Job Discussion Forums

[cornishmuppet]

Learning it and reading it are different. You can easily learn the phonetic symbols in an hour or two if you sit down and write them out or look at flashcards. There really aren't that many of them, after all. The same goes for Japanese kids learning the alphabet. You can sit down and learn the whole thing in an hour, but if you get presented with a text and told to read it, that takes a whole lot more practice. Japanese is actually way easier to read than English, but there are other things to consider like the lack of spaces between the words and no use of question marks, etc.

Then of course, there's kanji.........

[Quibby84]

If you studied for two days solid you could pretty much learn anything...but whether are not your remember it a week from then (without constantly using it) is up in the air...

[fluffyhamster]

Obviously Quibby you will need to keep testing yourself and writing out the kana, individually as well as in words, then maybe look at a few kanji (if you're up to that) to see how the hiragana interact with them etc. My definition of having learnt (and being able to "read" and "write") at least the individual kana is simply being able to write out pretty much the entire Gojuon (and random kana from it) without any mistakes. Once you can do that (which really can be achieved in just a matter of days), you will as I say be progressing to words and kanji pronto if you are at all ambitious and don't want to forget anything (that being said, I still remember all the kana even when I'm not reading or writing much Japanese for possibly weeks or even months at a time).

RingofFire, I think we are all aware that there is never enough time in the classroom, and if I were an "administrator" I'd push for a bit more time for English than is currently available in especially elementary schools in Japan, which would mean that there'd be more time to go thoroughly through whatever system was selected for teaching phonics (assuming such selections could be and were made). You really don't need to use or even think much of my system as an initial entry into phonics, and I really have no objection whatsoever to your use of post-its, flashcards, umpteen books, whippings and plenty of R&R time or whatever in your efforts to learn kana, because provided of course that we both in the end were reading and writing at equal levels of accuracy, there'd obviously be no reason for saying one of us was better at Japanese than the other.

The fact would still remain however that you'd have taken more time about it (assuming let's say that we both took a kana test simultaneously, but I after three days and you after having slogged for six months or whatever), and although you should perhaps be given a medal for being more "thorough" or "studious" (whatever that means, when the amount to be learnt was exactly the same), there ultimately really is only so much time in classrooms for achieving the "impossible".

[fluffyhamster]

By the way, have you guys heard the mnemonic 'Ah, kana signs: take note how many you read well (n)'? (A ka sa ta na ha ya ra wa n). I found it really helped.

[Yawarakaijin]

[ironopolis]

I think TORONT is just overcompensation by the Japanese learner, where there's a feature in their own language they know they have to change, but they do it too much. It once also took me quite a while to work out what was meant by "Orland" - I presume it must be Holland, until eventually Florida was mentioned. For the same reason you can hear German speakers say things like, "You are inwited to my party in the willage - we can play wideo games." Koreans likewise with f and p in English. To say nothing of the even more numerous ways in which English speakers butcher other languages!!

I'm sure Japanese speakers CAN make sounds ending in a consonant other than n, but often the problem is the inappropriate (although understandable) use of kana above the English to help them pronounce it. Unfortunately, this fossilizes the bad pronunciation to an extent that it's ever harder for them to correct. Koreans have the same problem with hangeul used in the same way, although they do at least have a greater variety of sounds they can replicate with their script than Japanese has. We're really lucky that the letters of the roman alphabet are so flexible and can be and ARE used for differing sounds in different countries.

I know where yawarakaijin is coming from about doing away with Kanji, but I think it actually makes Japanese easier in some ways. Of course, new words would be easier to read and look up if they were written in kana. However, Japanese has an awful lot of words which sound the same and would look the same written in kana, where having to know the respective kanji helps you distinguish them and remember them.

I also think that we read kanji faster than hiragana in many cases. Assuming you have at least a reasonable grasp of kanji, if you saw 南福岡 in kanji, you'd recognise it instantly. Whereas if you saw it in hiragana, you'd work it out fast, but not quite as fast because you'd be looking at each kana individually and there would be 7 of them, not just 3. I reckon that the process our brains go through when reading English is more similar to reading kanji than kana - you focus on letter combinations you instantly recognise rather than individual letters, just like kanji are often made up of combinations too, which you instantly recognise if you use them enough.

Not sure if that last bit makes any sense but I know what I'm talking about, even if nobody else does

[Yawarakaijin]

I get where you are coming from in regards to Kanji actually being faster and more beneficial in some cases. Japanese always say stuff like "I wouldn't understand if I didn't have the Kanji" I imagine there are cases like that but I reckon that the situation would, more often than not, create the context where it would be understood.

It can also be said that we dont actually "read" an entire word in English before recognizing it. I imagine that seeing the same combinations of letters over and over can "imprint" a mean just as a pictograph does.

[fluffyhamster]

Reading exclusively in kana is a bit like reading English written in IPA. You can work it out but it can be slow going. At least kanji help break the text up a bit more, for one thing.

[Rooster_2006]

[fluffyhamster]

The thing is, if people don't get to grips with a language's script sooner rather than later, they'll be limited to just what's in their coursebook (in the case of Japanese written using romaji; with English, there'd be no option really but to use the standard orthography - that, or IPA - to get away from katakana pronto). Learning kana certainly helps make one more aware of mora.

[stillnosheep]

12 hours spread over two weekends with the Heiszig method.