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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4997 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 41 of 1702 12 June 2011 at 8:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think that reading and understanding Japanese is impossible until you learn kanji. Yes, learning hiragana is easy, and it makes people feel like "yay! I can read Japanese now! If only I didn't have to learn those pesky kanji, this would be so easy!" But that is only because they don't have experience actually reading real Japanese, so they don't understand how much easier it is to read something written normally with kanji. Kraemder, in a year or two (depending on how fast you learn) you'll understand what we're telling you about kanji. Just make sure to start reading as soon as you can, instead of putting it off for later; it's possible to learn a lot of kanji and still not feel comfortable reading because of a lack of experience. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Adodger Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4704 days ago 5 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Spanish | Message 42 of 1702 12 June 2011 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am fluent and I do know in excess of 1,500 kanji. My question was about it seeming like you were implying that learning hirigana is harder than learning kanji, which is almost impossible to comprehend. And what I take from your responses is that you did not mean that it is harder to learn, but that having only a grasp of hirigana makes understanding Japanese much harder than if you also know kanjji. Two separate issues and I agree with you. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4974 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 43 of 1702 13 June 2011 at 12:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah I was thinking about this. It's the only reason that I can think of that one would be thankful for kanji - no spaces. With Kanji your brain has a fighting chance to separate out the words from each other. I was making some flashcards for my ipad app and the TTS Neospeech voice that comes free with it does HUGE pauses for spaces (sounds awesome though). I wanted to make flashcards for full sentences used in the Assimil course book I got so did hirigana without the spaces. The cards sounded great - and I couldn't read the darn hirigana to save my life LOL. When using the flash cards I totally had to rely on the TTS to understand what I was looking at. Even in English, reading a wall of text without any spaces is annoying. In my ideal world the Japanese would learn to use the space bar in addition to using phonetic alphabets. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Adodger Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4704 days ago 5 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Spanish | Message 44 of 1702 14 June 2011 at 1:25am | IP Logged | |||||
Some actually do. In most published or public writing you'll see no spaces. But I know that in emailing and texting Japanese people, some seem to like using spaces. Also realize that's only hard while you're learning it. If you can command the vocabulary to the point that you don't have to look up words because you know it when you hear it or see it, you can read it with no spaces too. Think about some random language you know nothing of. If someone speaks it at normal speed at you, you'll not know where any of the words began and ended. But think about English now. You simply know about every practical word imaginable and you'll recognize it immediately. Now think about someone writing English with no spaces. You might have to slow down or focus more, but you'll know where all the words are. I doubt you'd see "Hellomycatisstuckinthetree" and wonder if you should be looking up "tisstuck" or not. If we used no spaces all the time, we'd be used to it and go much faster with it. Makes me wonder how hard it is for other non-english speakers to get a solid hold on most of the English homonyms. Cuz we don't use pictures or symbols :) One more note. There is some sentiment in Japan to convert completely to hirigana and katakana. Even native speakers can understand that an alphabet is way easier to use. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4974 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 45 of 1702 14 June 2011 at 1:39am | IP Logged | |||||
It gives me eye strain to read that even if I don't have to reach for a dictionary O.o I agree that it will get easier but it still seems like they're making it unnecessarily harder. Why make reading into a word search challenge? Nothing I can do about it I guess. I might rely on my computer's TTS abilities a lot with this language. We'll see. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4974 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 46 of 1702 14 June 2011 at 1:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well I'm diving into Kanji now. guess it took nearly two months (?) for this to happen. I'm basically making all my flash cards using the kanji versions of words instead of hiragana/romaji. IE the spelling used in actual Japanese texts. I'm using Flashcard Deluxe for ipad/ipod software and its TTS feature. As I just got Assimil recently and seem to like it more than my other material (at the moment) I'm making the flashcards based on that. Unfortunately it doesn't have vocabulary on a chapter by chapter basis, just a glossary at the end of the book. It seems there's roughly 1000 words in this glossary.
As I like flashcards and I find it frustrating to study a dialogue when I don't know all the vocabulary, I'm attacking that glossary head on. I am about 3/5 of the way through so far. To make the flashcards with the appropriate kanji I'm typing out the hiragana at http://jisho.org/words/ (a nice online dictionary) and cutting/pasting the kanji into my spreadsheet along with whichever English definition seems better - Assimil or theirs. In the flashcard app the TTS reads the kanji to me (automatically when it comes up) and then if I know the English I give myself a pass. I do have the option of making the audio not play automatically if I want to test myself on knowing the pronunciation of the kanji. I haven't done that yet as all these words are new and I'm going through quite a lot at once at the moment. As I expected, I am able to "learn" the Japanese much faster with the kanji instead of the hiragana/romaji. Phonetic alphabets don't lend themselves to visual learning but Kanji does a lot. I had feared this would actually hinder my learning the actual sounds of the Japanese words but maybe that was silly. We'll see. I will say I like blowing through a stack of new cards in like 1/2 the time it took before. Maybe even faster depending on how much I focus. It's like I just have to see the kanji/jap audio side once and the next time either the audio or the kanji will trigger for me and I'll know the English. If this works out well I'll really be kicking myself for not doing it sooner. I will say I'm a bit excited about learning the actual written language so that I can start reading stuff I've studied. With just the Hiragana spelling I wasn't able to read but a handful of words which was pretty frustrating. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4974 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 47 of 1702 14 June 2011 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I spent the better part of the weekend making flash cards. I hate making flash cards like that where I
basically take someone else's list and manually enter it. I feel like there should be a faster way as in I should be able to download it. One reason why it took so long was that I had to enter romaji into the a website that would pump out the kanji. Assimil uses kanji in their lists but I can't type it so darn. The flash cards work well. I didn't copy the hiragana so I have trust the TTS is saying it right. I'm pretty confident in it though. I was whining about spacing in a previous post but there's a website that will put the spaces in for you along with furigana for every word. This obviously helps tons. I think it gets a little space happy though putting spaces when letters should be part of the word still but I'm not skilled enough enough to really be sure and in fact I would trust it over me for that reason. The furigana can be either romaji or hiragana to make stuff even easier. I'm still not skilled enough to handle that though. Im trying to download vocabulary into my brain as fast as possible but im still having to look up nearly all the words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4974 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 48 of 1702 17 June 2011 at 5:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well I'm thinking of trying the Listening Reading method. I haven't read up on the details for this in a while (I think it's in wiki?) but I am not sure if it would be very effective with a language like Japanese where the alphabet isn't phonetic but rather well.. kanji.. strange mysterious stick figures and random other lines instead of real letters.
I'm curious if anyone has used this method effectively with either Japanese or Chinese. I could of course use a converter to convert all the kanji into hiragana which might be better for L+R. I might try this this weekend and see how it goes - unsure if I would convert the text to hiragana or not. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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