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It's interesting to me that that Japanese language learning community seems to take the opposite approach to what I think is the view you're describing. For exa

It's interesting to me that that Japanese language learning community seems to take the opposite approach to what I think is the view you're describing. For example, they focus very heavily on memorizing a lot of kanji early, without as much grounding in the spoken language or in reading simpler texts and building up fluency. It always seemed like these learners were going about it the hard way since you have almost no context when learning kanji you don't know from the spoken language.

dymk 5y ago
I don't think what you're describing is actually different from the popular approach of comprehensible input. There's just a step that needs to happen before most input is comprehensible, and that's understanding the meanings of the most common kanji. One simply cannot read most Japanese content online without understanding at least a few hundred kanji. It's like if you wanted to learn the English language but had no understanding of the alphabet (ignoring kana for the sake of the analogy). You've got to bootstrap with some rote memorization first, then go start learning new kanji / grammar in context. Lucky, this doesn't take much time at all, and one can memorize the first few hundred kanji and vocab meanings / readings with a spaced repetition tool. And in parallel, there are resources one can start with knowing only the kana / furigana, such as these graded readers: https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/ https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  For comprehensible input you shouldn't need to learn the meaning when learning kanji. You should already know the meaning/sound from spoken language. There is definitely memorization required to learn to map the kanji to the words they represent, but the way most learners do it is not comprehensible input. There are textbooks that follow a CI approach, e.g. Eleanor Jorden's. John Defrancis's textbooks are similar but for Chinese. If you look at the reviews the main complaint people have is that they are not learning kanji from the start, despite Jorden explaining exactly why she's not doing that. Maybe CI is not the best way to learn languages like Chinese and Japanese, but the approach most learners take is definitely not CI.
  - dymk 5y ago
    Interesting. It's hard for me to envision an efficient way of learning Japanese that doesn't involve at least some rote memorization of Kanji meanings and readings (after all, that's even how native Japanese speakers learn). But I'm interested in this approach. I'll pick up Jorden's book and give it a try.

dymk 5y ago

I don't think what you're describing is actually different from the popular approach of comprehensible input. There's just a step that needs to happen before most input is comprehensible, and that's understanding the meanings of the most common kanji. One simply cannot read most Japanese content online without understanding at least a few hundred kanji. It's like if you wanted to learn the English language but had no understanding of the alphabet (ignoring kana for the sake of the analogy). You've got to bootstrap with some rote memorization first, then go start learning new kanji / grammar in context. Lucky, this doesn't take much time at all, and one can memorize the first few hundred kanji and vocab meanings / readings with a spaced repetition tool. And in parallel, there are resources one can start with knowing only the kana / furigana, such as these graded readers: https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/ https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/

jeffreyrogers 5y ago
For comprehensible input you shouldn't need to learn the meaning when learning kanji. You should already know the meaning/sound from spoken language. There is definitely memorization required to learn to map the kanji to the words they represent, but the way most learners do it is not comprehensible input. There are textbooks that follow a CI approach, e.g. Eleanor Jorden's. John Defrancis's textbooks are similar but for Chinese. If you look at the reviews the main complaint people have is that they are not learning kanji from the start, despite Jorden explaining exactly why she's not doing that. Maybe CI is not the best way to learn languages like Chinese and Japanese, but the approach most learners take is definitely not CI.
- dymk 5y ago
  Interesting. It's hard for me to envision an efficient way of learning Japanese that doesn't involve at least some rote memorization of Kanji meanings and readings (after all, that's even how native Japanese speakers learn). But I'm interested in this approach. I'll pick up Jorden's book and give it a try.