Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji?

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Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - buonaparte - 2015-07-16

yudantaiteki Wrote:I wouldn't be surprised if 75% is too high.

It IS much too high. A few years ago, I read a thick book on functional illiteracy. Only about 50% are functionally literate - they understand SIMPLE texts. Less than 10% are fully literate - they understand complicated texts.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - Aikynaro - 2015-07-16

juniperpansy Wrote:I tried to learn Japanese without Kanji for the first few years. I don't recommend it. It makes it extremely difficult to find good learning materials. I felt like a parapalegic trying to learn swimming. Its possible but...

The exception would be if you have a real Japanese environment to learn in (eg. a group of Japanese friends). Otherwise I think that doing speaking only you will most likely run out of level appropriate materials in a few months at best

Have to strongly disagree with this.
I'm not entirely sure what sort of material you're thinking of, but for the first year or so all of my study was subs2srsing anime, and that's an extremely rich source of vocabulary, sentences, and listening practice which doesn't require any kanji knowledge.
I 'exhausted' that source after maybe a year and a half, when the amount unknown words per episode was low enough to make it not worth continuing. By that point, a whole lot of other options were open - particularly manga and children's books (with good furigana coverage).

It's also worth pointing out - just because you've never studying kanji doesn't mean you can't read it.
I've never (successfully - always given up before actually achieving anything) studied kanji, but I can read books with very little furigana quite fine if they fall within my level, just from constant exposure to the kanji alongside furigana or audio. I have never at any point run out of materials - that's impossible I think, seeing it's all native stuff.

So, I dunno - maybe you were just doing it wrong.

Necessary disclaimer that I'm not claiming this to be the best or most efficient way to learn Japanese. Studying kanji is undoubtedly a good thing and I keep telling myself I'm going to start soon to fill in the gaps, but it's not necessary to start with even if your main intent is reading (as mine is, and I consider myself to read a lot). If your main intent was just speaking/listening, doing RTK or the like first would be completely arsebackwards.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - CureDolly - 2015-07-16

Stansfield123 Wrote:
CureDolly Wrote:and the country has 99% literacy.
I doubt any country gets above 75%.

I am not sure what your definition of "literacy" is, but if you are suggesting that a quarter of the Japanese population can't read manga or the signs in the railway station or the menu in a restaurant, that strains credibility.

I suspect that you aren't in fact suggesting that, but have a more exacting definition of literacy. Which is fine. I was using a Japanese Government estimate, but all I was really trying to say was that Japanese people, with few exceptions do know, and see many words in terms of, kanji.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - yogert909 - 2015-07-16

CureDolly Wrote:...have a more exacting definition of literacy.

Prepare for a 30 page debate on what is the definition of literacy.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - Flamerokz - 2015-07-16

yogert909 Wrote:Prepare for a 30 page debate on what is the definition of literacy.

Ahh, the familiar aroma of koohii.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - z1bbo - 2015-07-16

By not learning kanji you wont be able to use any written Japanese resource at all (except stuff for little children) and you will have a very hard time telling homophones apart- there are of thousands of them.

Learning new vocab will probably be much harder as well because without Kanji you have no idea of where sounds come from and what they mean.

You will also hate your past-self if you later on decide to get serious and learn how to read because you could have saved so much trouble and work time.

And to Aikynaro: by reading Kanji with furigana/audio you are learning them - maybe not structured and possible ignoring meanings but you still learn to recognize them and remember their readings (or block readings of words)

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - joshsmad - 2015-07-16

Zgarbas Wrote:It's not impossible, but I wouldn't recommend it.

This pretty much sums up my opinion.

Kanji really ties things together quite well. Very often, I will hear people say a word I've never heard before, but I instantly know the meaning because I can guess which characters are used.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - CureDolly - 2015-07-17

juniperpansy Wrote:Otherwise I think that doing speaking only you will most likely run out of level appropriate materials in a few months at best

Actually if you are interested in reading but not learning kanji (or not learning them all quickly) there are a ton of really interesting children's books - not ehon, but fantasy novels and school stories etc. that have full furigana, as do many text-heavy games like the Dragon Quest series.

You will probably find yourself picking up some kanji if you use material like this, but there is kana for everything.

It may give you a taste for kanji too.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - Aikynaro - 2015-07-18

@z1bbo
Sure, but OP was asking whether he could avoid having to sit down and learn kanji as the first order of business, not if he could avoid ever looking at it at all. I doubt picking them up for free without spending any time specifically on studying them would be a problem.

Most of your points against not learning kanji to begin with don't really bear out in practice, in my experience.

Written Japanese resources: Not a problem, because everything at your reading level for a very long time has furigana. The main obstacle in reading almost anything to begin with is vocabulary, not kanji.

Homophones: Not a problem, because you tell the difference by context in any case. It can be a problem doing simple Anki cards with single words on the front, but you can still throw kanji on the front and tell them apart by the general shape without actually studying the kanji. But it's an almost insignificant problem.

Learning new vocabulary: This one is untestable. Many people claim that kanji helps them learn vocabulary and I'm certainly not going to dispute that, but there's no real way to test the claim that it's 'much harder' without them (or, I'm sure there is, but I doubt anyone's done a real study, and 'I started studying without kanji and couldn't remember anything, and later learnt kanji and it really helped' really doesn't cut it as evidence).
But people learn languages without kanji all the time and have to memorise vast amounts of vocabulary. I don't think it's as big a deal as people here make out.

Hating yourself: Well, sure, it would be really nice to have already done all that, but the reasons I chose not to at the start were valid (basically: living in Japan I wanted to be able to speak/understand as soon as possible, plus learning kanji is boring as hell and was demotivating) and the results are not so bad.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - yogert909 - 2015-07-20

Aikynaro Wrote:...for the first year or so all of my study was subs2srsing anime, and that's an extremely rich source of vocabulary, sentences, and listening practice which doesn't require any kanji knowledge.
I 'exhausted' that source after maybe a year and a half, when the amount unknown words per episode was low enough to make it not worth continuing. By that point, a whole lot of other options were open - particularly manga and children's books (with good furigana coverage).

I'm actually quite interested in your experience learning solely from native materials. I would really appreciate if you don't mind outlining your exact method and how many hours of study it took to get to various levels of understanding.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - cracky - 2015-07-20

CureDolly Wrote:that have full furigana, as do many text-heavy games like the Dragon Quest series.

Only the 3DS remakes and 9 have furigana. On that topic though, most Level-5 games do have it.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - CureDolly - 2015-07-21

cracky Wrote:
CureDolly Wrote:that have full furigana, as do many text-heavy games like the Dragon Quest series.
Only the 3DS remakes and 9 have furigana. On that topic though, most Level-5 games do have it.

Ah thank you for the information. It a 3DS remake and 9 that I have been playing.

On how Japanese people "think in kanji" (and why the language tends to necessitate this), the following article is very interesting. I'll link to the English version:

http://meadowlake001.blogspot.jp/2014/09/just-out-of-curiosity.html

I would add as a rider to both the themes of this post, that while at my current stage I prefer games, books etc to have furigana, I find all-kana text very difficult to read and given a choice (as in Pokemon X/Y) prefer kanji with no furigana to all-kana.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - wareya - 2015-07-21

When I think of a long english word, I split it up into components too. The only "weird" thing about japanese is that it might take more attention, since you have to keep the context of the conversation in mind at the same time as waiting/looking for "new" and unusual "kanji". Any language with a restrictive phonology will be like that.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - cracky - 2015-07-21

CureDolly Wrote:Ah thank you for the information. It a 3DS remake and 9 that I have been playing.

Cool, have fun with them. It's an addictive series. My favorite is probably 5.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - tetsueda - 2015-07-21

wareya Wrote:When I think of a long english word, I split it up into components too. The only "weird" thing about japanese is that it might take more attention, since you have to keep the context of the conversation in mind at the same time as waiting/looking for "new" and unusual "kanji". Any language with a restrictive phonology will be like that.

Hardly. Most indigenous Japanese morphemes are poly-syllabic, and thus distinguishable. Do you think they would have had thousands of homophonous morphemes if they hadn't imported an orthography that allowed for it?

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - Aikynaro - 2015-07-21

yogert909 Wrote:
Aikynaro Wrote:...for the first year or so all of my study was subs2srsing anime, and that's an extremely rich source of vocabulary, sentences, and listening practice which doesn't require any kanji knowledge.
I 'exhausted' that source after maybe a year and a half, when the amount unknown words per episode was low enough to make it not worth continuing. By that point, a whole lot of other options were open - particularly manga and children's books (with good furigana coverage).
I'm actually quite interested in your experience learning solely from native materials. I would really appreciate if you don't mind outlining your exact method and how many hours of study it took to get to various levels of understanding.

Hmm, well, okay, but I'm not really sure how to measure levels of understanding and didn't keep track of hours.

But aha, Anki remembers.

First off:
There was a bunch of flailing around achieving nothing much, but I guess over the course of a year I learnt a few hundred words or so and the most basic of grammar - not enough to be of any worth by itself, plus hiragana/furigana. So, the zero-point wasn't from native materials, but I see no reason why it couldn't have been - I just didn't know what to do at first.

Then I got serious and tried some stuff (including RTK) that didn't work for me, and then worked out what I ended up using.

You can see my card layout and method here.
And here are the stats for that deck:
[Image: MjMeFcE.png]

So, 227 hours, apparently.
I stopped using it about a year ago, so about the time that I passed N3.

Some time before that I started reading seriously. You can see the stats for that here (although it's not accurate at the beginning). I only went for books that I could read fairly easily. At the time I estimated I was below N3 level, but I didn't (and still don't) have much of an idea what 'N3' level means.
For the first few books I looked up pretty much everything, but starting with the ふたごの魔法使い series I started looking up nothing because I didn't really need to in order to understand and the subs2srs deck was going fine. My intention was to never consider reading as 'study' - just reading.

After dumping the subs2srs deck (too much effort to make new cards for not enough gain), I basically stopped studying and just read books.

Passed N2 last December.

At some point started marking words in books and looking them up later, and making lists in Tagaini Jisho with them.
Realised that just reading doesn't really expand your vocabulary usefully, seeing the same words just keep showing up again and again in my lists. About 5 months ago started a new deck that's just word-translation, and it takes 10 minutes per day. I think it's working pretty well - when I see words that are in the deck while reading I usually remember them, although the pass rate is much much worse than the subs2srs deck (but then, it's also much faster to get through).

(not included in all this is a fair amount of time watching TV and such - I don't consider it study, but I guess it needs mentioning)

That's basically it. It's not really a method - I'm really shit at studying, and there are significant holes in my Japanese. But I can hold a conversation, read novels, watch the news etc. and get along okay.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - wareya - 2015-07-21

There's more to keep track of than homophonous morphemes. At morpheme boundaries you get ambiguity as to where which morphemes start and end where, and you naturally have to pay attention in languages with more restrictive phonologies because you'll have to look back by more syllables. If you're expecting the wrong morpheme because of the way a word started, your short term memory takes a moment to reorganize and you have to reinterpret it. In languages with more liberal phonology, this usually happens because of grammar rather than words. (We're full of lookahead and crappy reflexes, even if you're aiming some peripheral at bright green targets rather than parsing speech.)

Learning Kanji would almost definitely help with reparsing Japanese, though, not hurt it.

The only real point was that splitting words up into morphemes when you hear them isn't something unique to japanese. There's nothing to be wowed by.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - yogert909 - 2015-07-21

Aikynaro Wrote:That's basically it. It's not really a method - I'm really shit at studying, and there are significant holes in my Japanese. But I can hold a conversation, read novels, watch the news etc. and get along okay.

Thanks for outlining your study method. That's all I really want anyway is to get to the point where I can learn effectively from native materials. I didn't realize that I could just start with native materials from zero. I feel like I'm on the cusp of it now anyway and trying to figure out exactly how to shift from RTK and my core decks. I was playing with the sabu app which works similarly to subs2srs but skips the srs part in favor of keeping the movie in sequence. Either way, once I finish up a deck I'm working on, in a month or so, I think I'll just jump in the deep end and see how it goes with subs2srs or sabu. Thanks again for making me realize it is possible.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - Stansfield123 - 2015-07-21

yudantaiteki Wrote:
Tzadeck Wrote:
Stansfield123 Wrote:I doubt any country gets above 75%.
No country has higher than a 75% literacy rate? Bwahahaha. Man, I know you're admitting that you're making that number up, but wtf dude.
I wouldn't be surprised if 75% is too high. It's hard to qualify because very few countries do real literacy studies. Usually the literacy figures are created by just assuming that anyone who has finished a certain level of school is literate. (It also depends on what you mean by "literacy".)

I haven't seen exact studies for every single country in the world, but I have seen SOME numbers. I'm definitely not just making the 75% up. 75% is my best guess, based on numbers...such as these:

According to official US government figures, 14% of American adults are incapable of performing simple and everyday literacy activities, and another 29% can't perform moderately challenging literacy activities. The numbers are similar when, instead of prose, the subjects were presented with documents, or tested for quantitative literacy (I believe that's basic math skills - not actual mathematics, but just writings that require some understanding of basic math, to comprehend - stuff like "20 nuns get on a bus, but then 14 get off and half that number get back on, so how many nuns are there on the bus?").
http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp

That would make 43% of Americans functionally illiterate (in English), by any reasonable standard. I can see however how Japan and some western European countries, which severely restrict immigration, might reach 75% functional literacy. I'm not criticizing the US for allowing immigration, mind you, just pointing out that people who arrive from non-English speaking countries, and probably even their children, are going to be less likely to pass an English prose test.

Interestingly, in the case of the US these figures are very similar to (admittedly less well documented) historical descriptions of literacy. If the scholars of the time are to be believed, Americans used to be functionally literate at a rate of about 60% 150 years ago too.

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - yogert909 - 2015-07-21

I didn't believe it, but trusty wikipedia backs this up. I've been to some pretty backwards places and live in a city with a high immigrant population. I've never come across somebody I'd characterize as functionally illiterate. Granted, I mostly hang out in parts of the city where you wouldn't expect to see illiterate people, but even homeless people are reading the newspaper and whatnot. 43%....where are all these people?

Learning to speak Japanese before learning kanji? - raluca - 2015-07-27

I believe it is possible.
I've met ~20yr old Brazilian expats at school here in Japan. They have been living in Japan since they were children (6-7yr) and learned Japanese only by interacting with friends.
Apparently there are some Brazilian schools here, since none of them learned kanji until after graduating high school and deciding they want to.
In class they are usually the best speakers, really fluent and with indistinguishable pronunciation from natives. But when it comes to reading they have huge problems, unless it's the most basic of kanji.

So, yeah, you can become fluent.

But take into account that even these people decided that at some they really have to get down and master the writing system.