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It seems odd because it is. I live in Japan, tried to learn Japanese like I did learn English and German: through reading, as the true asocial geek I am. Well,

by Iv 8y ago

It seems odd because it is. I live in Japan, tried to learn Japanese like I did learn English and German: through reading, as the true asocial geek I am. Well, that's not possible unless you know about 1000 kanjis, unless you stick with kids book or some mangas (which, actually, I am not that interested in) To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first. I stopped caring about kanjis wen I realized that a 15 year old, top of her class, was having difficulties reading news articles because of some words she did not know. That's polemical and I would not tell it that upfront to my Japanese friends but I feel like kanjis are a vastly inferior writing system compared to the alphabets they have. The reason why it still exists is to create an educational hierarchy: the more kanjis you know, the more educated you are. Kanjis are of Chinese origin, they occupy a similar place in Japanese culture than Latin does in European cultures. I wish they would do like Koreans and get rid of it altogether, but it will never happen. The culture here is far too conservative for such a brutal change. They even call the furikana (kanji "subtitles" that explicit the pronunciation) as a dumbing down. This is an example where obfuscation is confused for depth.

mikekchar 8y ago
And as a counter example, I like kanji and learned Japanese by reading (though I also like manga, so perhaps it was helpful). I find kanji very helpful in learning vocabulary. In fact, I actually measured how fast I could learn vocabulary containing kanji I didn't know by learning the kanji first, versus learning the vocabulary phonetically. It was about the same. However, as there are only about 2200 kanji in the list of commonly used kanji and there are about 20,000 words you need for adult level proficiency, it means that each kanji is used in, on average 10 words. Actually, it's even better than that because the first 1000 most common kanji are used in 90% of the words you will encounter. I can learn vocabulary with kanji I know dramatically faster than vocabulary with phonetics alone. Ironically, I think it's even more helpful in Japanese than it is in Chinese because there are so many readings for the character that if you learn the word phonetically, you may have no idea what the root of the word is. Kanji is frustrating to write, but a joy to read, IMHO. Yes, you need to learn 2000 (or so) characters, but, let's face it -- you've got years to do it. I can now read words that I don't know and have a pretty good idea what they mean -- something that would be practically impossible phonetically in Japanese. In fact, when I'm faced with new vocabulary, I often ask people to write it for me (just in the air) -- as soon as I see the kanji I almost always know what the word means. I've often thought how superior this writing system is from roman phonetic characters (which bizarre historical spelling anachronisms to boot) ;-) I appreciate that you don't agree, but I hope you'll also understand that I have no intention of grading your education level on the number of kanji you know.
- echelon 8y ago
  I agree with you wholeheartedly. Kanji has aided in my study of the Japanese language in ways I couldn't fathom before trying to do so. I made it to N5-level proficiency [1] after a few semesters of study and only begrudgingly studied Kanji because it was required by the text. I hated it and really only wanted to speak and understand spoken Japanese. Then I discovered Wanikani [2], a spaced repetition service that focuses on teaching Kanji reading. Unlike Anki decks, Kanji is literally the only thing Wanikani focuses on, but it does so incredibly well. With diligence it's even possible to learn all Joyo Kanji within about a year. After taking Kanji seriously I began to understand the root meanings of the vocabulary I had known all along. It let me form associations I previously wasn't privy to and enabled a much faster uptake of new vocabulary. Instead of remembering why the syllables さいこう (saikou, pronounced "sigh co") means "best" or "utmost", I can simply recall the kanji: 最高. The character 最 means "most" and the character 高 means "tall". "most tall" = "utmost". Japanese is extremely logical like this, as is their grammar. For fans of logic it's really top-notch. If you're learning Japanese, please don't do yourself a disservice by skipping Kanji. A fully-integrated learning approach that includes reading will yield dividends in the long term. [1] http://jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html http://jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html [2] https://www.wanikani.com/ https://www.wanikani.com/
  - Iv 8y ago
    Of course kanji helps. Like Latin helps with many European language. If you learn Latin before learning French it will feel extremely logical. Making it a pre-requisite to write a single sentence in French, however, seems like a waste of time and goodwill.
  - Riverheart 8y ago
    Not too discount your experience but I found WaniKani to be very tedious and slow paced which steered me away from learning Kanji.
- w00kie 8y ago
  I love that I can see a word I don't know and get good grasp of its meaning (you can somewhat do that in Latin languages if you have a good grasp of latin and greek roots, but not as reliably). However I still cannot read it since I don't know with any certainty how to pronounce it if I've never heard it before. And in the old analog days, even if you're an expert with keys and stroke counts, it was still much faster to search a roman character word in a dictionary than a Japanese word you don't know the pronunciation of.
fenomas 8y ago
> The reason why it still exists is to create an educational hierarchy: the more kanjis you know, the more educated you are. Things are nowhere near this simple. If there was any value to abandoning kanji it could be done tomorrow, but the reality is that all-kana text is incredibly hard to read, and trying to learn Japanese's myriad homophones would be nigh-impossible without kanji to disambiguate them. Kanji are complex and archaic, sure, but it's not just conservative values keeping them around. The Japanese language just isn't feasible to learn or to use without them.
ehaliewicz2 8y ago
Kanji are not obfuscation, they are useful mostly because Japanese has many homonyms. Without them, text is far more obfuscated! I'm sure you've read kana only text before.
baud147258 8y ago
Except that you don't need latin to read news article, at most you'd get to know the etymology of some words and read untranslated older text
Nadya 8y ago
>That's polemical and I would not tell it that upfront to my Japanese friends but I feel like kanjis are a vastly inferior writing system compared to the alphabets they have. The reason Kanji are used instead of Kana are due to the vast number of homophones from a language limited in the number of phonetic sounds it has. It is how you can tell はし「橋」 from はし「端」 from はし「箸」. Sure, context would almost always let you know which word is used but that requires some additional parsing. Other languages have more sounds, thus fewer homophones, and this becomes less of a problem to determine which witch is which. Or as just shown - "witch" and "which" can be spelled differently even when they sound the same, something less possible with kana. Japanese has an insane number of homophones and reading kana-only sentences quickly becomes a headache because of it. I don't "read" sentences that contain kanji. I glance over the sentence and understand what it is saying. It's like watching someone act out a scene vs reading the scene's script. Although I am still learning Japanese, for sentences where I know all of the kanji, I can understand the Japanese much faster than the English translation (my native language).
yongjik 8y ago
> To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first. Well, to be fair, that's true for any language. Learning English by reading does not work: ask any Korean (or Japanese) who went through public English education in the 80s or before.

by Iv 8y ago

mikekchar 8y ago

And as a counter example, I like kanji and learned Japanese by reading (though I also like manga, so perhaps it was helpful). I find kanji very helpful in learning vocabulary. In fact, I actually measured how fast I could learn vocabulary containing kanji I didn't know by learning the kanji first, versus learning the vocabulary phonetically. It was about the same. However, as there are only about 2200 kanji in the list of commonly used kanji and there are about 20,000 words you need for adult level proficiency, it means that each kanji is used in, on average 10 words. Actually, it's even better than that because the first 1000 most common kanji are used in 90% of the words you will encounter. I can learn vocabulary with kanji I know dramatically faster than vocabulary with phonetics alone. Ironically, I think it's even more helpful in Japanese than it is in Chinese because there are so many readings for the character that if you learn the word phonetically, you may have no idea what the root of the word is. Kanji is frustrating to write, but a joy to read, IMHO. Yes, you need to learn 2000 (or so) characters, but, let's face it -- you've got years to do it. I can now read words that I don't know and have a pretty good idea what they mean -- something that would be practically impossible phonetically in Japanese. In fact, when I'm faced with new vocabulary, I often ask people to write it for me (just in the air) -- as soon as I see the kanji I almost always know what the word means. I've often thought how superior this writing system is from roman phonetic characters (which bizarre historical spelling anachronisms to boot) ;-) I appreciate that you don't agree, but I hope you'll also understand that I have no intention of grading your education level on the number of kanji you know.

echelon 8y ago
I agree with you wholeheartedly. Kanji has aided in my study of the Japanese language in ways I couldn't fathom before trying to do so. I made it to N5-level proficiency [1] after a few semesters of study and only begrudgingly studied Kanji because it was required by the text. I hated it and really only wanted to speak and understand spoken Japanese. Then I discovered Wanikani [2], a spaced repetition service that focuses on teaching Kanji reading. Unlike Anki decks, Kanji is literally the only thing Wanikani focuses on, but it does so incredibly well. With diligence it's even possible to learn all Joyo Kanji within about a year. After taking Kanji seriously I began to understand the root meanings of the vocabulary I had known all along. It let me form associations I previously wasn't privy to and enabled a much faster uptake of new vocabulary. Instead of remembering why the syllables さいこう (saikou, pronounced "sigh co") means "best" or "utmost", I can simply recall the kanji: 最高. The character 最 means "most" and the character 高 means "tall". "most tall" = "utmost". Japanese is extremely logical like this, as is their grammar. For fans of logic it's really top-notch. If you're learning Japanese, please don't do yourself a disservice by skipping Kanji. A fully-integrated learning approach that includes reading will yield dividends in the long term. [1] http://jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html http://jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html [2] https://www.wanikani.com/ https://www.wanikani.com/
- Iv 8y ago
  Of course kanji helps. Like Latin helps with many European language. If you learn Latin before learning French it will feel extremely logical. Making it a pre-requisite to write a single sentence in French, however, seems like a waste of time and goodwill.
- Riverheart 8y ago
  Not too discount your experience but I found WaniKani to be very tedious and slow paced which steered me away from learning Kanji.
w00kie 8y ago
I love that I can see a word I don't know and get good grasp of its meaning (you can somewhat do that in Latin languages if you have a good grasp of latin and greek roots, but not as reliably). However I still cannot read it since I don't know with any certainty how to pronounce it if I've never heard it before. And in the old analog days, even if you're an expert with keys and stroke counts, it was still much faster to search a roman character word in a dictionary than a Japanese word you don't know the pronunciation of.

fenomas 8y ago

> The reason why it still exists is to create an educational hierarchy: the more kanjis you know, the more educated you are. Things are nowhere near this simple. If there was any value to abandoning kanji it could be done tomorrow, but the reality is that all-kana text is incredibly hard to read, and trying to learn Japanese's myriad homophones would be nigh-impossible without kanji to disambiguate them. Kanji are complex and archaic, sure, but it's not just conservative values keeping them around. The Japanese language just isn't feasible to learn or to use without them.

ehaliewicz2 8y ago

Kanji are not obfuscation, they are useful mostly because Japanese has many homonyms. Without them, text is far more obfuscated! I'm sure you've read kana only text before.

baud147258 8y ago

Except that you don't need latin to read news article, at most you'd get to know the etymology of some words and read untranslated older text

Nadya 8y ago

>That's polemical and I would not tell it that upfront to my Japanese friends but I feel like kanjis are a vastly inferior writing system compared to the alphabets they have. The reason Kanji are used instead of Kana are due to the vast number of homophones from a language limited in the number of phonetic sounds it has. It is how you can tell はし「橋」 from はし「端」 from はし「箸」. Sure, context would almost always let you know which word is used but that requires some additional parsing. Other languages have more sounds, thus fewer homophones, and this becomes less of a problem to determine which witch is which. Or as just shown - "witch" and "which" can be spelled differently even when they sound the same, something less possible with kana. Japanese has an insane number of homophones and reading kana-only sentences quickly becomes a headache because of it. I don't "read" sentences that contain kanji. I glance over the sentence and understand what it is saying. It's like watching someone act out a scene vs reading the scene's script. Although I am still learning Japanese, for sentences where I know all of the kanji, I can understand the Japanese much faster than the English translation (my native language).

yongjik 8y ago

> To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first. Well, to be fair, that's true for any language. Learning English by reading does not work: ask any Korean (or Japanese) who went through public English education in the 80s or before.