Metafilter came up trumps today with this question and responses about reading material for the learner of Japanese. This led me to Liana's Extensive Reading Journal—there's a very good explanation, and justification, of extensive reading here. So many good blogs, so little time.
With Russian I never quite got to the point where my reading became a continuous upward swoop of improvement leading to full literacy. If I read with copious use of a dictionary I soon got bored, often forgetting the start of a hard sentence by the time I'd reached the end of it. If I read with no dictionary at all, I felt as though I was just filleting the text for easy words and establishing the structure of sentences with no regard to actual content (something did something to something yesterday with a something). Perhaps it's different with Japanese, where the semantic associations of the kanji will give you hints even if you've never seen the word before.
Also from that Metafilter question thread, lots of Japanese audio resources.
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Thank you, I'm glad you found my blog to be interesting!
ReplyDeleteI've found that if you're able to read at a level where kanji is liberally used, and you have a good grounding in kanji to start with, then kanji is a huge help when reading without a dictionary. The problem I've found with Japanese authentic reading material is that I know or can recognize a great many kanji, but I don't have the corresponding vocabulary base. That is, say I can read as many kanji as your average 4th grader -- it's not at all the same as knowing as many words as your average 4th grader, and so a book at that level will be too difficult for me to read fluently. But then, going back down a couple notches, Japanese kids books are mostly hiragana; I have a better chance of knowing more of the words in an easier book, but can't use my kanji knowledge to figure things out. I've often wondered how extensive reading would work with Chinese, where you have the benefits of hanzi right from the beginning...
Hi Liana—thanks a lot for dropping by; yes, I got a lot out of your blog.
ReplyDeleteA colleague and I were wondering the other day, in fact, about how Chinese-language kids managed to learn to read in the days before pinyin and bopomofo: a hanzi that you don't know yet will be quite a stumbling block unless you are able to use a dictionary. But on the other hand if you learn a hanzi at an early age, you'll probably never forget it.
I have a few Japanese-language YA novels and some non-fiction (cookery books etc.) which from the illustrations and furigana look as though they're aimed at young people; I'll have a go at these sometime, but meanwhile I'm still plugging away at romanized textbooks and separately looking at kanji every now and then. I have an entirely unscientific hunch that I'll do better to learn the basic vocabulary via romanization before looking properly at the written language; I may be wrong.
The problem, as I see it, with learning basic vocabulary in romaji is that you're connecting your knowledge of a word to a piece of information (that is, the written form in romaji) that won't do you much good when you want to read authentic material. On the other hand, if you connect the word to the kana/kanji form right from the start, that should help you practice recognizing the word, eventually making it quicker to read -- something you'll have to do eventually anyway, since pretty much nothing is written in romaji.
ReplyDeleteThat is to say, I think that learning to read is a process of becoming so familiar with the written word that looking at it and understanding the meaning becomes automatic. (To use the second language acquisition jargon, you develop automaticity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaticity) The first step is mastering the individual characters/letters - that is, looking at A (or あ) and knowing immediately what it is. From there, with lots of practice and input, you go on to recognizing words automatically, then phrases, then eventually whole sentences and paragraphs. I would worry that pushing kana use to the side would put you at a disadvantage: you may know all the words in a sentence written in hiragana, but if you aren't used to connecting them to the written kana forms, you would have to spend time reading character by character, and it would take you much longer to read than if you had studied the kana forms from the start and could recognize the individual words.
(Incidentally, this is why texts with lots of kanji are actually easier for me, and I assume a lot of other adult Japanese language learners, than texts with no kanji: I can instantly recognize the pronunciation and meaning of 山, and やま takes me just the slightest bit longer.)
The textbooks I used when I took Japanese in college, the Genki series, uses romaji for the first two or three chapters, then drops it, and I think that's better for forcing yourself to get used to the Japanese writing system. I can think of situations where romaji might be useful -- I've noticed that if I'm exposed to a word multiple times in romaji (I'm thinking here of a lot of kimono terminology, since it's a subject I've read a lot about in English) even complicated ones can become pretty easy to remember, and I use that sometimes if a long word is really bothering me and I want to remember it. But my impression is that it's better to get right to the kana if reading is even a secondary goal for you.
Anyways, I'm just one learner and I've certainly got a long ways to go myself - it might be something to ask Metafilter about, or other language learners.
About Chinese and learning to read without any sort of pronunciation gloss, that's really an interesting question. Ancient China certainly had an amazing, sophisticated educational system for hundreds of years, so it's not like it was rare for people to learn to read... I would assume rote learning and memorization was a big part of formal education, and I wonder if there were picture books or simple books that let kids connect the information they already had about vocabulary, sentence structure and pronunciation to the written form. Kanji/hanzi certainly seems more complex to me than writing systems based on syllabaries, but if it's what you learn as a kid and it's all you know, then you adapt. I would like to know for sure now, though, and not just my guesses :)
I had hoped to leave romaji behind long before this point. The idea was: tear quickly through a romanized textbook so as to get a reasonable grasp of the spoken language, and only then tackle trying to read kanji. This is what the romanized textbooks recommended (but then they would, wouldn't they!). It wasn't quite what Heisig recommended—he said you should learn the writing and English keywords for the kanji before doing any other Japanese study—but doing Heisig at the same time as tackling romanized text, or afterwards, ought not to make a difference, since Heisig initially doesn't teach you any readings.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, what's actually happened is that for the past year I've alternated between ploughing through romanized textbooks and ploughing through Heisig; I've made a lot of false starts and restarts and have got pretty annoyed with myself for wasting time. I've definitely spent much too long with romanized text...
An anecdote about learning to read: a friend of mine started school here in England in the 1960s, when some primary schools were experimenting with teaching reading via the Initial Teaching Alphabet, a sort of watered-down IPA. The idea was that children would progress to normal English orthography after mastering ITA. It didn't turn out very well; my friend is highly literate but can't spell at all, and blames ITA for this.
With every language I've tried to learn, listening comprehension has been the big problem, and I think that influenced my liking for romanized Japanese: at least romanized Japanese unambiguously tells you what the word sounds like; I'm nervous of getting to a stage where I think I can read kanji well but am actually assigning totally wrong readings to them.
(Myles na gCopaleen one said he wanted to publish a book called How To Speak Irish, by One Who Can't. This blog is probably the Japanese equivalent.)