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I studied Japanese for about 2 years in college. I estimated that to learn a single kanji, it took the time to learn 40 other vocabulary words. I wished I had
by ivankirigin 16y ago
I studied Japanese for about 2 years in college. I estimated that to learn a single kanji, it took the time to learn 40 other vocabulary words.
I wished I had focused on speaking instead. Academic japanese seems to treat starting students like they're going to get a PhD in the language. That is absurd. Written Japanese beyond hiragana and katakana (the two phonetic alphabets), should only start in the 3rd or 4th year of undergraduate study.
- chousuke 16y agoI don't understand this sentiment. Kanji are an integral part of the japanese language, and much of it doesn't make sense without them. You can and should start studying kanji as soon as you have a reasonable command of hiragana. Every time you learn a new word you should at least check the characters it's written with instead of pretending that it's okay to use hiragana for everything. My experience has been that I sometimes actually understand words I've never heard before because I can connect the syllables with kanji whose meaning fits the context. It's up to you to balance your time between learning the written language and learning the spoken language, but they are not independent of each other, and ignoring kanji in the beginning is a mistake.
- ivankirigin 16y agoKanji are important for written language. I see no reason the language should avoid eliminating kanji, given the available alternatives. In my experience, there wasn't a single case of being able to infer meaning from context or radicals or anything.