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The real roadblock with Japanese, in my opinion, is how kanji makes it impossible to absorb new vocabulary through casual reading. We naturally infer the meani
by corey_moncure 5y ago
The real roadblock with Japanese, in my opinion, is how kanji makes it impossible to absorb new vocabulary through casual reading. We naturally infer the meaning of words from their syntactical and semantic context, but with kanji there's no "name" to hang the inferred meaning to as you read. You can't pronounce it in your head, or out loud.
Kanji make it possible to sometimes guess the meaning and pronunciation of a completely unfamiliar word, but even in those cases it's just a guess. You can never be certain. And in fact, since you can't be certain, it means you need an entirely separate type of dictionary to look up these words, a reverse-kanji dictionary where characters are categorized variously by the number of lines, the presence of certain components, and other schemes of native and non-native invention. This is because you don't have a name for the word you're looking at, whereas in almost every other language, the "spelling" of the word is the name.
About four years into Japanese, the same point where in my Spanish studies I was picking up Don Quixote and enjoying it, I was struggling to cope with young adult fiction. No, I was completely defeated by it. Every page was a slog and it was impossible to progress without turning it into a study session where I looked up the pronunciation of every single unfamiliar word and repeatedly practiced writing unfamiliar characters.
At some point it becomes simply impossible to progress without active, intentional study. The so-called "osmosis" hits a hard asymptote and it's because of kanji. Reading fiction for 12 year olds means pencil, paper, and two dictionaries to decipher it. Or it used to; I guess mobile apps that can OCR the text and look up words have made this process vastly easier for younger learners.
The article is paywalled so mea culpa if this point is addressed in there.
- laurieg 5y agoWhile I empathise with your struggles with kanji, the language itself provides a solution: furigana. Japanese is wonderful for having a very close mapping between letters and sounds. These easy to read and pronounce letters are often written above kanji for young children. Admittedly, once children become teenagers they are expected to be able to read a good amount of everyday kanji words and the use of furigana falls away apart from for unusual readings or less common words, and pretty much entirely for texts aimed at adults. Still, if you're content with quite simple content you can pick up a wonderful amount of language by osmosis with the helping hand of furigana.
- lhorie 5y agoMy impression is that adult learners tend to struggle with Kanji even though furigana exists because age is a strong identity factor in Japanese culture and furigana is usually used in age-specific contexts. So a Kanji that might be accompanied by furigana in a shounen manga (geared to kids) typically won't be accompanied by it in a seinen novel (geared towards young adults). Needless to say, adults don't necessarily want to read doraemon (a kids series) as beginner Japanese learners.
- usrusr 5y agoTo be fair, in the English language mentally attaching an unknown sequence of characters to some work-in-progress pronunciation guess can also lead to some serious hilarity. I suspect that people who grew up with a non-alphabetic script have better "geometry abstraction capabilities" trained into their brains that would make them noticeably more performant in a test involving fantasy glyph memorization/reidentification.
- klipklop 5y agoI agree and the only solution is to memorize a lot of kanji sadly. There are anki flashcard (spaced repetition) decks that can help drill the kanji into your head. Finding accessible reading material is challenging especially at the absolute beginner stage. In my japanese study I make sure I flashcard kanji every day. Without 300+ memorized reading even kids stuff will be hard. EDIT: Just saw that you are 4 years into studying. That is a bit demoralizing for me that you still can't read adult level stuff. I can only read stuff along the level of "Ayako rides the train", etc.
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- tayo42 5y agoI always wondered, does Kanji not have a way of breaking things down? I noticed some complex Kanji characters seem to made up of smaller simpler characters. I always wondered if it was a coincidence or not.
- schoen 5y agoThese are historically separate characters, and they're meaningful, but it's relatively unlikely that you can use them as a way of learning Japanese or Chinese characters that you don't already know (as opposed to maybe as a way of helping to remember ones that you do know). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Phono-semantic_compound_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati... Also, in the Japanese case, they were borrowed from Chinese centuries ago and commonly given one pronunciation based on what the Chinese word sounded like to Japanese people at that time, and another based on the Japanese translation of the Chinese word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings So yes, all of this is super-meaningful at an etymological level, but not transparent or reliable, and even trickier with Japanese rather than Chinese, because extra layers like kunyomi were added on top.
- karatinversion 5y agoMany kanji are composed of symbols that are also kanji in themselves; there are also radicals which are not kanji in isolation but appear in the same form in many characters. That being said, the meaning (or meanings...) of a kanji cannot be derived from its parts, just like the meaning of an English word cannot be derived from the letters that appear in it. Also, as a rule, the same character will be read differently in different contexts. E.g. 生きる _i_kiru "to live", 生まれる _uma_reru "to be born", 学生 gaku_sei_ "student".
- mcqueenjordan 5y agoIn case it's useful to someone: https://kanji.club/ https://kanji.club/ is a wonderful bushu -> kanji "reverse lookup" resource.