4 ms·

> But they're still made of components (including radicals) arranged in horizontal and vertical orders. Yes, you have symbols in Japanese, but each of those sy

by ksk 6y ago

> But they're still made of components (including radicals) arranged in horizontal and vertical orders. Yes, you have symbols in Japanese, but each of those symbols can also be written out in hiragana (their phonetic script). And there are no special rules for pronouncing hiragana that change depending on the word (with a handful of caveats). Today's Japanese is very, very straightforward and easy to pronounce. Now, please note that I am not talking about accents - having an accent is a whole another issue that will take loads of practice to get rid of.

crazygringo 6y ago
I was under the impression that the majority of written Japanese (e.g. in newspapers etc.) is kanji, which isn't phonetic at all. So I'm a bit confused about how Japanese is straightforward and easy to pronounce -- isn't it actually one of the hardest languages in the world to memorize how to pronounce, behind Chinese? I know there are the phonetic hiragana and katakana, but they're used particularly with children and language learners. An adult reader has to memorize ~2,500 characters non-phonetically, no?
- lioeters 6y ago
  Yes, it's true that reading and writing at an adult level requires knowing at least the "common" ones, about two to three thousand Kanji characters. However, Hiragana and Katakana are not just for children or students. They form a significant portion of everyday text, and in fact necessary for constructing sentences properly in Japanese. For example, many/most grammatical particles like "of", "in", "to", "from", are written in Hiragana. And foreign/imported words are usually in Katakana. Regarding the ease of pronunciation - I think the grandparent comment was talking about the sounds of the language, not about memorizing how to read and pronounce the text. Japanese speech is composed of a fairly small set of simple sounds, similar to Spanish. Having taught both Japanese and English, I would say the latter has many more tricky sounds - like th in "the", or ar in arm (especially how Americans say it). In contrast, if one knows the sounds of each Hiragana (consonant + vowel combination), they cover almost all of Japanese speech.
- presentation 6y ago
  I'd say Japanese is even more difficult than Chinese - at least with Chinese the majority of characters are predictably one syllable with the same pronunciation regardless of context; in Japanese you get entirely different pronunciations depending on the context, with a ton of exceptions. That said the actual sounds are few and really easy to vocalize (if you ignore pitch accent). Adults do use kana for certain words and in between words, but it's true that you do need to know a lot of kanji to read things fluently.
- ksk 6y ago
  You're on the right track. Individual words in Japanese can be represented in three ways: 1) Pure hiragana 2) Pure Kanji 3) A mixture of Kanji + hiragana #3 comes into picture especially when conjugating verbs. As the base verb is written in Kanji but the various forms are tacked on in hiragana. The important bit : The kanji symbol essentially just compresses the hiragana into a symbol, but all words that contain kanji can be uncompressed back to hiragana. Japanese is definitely hard to learn, but it is not hard to pronounce. The hardness comes from the fact that the Kanji can have multiple 'readings' depending on the context. Source: Studying/struggling with Japanese for the last 5 years.

by ksk 6y ago

crazygringo 6y ago

I was under the impression that the majority of written Japanese (e.g. in newspapers etc.) is kanji, which isn't phonetic at all. So I'm a bit confused about how Japanese is straightforward and easy to pronounce -- isn't it actually one of the hardest languages in the world to memorize how to pronounce, behind Chinese? I know there are the phonetic hiragana and katakana, but they're used particularly with children and language learners. An adult reader has to memorize ~2,500 characters non-phonetically, no?

lioeters 6y ago
Yes, it's true that reading and writing at an adult level requires knowing at least the "common" ones, about two to three thousand Kanji characters. However, Hiragana and Katakana are not just for children or students. They form a significant portion of everyday text, and in fact necessary for constructing sentences properly in Japanese. For example, many/most grammatical particles like "of", "in", "to", "from", are written in Hiragana. And foreign/imported words are usually in Katakana. Regarding the ease of pronunciation - I think the grandparent comment was talking about the sounds of the language, not about memorizing how to read and pronounce the text. Japanese speech is composed of a fairly small set of simple sounds, similar to Spanish. Having taught both Japanese and English, I would say the latter has many more tricky sounds - like th in "the", or ar in arm (especially how Americans say it). In contrast, if one knows the sounds of each Hiragana (consonant + vowel combination), they cover almost all of Japanese speech.
presentation 6y ago
I'd say Japanese is even more difficult than Chinese - at least with Chinese the majority of characters are predictably one syllable with the same pronunciation regardless of context; in Japanese you get entirely different pronunciations depending on the context, with a ton of exceptions. That said the actual sounds are few and really easy to vocalize (if you ignore pitch accent). Adults do use kana for certain words and in between words, but it's true that you do need to know a lot of kanji to read things fluently.
ksk 6y ago
You're on the right track. Individual words in Japanese can be represented in three ways: 1) Pure hiragana 2) Pure Kanji 3) A mixture of Kanji + hiragana #3 comes into picture especially when conjugating verbs. As the base verb is written in Kanji but the various forms are tacked on in hiragana. The important bit : The kanji symbol essentially just compresses the hiragana into a symbol, but all words that contain kanji can be uncompressed back to hiragana. Japanese is definitely hard to learn, but it is not hard to pronounce. The hardness comes from the fact that the Kanji can have multiple 'readings' depending on the context. Source: Studying/struggling with Japanese for the last 5 years.