Comment by T-R | Hacker News Reader

Comment by T-R | Hacker News Reader

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> pay little or no attention to memorizing characters

I'm not usually one to speak bluntly, but, at least for Japanese, speaking from a lot of experience, this is flat out the wrong approach.

Older books like the romanzied "Japanese for Busy People" took this approach. I started with this book, it felt easy at the time, but it was immensely impractical - you don't build up enough of a base to learn from any other material. It's completely useless. After over a year, in a formal setting, I ultimately decided to just completely start over.

Currently Japanese courses mostly just focus on Hiragana and Katakana, since material for children usually has pronunciation guides over the kanji anyway. This is workable, but it just gives you no leverage where you could have some - you end up memorizing a thousand indiviaul words, some of which maybe kind of sound similar in parts, when you could instead learn a dozen charcters, and know that they share root words. Phoenetic approaches work for children who are in a situation where they can memorize from immersion with native speakers, and have additional clues like context and intonation to emphasize root words, to pick up new vocabulary.

When I started studying Chinese, we instead went with a "radicals-first" approach, and after just a short time of that, my Japanese vocabulary exploded - I could suddenly pick out all the seafood on a menu, and I started asking people mid-conversation "oh, does that use these characters?", and I could understand what it meant without them having to struggle to translate to English: Heart+Electric+Map - it's probably an electrocardiogram, especially if we're talking about hospitals. If you haven't learned the kanji, you don't even know if you can make that association from the sounds, much less how to ask that question.

That's how you get to fluency, by building up a foundation that lets you learn without active study. You can't get there by avoiding the basis of word composition in the language. Apologies if my frustration with characters-last approaches came through a little strong - they wasted a lot of my time.

Mair's point is that "building up a foundation" means learning the language not the script.

> characters-last approaches

I think it's more accurate to call what Mair's advocating a "language-first-characters-later-if-necessary" approach.

Here's what Mair said about Chinese classes:

It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25. If the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarin—strictly romanized, mind you. But there are exceedingly few teachers who are enlightened enough to teach it that way.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-h...

They're not reasonably separable. Memorizing romaji, or even strings of hiragana, removes the associations between root-words that are related, like those radicals that let you identify menu items, and removes the visual aid for identifying root words in context. Memorizing associations between arbitrary groups of sounds without the radicals is actually harder, it just sounds easier to those intimidated by the idea of learning characters.

Given, much to Mair's displeasure, that actual native media is written with kanji, they're immediately necessary, and not studying kanji effectively bars students from any learning outside the classroom until they have - which is completely counter to giving students either the context necessary for immersion or the reinforcement for traditional study to work.

Maybe it's merited for Chinese classes, with its larger character set, but Mair's approach just sacrifices students' ability to learn on their own in favor of lowering attrition rates of intro-level classes. It's actively harmful to students aiming for fluency to build up the characters as this insurmountable mountain in the distance before they can actually use their knowledge, rather than the useful compositional blocks and visual aids that they are.

> They're not reasonably separable

They are very reasonably separable. If they weren't, countries like Korea couldn't have switched their orthography (which they did).

Also Japanese people enjoyed playing games like マザー２. This is part of "actual native media", and Japanese writing could look like this:

https://youtu.be/F_UrqsO2JQ0?t=10m15s

(Notice the native narrator has no trouble reading the kana-only writing.)

It's true that much of current native media still uses kanji, but they aren't "immediately necessary". There are books/manga with furigana and software tools like Rikaichan/kun for online articles.

People should be able to learn whatever they want outside of the classroom, including kanji (being able to recognise commonly used characters certainly helps in understanding native media). It's just that grammar, vocabulary, etc (real language) are much more important than kanji for beginners.

Sure, Korean is phonetic, and so learning it phonetically makes sense, since you won't be forced to re-learn it again to be able to use your knowledge. Speaking from experience studying Korean, though, attaining a useable vocabulary through rote memorization is dramatically harder than if you're familiar with the 한자/漢字 words are derived from, for exactly that reason - even though hanja's not used directly so much in korean, we started studying it in the third semester of Korean class, and it was helpful, though I'd agree maybe a bit excessive there.

Games that use a strict hiragana character set are readable by natives because they're already fluent in speaking; they're unnecessarily difficult for non-native speakers, particularly since they tend to only have the bare minimum of separators between words. After living in 4 prefectures, working for a small Japanese company, and dating a native speaker for roughly a decade, I still find those games hard to read - it's just hard to identify the shapes of words, like reading English with no spaces; you have no choice but to guess where the boundaries are and sound everything out syllable by syllable, because everything's written differently from how you'd see it anywhere else.

If some people want to put off kanji or memorize phrases from a travel guide, that's their prerogative, but not teaching the compositional aspects of kanji, and leaving students to fend for themselves after selling the idea that it's all rote memorization (and seemingly to push this implausible ethnocentric dream of the language one day being exclusively romanized) is just a disservice to the students, as it was to me.

> strict hiragana character set are readable by natives because they're already fluent in speaking

This is an argument for spending more time trying to become fluent in speaking (by learning vocab/grammar/etc) than spending time learning how to draw a bunch of characters.

The use of spaces would be necessary if Japan were to switch to kana, and that's one of the 3 things Kanamoji-kai recommends as well:

http://kanamozi.org/hikari958-08_kanamozibun-kakikata.pdf

Without spaces kana-only writing would be hard to read for most native speakers.

I honestly don't see any issue in not teaching kanji in Japanese classes, any more than not teaching cursive writing or Latin in English classes. They are just not essential. (Please do not start a lecture on how Latin helps you understand English.)

> ethnocentric dream of the languge one day being romanized

I'm not saying Japan should switch to romaji. I think in Japan's case kana would be much more realistic.

Also, I'm not advocating abolishing kanji either (people should be able to write kanji all day everyday if that's what they want to do).

I just want the government to (a) stop teaching kanji in public schools, and (b) mandate the use of kana (or some other phonetic writing system) in government documents.

I don't see how it's "ethnocentric". For most non-native speakers it's much easier to learn this way. Only non-native Japanese learners I've met who found it "easier to read" kana-kanji writing were people who already knew kanji e.g. Chinese people who were learning Japanese & were not fluent in speaking. The true of the matter is they were just familiar with the characters and they often didn't even know how to pronounce the words.

I have to agree with T-R. Japanese is much easier to read with Kanji. If you run into a kanji you don't know, that's too bad, but I run into words I don't know in English, too. You just look it up. English spelling is just as complicated, in my opinion. Also, "stop teaching kanji in public schools" is pretty much the same as abolishing kanji.

You read my conversation with T-R and your takeaway is I think teaching kanji to beginners is a bad idea because "I run into a kanji I don't know"? Please.

> English spelling is just as complicated, in my opinion

That's a separate issue, but I agree with you to some extent. Here's a Feynman quote (which I agree with 100%):

If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

> "stop teaching kanji in public schools" is pretty much the same as abolishing kanji

I don't think so. There are many things that aren't taught in public schools but taught in private classes (calligraphy/ikebana/yoga/etc).

It's good that people who care about these cultures enjoy them in their own time and other people are left alone and not being forced to learn something they think has a low ROI.

If kanji is such a good idea as you claim, it will survive and thrive without government coercion, don't you think?

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