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Learning Vocab Without Kanji - Nukemarine - 2014-02-23
Fillanzea Wrote:Until quite recently, most speakers of Chinese or Japanese have been illiterate.That is not true for Japanese. I'm fairly sure the literacy rate in the Meiji period was around 80%. It only improved since then. I can't speak for Chinese though.
And blind people in China and Japan don't seem to have a deficit when it comes to spoken language.
Learning Vocab Without Kanji - shinsen - 2014-02-23
That's an easy enough Google search:
"literacy rate in 19th century Japan" -> "40 percent for men and 15 percent for women"
"literacy rate in 19th century China" -> "30-40 percent for men and 2-10 percent for women"
Learning Vocab Without Kanji - Fillanzea - 2014-02-23
For me 'quite recently' includes the Meiji period.
There's also reason to think that literacy might have been much lower than 80%, depending on class and gender and geography.
Learning Vocab Without Kanji - afterglowefx - 2014-02-25
This is something I want seen through. Even with kanji knowledge, one hits a point (usually around intermediate level) where the massive influx of vocab consisting entirely of かきくけこ・さしすせそ with a little あいうえお sprinkled in for flavor gets to be nearly unbearable.
I don't really care about any of the other sounds or about vocab consisting of only half the above-mentioned and something else, but when it's only the above mentioned--and these are like the Japanese' most favoritist sounds in the whole world--recognition in isolation is (at least for me) almost impossible. In-context is fine, readings is fine, but damn you Core, damn you and your infernal card setup.
So yeah, I'm going to start working on this.
Learning Vocab Without Kanji - afterglowefx - 2014-03-01
Just a little update. I made a small mnemonic system (40 sounds, consisting almost entirely of かきくけこ・さしすせそ + あいうえお and all their common combinations) and took it for a test-drive this week. I saw results with it despite not putting a lot of effort into especially remembering the stories.
I really think if one put the time in to fully implement it they'd see good results on words that don't seem to want to stick--especially once the sound-mnemonic link really set in.
One downside was that I found I was concentrating on which mnemonic a given sound was associated with instead of what kanji it used. Where as before I would ask myself "せい？どのせい？正のせい？生？" and work out the word from there, now I'm thinking of seahorses. The former helped to reinforce the vocabulary, the kanji, the kanji reading, and the root meaning of the word (much of which transfers to the next time I see 生 or 正 or 制 or whichever of dozens of kanji use the reading (damn you Japanese)), while the sound mnemonic served only to recall the meaning of the word. I think you might see faster results with the mnemonic system, but you'd gain a much deeper understanding of the language by sticking with kanji. I suppose that's common sense, though.