Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site boring.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!mhuxn!mhuxr!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!pyramid!ut-sally!seismo!mcvax!boring!lambert From: lambert@boring.UUCP (Lambert Meertens) Newsgroups: net.nlang Subject: Re: Learn Japanese or bust. Message-ID: <6712@boring.UUCP> Date: Sat, 21-Dec-85 06:18:17 EST Article-I.D.: boring.6712 Posted: Sat Dec 21 06:18:17 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 23-Dec-85 04:44:27 EST References: <1791@uwmacc.UUCP> <839@h-sc1.UUCP> <1809@uwmacc.UUCP> <6711@boring.UUCP> Reply-To: lambert@boring.UUCP (Lambert Meertens) Organization: CWI, Amsterdam Lines: 107 Summary: Learning to *read* Japanese is hard Apparently-To: rnews@mcvax Eight years ago I spent some time learning Japanese but soon (after one year) gave up. Having neither the inclination nor the time to sit for years in classes, I attempted some kind of do-it-yourself method. With other languages, reading a lot once I had acquired enough knowledge to decipher (with the aid of a dictionary) the meaning of what I read turned out a good method. Initially, the effort is large (you have to look up a *lot* and you still miss quite a few things), but if you take to it, you catch on fast and the effort gets less and less. At least, that's the way things worked out for me. Although it may be true that, in order to acquire fluency in language X, nothing can replace living for some time in an X-speaking country, I dare to venture that this comes close to it if one has the knack of incorporating vocabulary and idiom in one's "active knowledge" without being forced to actualize that knowledge. Now why didn't this work for Japanese? In the first place, the effort of looking up a kanji character in a character dictionary is sooo much larger than looking up a word in an alphabetized dictionary. As an experiment, I just looked something up: ON reading: SAI SHIN KAN EI JI TEN Kun*: Sai-shin Kan - Ei Ji-ten time (sec): 64 23** 160 0*** 43 20** English: Up-to-date Japanese - English Dictionary *) The kun reading (Japanese pronounciation) is accidentally the same here throughout the phrase. This is normally not the case. **) The organization of my dictionary (Nelson) is such that subsequent characters making up one word can be found more readily. ***) I managed to remember this one! The time needed was more than the sum of these times, because I also have to write everything down, or else I have forgotten the start when I come to the end. All in all, it took something like ten minutes. Before I gave up, I was much more proficient, but this would still have taken me several minutes, for just four words. Imagine plodding through a novel at this pace. Now this wouldn't have been so bad, but the discouraging thing was that I kept looking up the *same* characters over and over, like, I *know* that I have looked this one up umpteen times before, and even just a few minutes ago, but what was it again? Try what I might, I could not keep that mapping from characters to readings in my long-term memory. I also tried to do it with memorizing cards (character on one side, reading on the reverse side), but after memorizing character #11 I would forget #1. Different people have different abilities on this type of tasks, and it may be the case that my performance on this score is exceptionally poor, but I surmise that it helps a lot in its development if you start practicing it at an early age, which is precisely what Japanese kids do, and that if you start too late, it will never become what it might have been. (It may also be the case, as some researchers suggest, that the Japanese are endowed with a greater *innate* potential ability for the task.) For Japanese school children it is also helpful that they can already speak Japanese when they learn to read. So the "readings" fit in with a great deal of knowledge they have already. They have, therefore, no need for the mnemotechnics like (often false, but still helpful) explanations of the "picture" hidden in the character. Unfortunately for me, these mnemotechnics don't work too well either. For some time I tried reading a children's book written in hiragana (Sarukani, The Monkey and the Crabs). Boy, was that a mistake! Apart from the completely minor problem that hiragana has been specially designed to maximize confusion in my perceptual system (a/wa, e/n, ki/ma/ha/na/ta, te/ko/to, ke/se, ne/re, nu/me, u/ri/ra/ro/ru), a problem that I didn't encounter in the Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets, it turned out that about every other word had ten possible meanings, which kind of explodes combinatorially. (At least the words had spaces in between, which is not the normal practice; without spaces, the tree of possibilities spreads out much faster.) Of course, if you already know Japanese, you would not find this a problem at all for a children's tale. For serious writing, it is unacceptable--too many ambiguities--which explains why the Japanese will still stick to kanji after China has romanized (assuming they ever will). I am not trying to discourage anyone from learning Japanese. The language per se is not particularly hard. But it is impervious to the method of learning it by reading it. (There are of course *some* difficult things in Japanese, just as in any other natural language, such as counting and politeness modes, and idiom is hard in *all* languages.) To conclude, some data on the number of kanji characters learned in subsequent grades (source: Nelson): Grade Number Accumulated 1 46 46 2 105 151 3 187 338 4 205 543 5 194 737 6 144 881 > 969 1850 N 29 1879 There are 969 characters in general use in addition to the 881 learned in grades 1-6. These 881 have, of course, been selected as the most important ones and you can possibly manage without the other 969 in the same way many English-speaking people manage without knowing the meaning of words like "recondite" or "obsolescence". Together, these 1850 form the "To^yo^ kanji", as established by the Japanese government (except that for practical purposes the press has made a few substitutions, bumping the 28 least frequent characters in favor of 28 more useful ones). The final 29 characters are "approved" characters for use in writing proper names. -- Lambert Meertens ...!{seismo,okstate,garfield,decvax,philabs}!lambert@mcvax.UUCP CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science), Amsterdam