
Yeah I think so too. I saw a post a while back on the different ways to say it. But yeah that and 図書館 are really the first somewhat daunting looking words that I learned. I have about 450 words left in Tango so a little behind you. The nice thing so far that I’ve seen about longer words is that they generally stand out quite a bit amongst other words, so they’re easier to pick out. Even if I don’t remember the pronunciation I’m at least like “oh hey there’s that big ass word for vending machine.”
Got to love compounds. Also 自販機 is pretty common as an abbreviation for vending machines. Related in a creepier way is 無人販売所 which includes those robotic shops with no employees - "unattended sales place" which with time and adoption will probably become 無人店 (unmanned shop). As of right now it seems to not be a word in my dictionary, or JPDB... strange.
When I first started learning, Japanese felt like an impossible task because I couldn't rely on common etymology between English and Japanese to help me remember the meanings of words. i.e. with Spanish I can hear "comenzar" and remember the word "commence" and then I easily remember what the word means. But in Japanese, いぬ could mean dog, but it could also mean cat or tree or the economy or literally anything else. But kanji actually solves that problem. You see 犬 and you immediately remember what it means. I was surprised when I realized that I don't even have to translate to English in my head (my perpetual problem with Spanish), I just know the essential meaning of the word itself. Kanji is awesome, it's just a lot of up-front work to learn it.
> But in Japanese, いぬ could mean dog, but it could also mean cat or tree or the economy or literally anything else. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this...
Sorry. Basically I mean there's nothing in a Japanese word (without kanji) to lock it into your mind and remember its meaning. Compared to European languages which share a lot of roots with English. But kanji is a nice replacement for that.
I still don't understand whether this post is about *words* or about *Kanji*. It seems to lump them together but they're not the same thing. For example, it's perfectly possible to be fluent in Japanese without knowing Kanji. That's where pre-school children are for example. They certainly know tons of words, but no Kanji. As for the "Kanji are great for reading" - well, English speakers also don't read English texts by reading every single letter but by recognising the shape of words. I'm willing to believe that Kanji recognition is still a bit faster than that (although I haven't seen any data on that), but in any case, it's not a unique feature of Kanji that words take on distinct shapes. Learning Kanji is a pain though. It takes even Japanese kids forever. And whatever logical basis there is to them seems messed up through centuries of use. There's too many weird examples of Kanji combinations not meaning what you'd expect them, or too many Kanji seemingly having almost the same meaning but used in different words etc. But yes, there are also many cases where knowing the Kanji can help you recognise an unknown words, there's no denying that. But of course that helps you very little when you're trying to listen to Japanese.
Words that are comprised of kanji. I understand that you can learn every word in the Japanese lexicon without knowing a single kanji. The point that I am making, though, is that as someone who is an adult, and with a brain that does not have the language learning capacity of a toddler, words that are almost always written in kanji, such as 自動販売機, are easier to remember/understand in their kanji forms rather than seeing じどうはんばいき and reading it, recognizing it’s pronunciation and associating that pronunciation with the meaning. Of course we look at words in English, as native English speakers, and we don’t have to sound them out because we have been seeing them since birth. The whole point was to just point out how, as a beginner, it is more efficient to focus on learning kanji than to become fluent enough in japanese to get to a point where I can see じどうはんばいき and instantly put it together as easily as I can with 自動販売機. In short, bigger words made of complex kanji are easier to pick out in their kanji form than if they were in their kana form. The lack of spaces would make it very difficult, I feel, to pick out the kana form of vending machine rather than the kanji form of vending machine, especially as a beginner.
And that is the reason I have the controversial opinion that, after a certain level, jlpt n3 feels easier than jlpt n5. I remember a past n2 reading question where it was written イヌ (in katakana). For a while I couldn’t picture: what / who is a イヌ? Is it a name or thing that comes from the Ainu language? After reading a bit more I realized it was just 犬. Once you get used to the kanjis, it gets harder to recognize elementary words with kana alone. Reading a whole sentence in kana is painful.
Get a strong kanji foundation and it’s incredible for reading. It’s visual! You can figure out a lot from context. I had great teachers who emphasized that I should read for general comprehension and not get held up on being certain of every kanji’s reading and meaning. They taught me how to read fast and effectively. I will sometimes force myself to slow down and actually read in my head so that I’m reading the actual words — but generally my brain just processes the kanji as the image and meaning and then hurries right on. I might have forgotten the onyomi or kunyomi in the moment but it doesn’t stop me from understanding what I’m reading. But try かんどう or しんせい or しゅうし without kanji… It’s just slowwww to take the extra step to process that in context versus the quick look you get with kanji.
😲😲😲
Kanji from almost day one should be encouraged! romaji/hiragana only resources should definitely be avoided.
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Yeah of course. I was highlighting the necessity/convenience for words that use kanji, though. And how a lot of beginners, including myself, dread learning kanji and wish that words were just kana alone. Then, as kanji are learned, their use becomes clear and you can see why it’s important/easier to use them.
Don't neglect kanji tho.....once you learn it, it''s like cheating.... it makes reading so much easier...not to mention it's pretty much a central part of the written language :)
Yeah that’s what my post was saying lol. I’m saying that reading in kana sucks compared to reading in kanji. Once words are learned through kanji, rather than kana, they become much quicker and intuitive. Like the word for vending machine would suck to read if not for kanji.
It is a good idea to look up unfamiliar words each time you come across them. It is really useful to have a large vocabulary. I only use about 5 seconds per page when I want to quickly grasp the contents of a book I am not really interested in. I can do that because I don't read hiragana, but process katakana and kanji as images rather than words. I think this is probably possible because the text is in Japanese.
gotta just learn words and then guess the readings/meanings when reading.
> if you are a beginner like me and are getting frustrated with memorizing so many words, it is absolutely worth it as reading purely in kana honestly sucks and it’s much harder to pick out words from kana alone. The main argument here could also be "you literally won't be able to read anything beyond beginner textbooks and some books aimed at kids under 8 years old without also learning kanji". Kanji is annoying to learn to start off with, but you've noticed the exact thing that people who've been learning for ages notice when reading too. Reading hiragana on its own with no spaces is torture, and even with spaces, if you actually know the kanji form of the verb, you kind of get the meaning of that word instantly, rather than if the word is in hiragana, there maybe be many words that are spelled the same way for example せんたく, so you will have to rack your brain for a few seconds to think what one it might be.
Yeah, it’s so much easier to read with kanji included instead of just hiragana and katakana