|
 |
To Kana or Not To Kana - japanese questio | ||
Tags: Japanese | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Kendrah Newbie United States Joined 5570 days ago 10 posts - 17 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 15 01 September 2009 at 3:18pm | IP Logged |
|
Hey ya'll!
As anyone experienced in Japanese language courses, the japanese course books usually come in one of three ways: with all the lessons in romaji, half and half in kana and romaji, and totally in kana. Which is the best way to go? Generally people say romaji and kana but some of the older courses (such as 'Beginning Japanese Part 1 & 2' by Eleanor Harz Jordan) and Living Language are both examples of courses that don't include kana. I wonder if it's really a good idea to skip them? They seem like decent courses and one could incorporate the kana by writing the lessons out in the kana. As for the all kana books... well, I tried one but it went way over my head, as I was still struggling with the kana (esp. kata) and a great deal was written in kata. Full kana beginning books are for the more intermediate, I would think. (Maybe I'm wrong.) But I'm not certain so I'd like opinions from all those learning (or who know) Japanese. Edited by Kendrah on 01 September 2009 at 4:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5617 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes  Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 3 of 15 01 September 2009 at 4:09pm | IP Logged |
|
Get the kana only version, you'll have to learn it at some stage, might as well be
straight away. I remember when I started it took absolutely ages to read anything, but after about 10 days I was moderately quick (not having to reading each kana individually), and within 30 days I could read more or less normally without pauses to think about it. My suggestion is don't spend too much time individually learning the kana, maybe a couple of hours. Then start reading, when you finish a bit, reread it trying not to look up all the kana you don't know. Repeat a few times, and you'll soon know all of them. Try something like sentences from smart.fm or one of the tales from here (http://english.franklang.ru/12/). Avoid text which has romaji in it, it's hard to ignore. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5772 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 15 01 September 2009 at 4:43pm | IP Logged |
|
Kana, now. Knowing kana you'll still be able to use romaji material, the other way you won't. You'll probably forget a number of the rarely used kana until you actually need them (I only ever read ヲ in manga and song titles) but that doesn't really matter, you'll know the more frequent ones soon and the other ones you can still look up when you need them.
I also think that transcribing the romaji only lessons to kana is a good idea. :) I can't actually say anything to your dilemma with the all kana books because I started out by watching subtitled dorama, memorized the kana and some kanji and skipped half a year of class when I started Japanese class. Of course reading in kana will take longer than reading in romaji when you lack the practice - but in this case, more practice helps. Edited by Bao on 01 September 2009 at 4:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6091 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 15 01 September 2009 at 6:45pm | IP Logged |
|
Have you tried Hiragana Katakana Worksheets? It might be worth practicing with these first, at least until you've gotten used to kana.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| wildweathel Newbie United States Joined 5569 days ago 32 posts - 71 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Japanese | Message 6 of 15 01 September 2009 at 9:14pm | IP Logged |
|
I've never been impressed by roumaji courses. Let's compare the main advantages of the various phonetic options:
Kana (仮名): you have to learn them, so might as well get comfortable now. Nihon-siki roumaji (日本式ローマ字): requires a few minutes to learn and maybe a few days before the sound changes become comfortable. Makes verb conjugations extremely easy to understand. Used for computer input. Kunrei-siki roumaji (訓令式ローマ字): actually taught in Japan, mostly the same as nihon-siki. Hepburn romanization (ヘボン式ローマ字): many sound changes are reflected in spelling. Looks like it sounds, at least to English speakers. Hepburn is obviously silly: you save 15 minutes--that's fine if you're on a web forum talking to people who aren't studying Japanese and don't want to spend 15 minutes explaining why "siki" is actually pronounced something more like "shiki". Yet, this is the only roumaji system I've seen at a book store. Nihon-siki is great for explaining some things with verbs (it's common for the break between verb-stem and suffix to happen in the middle of a syllable). But, kana is the way to go if you're serious. Actually, the full mixed script (kana and kanji) is ideally the way to go. Kanji aren't inherently difficult: I'm still a beginner (less than 1000-word vocabulary), but, I learned to recognize and write about 2000 kanji in two months. That said, I have never seen a beginners course in mixed script. The closest is low-intermediate stuff like the Japanese Core 2000 at http://smart.fm and 2001 Kanji Odyssey and Tae Kim's beginner's grammar reference http://www.guidetojapanese.org/ . 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| hobofat Diglot Newbie Japan Joined 5566 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin, Spanish | Message 7 of 15 04 September 2009 at 7:57am | IP Logged |
|
In my Japanese courses at university the very first thing we did was learn hiragana and katana. Nothing was taught in romaji. I would advocate this method. I think that our brains discern patterns in what we see. Since hiragana and katana is phonetic, and it is what all japanese native media uses, there is no point in learning vocabulary and building up pattern associations in the mind and then have to switch to kana script. If you start using it from the beginning, you won't have this problem.
There is no reason that you cannot learn the hiragana and katakana with a set of hand-written flashcards over the course of a couple days. It's really all it takes. The rest is just reading Japanese words in those scripts to reinforce. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5614 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 8 of 15 04 September 2009 at 9:16am | IP Logged |
|
IMHO, you can learn basic oral Japanese with Romaji texts, but frankly, if you seriously want to learn Japanese as a target, you should manage to get used to complex writing system, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Once I intended to learn Arabic with Latin alphabet (instead of Arabic script), but eventually I got frustrated with the method, and my experience proved once again that if somebody really wants to learn a foreign language, he/she should try to learn its formal writing system from the beginning, simply because most of Arabic/Japanese resources are written in its original script (not Romaji).
1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
