On January 09 2012 18:05 PlaGuE_R wrote: kanji is really nice looking but 2300 characters is so much! thank god for the Romans giving us their alphabet ^^
It's not just really nice to look at. I don't know about Japanese, but in Chinese, single characters contain thousands of years of cultural development and history. Sometimes a handful of characters need entire paragraphs in Western languages to describe. Chinese is also incredibly compact. A person reading in Chinese can capture the same meaning much much faster than a person reading an alphabet based language simply because the ideas are transmitted so much faster.
On January 09 2012 09:30 cameler wrote: Hey TL, just an interesting thought thats popped in my head as I learn Japanese slowly in my Uni.
So, I am aware there are nearly 2300 total characters that the average Nihongo student has to learn. 2000 of them being official Kanji.
So, theoretically, if there are High School dropouts in Japan or kids that are bad with memorizing that sort of thing, there would be a lot if illiterate people that couldnt even read the newspaper.
I would like to ask any Japanese people, how is that sort of issue avoided... or is it avoided at all. Is it assumed not everyone can read a newspaper comfortably?
I ask because our HS drop out rate is kind of high in Canada and the USA, but people can still at least pick up a newspaper on the way to work lol.
Am I asking a stupid question? Maybe, but I still want to know is it like 100% of the kids that learn 2000 Kanji?
Someone at the level of a high school dropout can easily read enough kanji for a newspaper. There are illiterate people in all countries though, and they probably won't be reading newspapers regardless since if they did, they probably wouldn't be illiterate.
Kanji are hard as butt to learn for foreigners, but it's really not an issue when you live in Japan because you're exposed constantly. WRITING kanji is a different story, I'd go as far as to say that Japanese people in general are quite bad at writing kanji since cellphones have the ability to do it for them, making them train it less. It's quite common that foreign japanese students at a high level write obscure kanji better from memory than average Japanese.
The Heisig method (I think this is what nalgene is talking about) is only useful if you have close to zero understanding of the language. What it teaches you is how to remember characters, how to build characters, and how to write them: all of those things are something non-native learners find confusing. I actually don't find doing the whole thing beneficial: once you've done 400 or so from Heisig's textbooks, you get the point Heisig is pushing forward and can teach yourself with a dictionary on hand. Once you get the point, the whole textbook is more boring than dirt.
To those wanting to learn Japanese fresh, I definitely recommend doing a few hundred from his "Remembering the Kanji" textbook as well as doing his "Remembering the Katakana/Hiragana" textbooks. "Remembering the Kanji" may enlighten you on how kanji is constructed and will probably teach you much easier and lasting methods to remembering the damned things. The Hiragana and Katakana textbooks are extremely good and are short enough that your attention span shouldn't stray far. If you get the point he's pushing forward, you shouldn't forget neither katakana, hiragana, or kanji quickly.
If nalgene is talking about learning kanji with raw SNS, you're wasting your time and learning absolutely nothing. Adults, unlike children, understand context so you don't have to go the hard route and ROTE learn everything. Obviously ROTE learning works fine but its the hard way of doing something, is extremely uninteresting, and you're very likely to forget a lot of it without constant repetition or exposure to it. In a way, foreigners have an advantage Japanese/Chinese children do not have when learning their first language and it would be prudent to tap into this advantage ASAP.
Why Japanesne? Chinese is much harder, no? And even then, people that hasn't even finished Primary School can still pick up a news paper and understand a bit. As you live in a country you are bound to be able to pick up something.
Speaking from the perspective of Chinese (which is the same, but more characters) its pretty easy to recognise characters after you've been learning for a little while. This is mostly because the characters are actually made up of a much smaller number of symbols, so each character is made up of 3-4 frequently recurring symbols.
However, you forget them quite fast :/ So if you don't keep it up it is difficult. But in Japan and China they are surrounded by them at all times.
Just like how you don't forget stupid arbitrary spelling in English, you're just surrounded by it all the time.
I'm just guessing the OP is white or something. It's an activity he can do if he's got lots of spare time.
On January 09 2012 20:54 divinesage wrote: My literacy in Chinese has degenerated to the point I struggle with reading long texts. This is after 4-5 years of not reading the language much. Not that my Chinese was good to being with.
So yeah, I do think Asian languages are harder to master but if it's your first language I think it should be like English: It comes intuitively to you.
I don't know about other people who speak in more than one language but for me, when I think of stuff to write, even if it is in Chinese, I usually form my thoughts in English first before I translate it.
Edit: Also, it is easier to recognise groups of words rather than individual ones.
It's easy for me to think in either language, but shouldn't it be easy for you? The structure isn't too different from English save only the lack of conjugations.
sure, they may be made of of 26 different components, but unless you know french, latin, ancient greek and german, you probably can't guess the meaning of the word from the letters you know. The letters don't convey (much) meaning themselves.
Its not really that different than having thousands of words/syllables made of a small set of lines/symbols, which do convey information.
On January 09 2012 20:54 divinesage wrote: My literacy in Chinese has degenerated to the point I struggle with reading long texts. This is after 4-5 years of not reading the language much. Not that my Chinese was good to being with.
So yeah, I do think Asian languages are harder to master but if it's your first language I think it should be like English: It comes intuitively to you.
I don't know about other people who speak in more than one language but for me, when I think of stuff to write, even if it is in Chinese, I usually form my thoughts in English first before I translate it.
Edit: Also, it is easier to recognise groups of words rather than individual ones.
It's easy for me to think in either language, but shouldn't it be easy for you? The structure isn't too different from English save only the lack of conjugations.
Not really. Take for example this thread. If I was the OP and I was supposed to type this in some other language, I'd use English as a base to start off my train of thought. Maybe we could think of it this way, your inner voice has a master language, and it's the one which you use most commonly and intuitively.
Or maybe it's just my horrible Chinese vocabulary at work.
Most kanji used in everyday life has the hiragana characters in smaller print above the kanji. The official number of kanji is almost 2000, but there are thousands more, most people aren't expected to be able to read all of them all the time. So e.g., signs and magazines show the hiragana as well, but some newspapers might not. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
EPT
