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How long does it take to read in JP? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| dambros Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 4627 days ago 15 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English | Message 17 of 25 02 April 2012 at 3:31am | IP Logged | |||||
I am sorry if this was answered in the link, but it didn't work for me. What did you use then to learn kanji? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4698 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 18 of 25 02 April 2012 at 3:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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Assume you start from scratch, with not a lot of vocab. I'd get a book for children with Furigana, slowly plowing along, trying to get the vocab used. You'll pick up some Kanji this way, probably not at lightning speed, but we're talking about 2000 jouyou Kanji here, some of those consisting of huge amounts of strokes.
I like a systematic approach better, TBH. Learn the radicals first (only 200 and some), it will help you differentiating them. Makes a huge difference. SRS is not a bad choice to do this. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5175 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 19 of 25 02 April 2012 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can read Japanese, I would say.
but it depends of course what do you want to read, message from a Gal or scientific dissertation? JLPT n5 and n1 both contain text in Japanese, but the difference is the range of the difficulty. well, so it depends. however reading in Japanese, I often faced a problem of lack of vocabulary. If you learn French for example you may notice that after learning some bulk of vocabulary you get some advanced items of speech for free. Japanese vocabulary on the other hand is very rich and different than European. It has a lot of borrowings from English, but still the core is in Japanese. talking about Kanji, what I don't reccomend is worying about the "readings" too much. If you look at kanji dictionary you will see plenty of readings, but only few are really useful. many of those readings are totally irrelevant - just look them up in a dictionary, there may be no words with the on reading of "猫" (I don't know any, but they MAY exist, if you search the dictionary), but you will still find the 'byou" written next to the character. Little research for the on readings of the character, in dictionary, shows: 窮鼠噛猫 きゅうそごうびょう cornered mouse bites the cat - a saying. and another word of some plant or some animal with reading "myou" this time. So the only relevant reading is neko, or rather neko is a Japanese word for cat. They called 'neko' to a cat long before they knew about the Chinese people. I think the whole concept of kunyomi is slighty irrelevant, it is useful mostly if you are Japanese kid and already know that cat = neko, it's some kind of an explanation for the kid learning kanji in school. learn kunyomi as a word, and learn onyomi only if there is one to remember, if you are more advanced you can guess the onyomi from the way the charactr looks. Learn unusual readings as exceptions together with the words. you may know that 食 is read as "shoku or jiki". so when you encounter a word containing this character what can you say? that you read it "either shoku or jiki"? Just learn as the default reading, and learn words with jiki reading (few and far in between) as exceptions. 乞食 （」こじき） - a beggar 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Yashinka Diglot Pro Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5206 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Swedish*, EnglishC2 Studies: Japanese, German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 25 03 April 2012 at 4:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with the above post, learn to read the kanji by its usual readings first and then move on to more obscure ones. I learned kanji almost exclusively through context, in sentences, which after a while makes you so used to the high frequent kanji and its usual readings that you can read them without any noticeable effort. However, the kanji that you might and will encounter in reading books is quite vast. I read novels in Japanese with a good reading flow but I still encounter unusual kanji or readings on every other page or so, so have patience with it is all I'm saying.
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| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5780 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 21 of 25 04 April 2012 at 7:25am | IP Logged | |||||
I decided to start a new thread with my method for learning kanji. You can read it here: Kanji method: Heisig/SRS free 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5378 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 22 of 25 04 April 2012 at 4:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The answer depends almost entirely on what you mean by "understanding a text".
After over 3 years, despite being comfortable in conversation -- and exchanging emails is virtually second nature --, I still find reading Japanese to be difficult because of the range of vocabulary. So if other posters believe they can read Japanese comfortably after a year or after 18 months, I have to wonder if we have the same definition. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5305 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 23 of 25 05 April 2012 at 4:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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As Arekkusu points out clearly, what you need in order to read is vocaublary, and that reading requires more vocabulary than conversation and email exchange. So whether you can read in, say, 2 years will depend on whether you diligently learn and know vocabulary and practise reading for 2 years, or whether you skype and watch anime for 2 years.
My friends tell me that a Chinese native who knows JLPT-N2 vocabulary would be able to read general things comfortably [note]. That means all kanji's and around 10000 words. The 10000 words aren't as scary as they sound, as some of then are similar, like "sing - singer". So let's say that's 2000 kanji's + 3000 hard words + 3000 medium words + 3000 easy words. And how soon you can read is simply how soon you learn and know them. [note] The question I asked my friends was something like, "If I don't intend to use Japanese for work, I just want to be able to read newspapers and magazines and blogs, but I don't want to keep guessing at words, and I don't want to keep flipping my dictionary either, which JLPT level should I aim at?" Edited by smallwhite on 06 April 2012 at 1:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6122 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 24 of 25 05 April 2012 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's a completely different situation for Chinese (and Korean) speakers, I think. There was a Chinese guy in my class, really he could comprehend anything, but then when he read aloud, he didn't know how to pronounce numbers in Japanese. They kind of guess at the meaning by just looking at the characters.
I'll try a quick test. I'm past 4 years of this, and I pick one page of my デュラララ novel. This is a light novel which I picked because I know the anime and figure this will help me follow. It was in the easy novel section of the bookstore, but it's still pretty hard for me. I see a few words that I didn't know but I've seen the Kanji before but could kind of guess. One that I knew the meaning and but got the reading wrong. A handful of names that I fail at, but have furigana in the book. One I had no clue on. 喪失 == and my guess wasn't off on this, but I wasn't sure and didn't know how to pronounce the first character. 怯える == おびえる to be frightened. I had no clue on this one. Goes to show, Japanese seem use kanji beyond the jouyou even in a book that was in the light novel section of the book store. 放課後 == which should be easily guessable but I jumped the gun and looked it up too early. I read it correctly (though this is an easy one to read) 奇妙＝ and I got the reading wrong but knew the meaning, though it's a stupid mistake and this isn't a hard word at all, really. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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