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I used to know how to write in Japanese

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Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#231

Post by BrtByte »

lyall wrote: post #11

When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing. Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel str…

I think your advice makes a lot of sense for most learners: prioritize the skills you'll actually use, and don't feel guilty about skipping handwriting unless it personally matters to you

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#232

Post by BrtByte »

bapak wrote: post #30

A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. So time to sunset the system, surely? I don't know why so many countries are so obstinately hanging onto something so difficult. Do it like Korea if you don't want to go the Vietnamese way.

But at the same time, language and script are deeply tied to culture, identity, and history, so it's not as easy as just flipping a switch

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#233

Post by BrtByte »

vunderba wrote: post #43

I spent years in Taiwan studying traditional Chinese and even at the height of my proficiency there were plenty of rarer logographs that I'd frequently stumble over - only able to draw "blurry approximations" of them depending on my familiarity. Coming from a phonetic language with only 26 letters, it was such a surreal feeling being able to effortlessly read a character but be unable to reproduce it.

Also wild how quickly the writing ability fades without regular use

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#234

Post by pm215 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #225
jimbokun wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The characters you copy pasted are in a phonetic script called hiragana, conceptually similar to the English alphabet as each character denotes a sound. The kanji are pictographic characters that often have different pronunciations in different contexts. The kanji for べんきょう are 勉強 (meaning "to study").

I know that. In your model of the problem, pm215 knows the following things: 1. There is a Japanese word pronounced benkyoo which refers to activities like reading books with the intent to learn something, doing practice exercises with the intent to learn something, preparing to take a test, doing things that a school might ask you to do, and other similar endeavors. 2. There is an English word "study" which correspo…

No, the problem I describe is "I am thinking of a Japanese sentence (which I know the meaning of), and I could write it in hiragana but not in kanji".

This is analogous to "I want to write an English sentence, but I can't remember how to spell one of the words", except it's worse because at least English words are spelled vaguely in line with their pronunciation.

I think where I may have stated the problem confusingly was my reference to not having a link between the Japanese word and the English RTK keywords. RTK assigns one unique keyword to each kanji, which (a) doesn't always line up with the meaning of a word in which it's the only kanji and (b) doesn't inherently help with multi kanji words. In this case benkyou is 勉強 which is two kanji with the RTK keywords EXERTION and STRONG. Unless you actively learn and memorise a link between the Japanese word and this pair of keywords, RTK is not going to help you with writing the word.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#235

Post by coffeeling »

lyall wrote: post #45
timr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore. It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards. As a partial a…

Yeah I agree. I way over-indexed on learning kanji (via WaniKani) at the beginning of my Japanese learning journey. I got about halfway through before realizing it was silly that I could read 健忘症 but didn't know many very basic hiragana-only words. It wasn't timed wasted but it probably wasn't the most efficient approach. In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then m…

In an ideal world, some kind soul would escort kanji behind a shed and we'd hear a loud bang, then marvel at how we can suddenly just read words we've heard for years.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#236

Post by coffeeling »

BrtByte wrote: post #229

I've noticed the same thing (not with Japanese), but even after learning to write in Korean, my ability to handwrite faded way faster than my reading skills. I figured it was just laziness, but it makes sense that reading and writing use totally different parts of the brain.

How do you lose the ability to handwrite in Korean? That sounds weird to me.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#237

Post by coffeeling »

nachteilig wrote: post #187
NalNezumi wrote: post #111

Don't worry it's common for natives too. Not born & raised in Japan but went to Saturday school for Japanese in Europe and I was excited to be able to read (and understand) the newspaper for the first time at middle school, because my Kanji caught up. From there it's usually very quick how much Kanji you can learn. But now, 20 years later? When I need to go to fill forms I flip up my phone and search for Kanji all th…

Is it this way for Hiragana and Katakana for you too? I just started and have not moved on to Kanji yet, and I already struggle to write them.

A lot of Japanese learners do hate katakana (personally, a lot of fonts could stand to be clearer about ツシンソ ), because most writing is in kanji+hiragana so they have less practice with katakana. But kana ability is really just exposure. Use it to get used to it.

Same reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from.

Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#238

Post by thaumasiotes »

bobthepanda wrote: post #226
thaumasiotes wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One interesting thing I learned while researching this comment was that a big reason Hanja disappeared was because Koreans gained literacy during the typewriting era, but before computer auto-suggested keyboards, and it was just substantially easier to make and use a letter-based typewriter. If you look in the right places, you can find people complaining about how it's impossible to dynamically render hangul block…

There are around theoretical 11,000 possible Korean blocks, which is a lot. But Unicode has ~98,000 Chinese characters. Nine times the characters is a quaint problem for computers but a very difficult problem for a physical typewriter.

No, it is a problem exactly equal to the other one. No typewriter can produce 98,000 different characters. And no typewriter can produce 11,000 different characters.

With zero difference between hangul and hanja, how can the typewriter favor one over the other?

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#239

Post by thaumasiotes »

pm215 wrote: post #234
thaumasiotes wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that. In your model of the problem, pm215 knows the following things: 1. There is a Japanese word pronounced benkyoo which refers to activities like reading books with the intent to learn something, doing practice exercises with the intent to learn something, preparing to take a test, doing things that a school might ask you to do, and other similar endeavors. 2. There is an English word "study" which correspo…

No, the problem I describe is "I am thinking of a Japanese sentence (which I know the meaning of), and I could write it in hiragana but not in kanji". This is analogous to "I want to write an English sentence, but I can't remember how to spell one of the words", except it's worse because at least English words are spelled vaguely in line with their pronunciation. I think where I may have stated the problem confusingl…

> RTK assigns one unique keyword to each kanji, which (a) doesn't always line up with the meaning of a word in which it's the only kanji and (b) doesn't inherently help with multi kanji words. In this case benkyou is 勉強 which is two kanji with the RTK keywords EXERTION and STRONG.

Ah, you're right. I had no idea this was what you had in mind. That is a system that doesn't make sense. You have to learn the spelling of words per word, not hope that the roots make sense.

(By contrast, 勉强 exists in modern Chinese too, where it mostly means "force; coerce; compel", but can also refer to just barely being able to do something. I was amused to see that it means "study" in Japanese - that implies one of the most sharply negative attitudes towards studying that I've ever heard of.)

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#240

Post by coffeeling »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #137
koakuma-chan wrote: post #124

"is point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced." How is this different from English words? How is conscientiousness pronounced? Not to mention rendezvous.

English is written using an alphabet. Alphabets are by and large phonetic so you do not need to remember how to pronounce every word, you learn to read the alphabet and specific spelling (e.g. 'th' in English) and you are mostly done. Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.

> Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.

This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.

That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.

Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.

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