I started reading ノルウェイの森 by Haruki Murakami yesterday and I find his use of furigana (or lack thereof) quite intriguing. In the first 50 pages he has used furigana only 3 times, for the following words (furigana after the hyphen):

辺土 - リンボ
修道尼 - シスター
角 - かど

Other than that, nothing. I have counted 31 distinct non-RTK1 kanji in the first 50 pages. So my question is - does this prove the usefulness of RTK3? Allow me to note here that I have not done RTK3 yet, so what I'm asking is, do books like this prove that RTK3 would be useful? I can read about 85% of the non-RTK1 kanji in the book just by looking at 'em 'cause I've seen them so many times in other books with furigana, and I'm sure that if I looked up the readings for the rest, I would have little trouble remembering how to read them. I can't imagine a situation (besides the kanken level 2 and up) where writing these from memory would help me much in any way, and RTK1 has trained me to recognize characters so well, I have no trouble recognizing new ones, and little trouble even writing them from memory, without ever learning a keyword for them or making up a story.

What do you other people think? If you were experiencing this, would you still do RTK3?

- I was going to provide a list of all the non-RTK1 kanji I found in the book, but I seem to have lost that list in the past 3 hours. Very upsetting for me. But I remember what some of them were so if anybody is curious, I could list some of them.

i was gonna start reading some of the novels by this author in English.

i see that you are reading them in Japanese, so i want to ask: is it really hard?

my current level of Japanese is somewhere in-between JLPT Level 1 and 2. the only other books i have read in Japanese are some elementary and junior high school level novels.

do you think i could handle something like a Murakami novel?

Other people have told me that Murakami is pretty easy, but I've found the book to be a little difficult. It's a bit abstract and philosophical and of course there's the kanji thing. He seems to expect more kanji knowledge of his readers than other authors I've seen. Also, this book is about 600 pages, which can be discouraging if you can't read it at a fast enough pace. Then again, I have an experience with Japanese books in which the first 10 pages or so is a struggle and then the difficulty begins to drop off, I guess as I become accustomed to the author's writing style and word choice. I don't really notice the writing style consciously, but I notice the shift in difficulty as I get into the book, and the same thing has happened with this book.

To what kind of book are you referring when you say "junior high school level?" Can you provide an example?

I've read the following non-children's books prior to trying this one, and I'll list them in order of difficulty:
僕の世界の中心は、君だ。
世界の中心で愛をさけぶ
リング by Koji Suzuki
博士の愛した数式 by Yoko Ogawa
ローマ人の物語, book 1 by Nanami Shiono

I recommend reading one of the first two on that list as a transition between children's literature and adult literature. The language is pretty light and simple, but the authors don't pull any punches when it comes to kanji. I read the second one on that list without using a dictionary (I was between JLPT 1 and 2 at the time) and right afterward, I read リング without a dictionary.

Murakami's books can also be daunting because they are very long. As I mentioned, the one I'm reading is about 600 pages and "Kafka on the Shore" is about 800. I intentionally held off on starting this book (even though I thought it would be easy) because I wanted to make sure my reading speed and vocabulary were sufficient to read this book without taking forever. I do recommend reading some shorter adult books before trying Murakami, but that's just my opinion. Let us all know what you decide to do.
The first two

How much did you like those books? Reading a book you're not interested in can be torture, even in your native language. Could you give a little description of what they are about?

I've been reading books that I already read in English-- at the moment I am halfway through "The Green Mile", which I liked in English but doesn't seem as interesting in Japanese. I guess Stephen King books tend to be long-winded, but I can tolerate that better in English. The book is only meant for adults so there isn't much furigana.

I read through the first 5 Harry Potter books and found them all excellent, enough to keep me up past my bedtime reading (book 6 has a 3 month waiting list at my library). They have furigana on most of the kanji the first time they appear on a page. They also have loads of non-RTK kanji (many more than in Green Mile anyway). Still, I wouldn't recommend them unless you like them in English.

I liked all of those 5 books to some degree and would be happy to provide my thoughts on them.

世界の中心で愛をさけぶ
This book was made into a popular movie and a TV drama. It's a teenage love story in which the girl is diagnosed with a serious illness and dies, and the book focuses on how she and the boy fall in love, and then deal with her illness up to and after her death. About half of the chapters are told in third person narration (I think) describing their time together. These are interspersed with chapters told in the first person from the boy's perspective as he travels to Australia with her ashes to spread them near Ayer's rock.
The book was enjoyable enough, and the language was easy on the head. I found the main character to be a bit whiney, but that's all.

僕の世界の中心は、君だ。
The movie that was made from the previous book I mentioned was made into a Korean movie, and then a Japanese writer made that movie into a novel again. This is that novel. I didn't realize that when I bought this book; I just thought it would be similar to the other. At any rate, aside from the broad plot outline, this book is very different from the others and is a story in its own right. This author employs a different layout from the other as well. In this book, two chapters take place 10 years after the girl's death and the rest take place while the girl is still alive. All of the odd-numbered chapters are told in third person from the male character's perspective and the even-numbered chapters are told in third person from the female character's perspective, which I found very interesting.
In actuality, I enjoyed this book quite a bit more than the original.

リング
This is the book that they made into a blockbuster horror film, which spawned the American movie The Ring and sequels in both languages. The book follows journalist Asakawa who investigates the mysterious deaths of four students and eventually gets himself wrapped up in the phenomena surrounding them. This is less of a horror story and more of a mystery thriller than the movie is. Not incredible writing, but a fun read nonetheless.

I'll review the other two books after taking a breather.

I am very slowly making my way through a short novel by Mishima. Now, he is an utter nightmare as far as kanji usage is concerned: using rare kanji even for the most common of words. Luckily, most things are transcribed in furigana. Which brings me to the question: how much is the use of furigana a style decision by the author and how much of it is added by the editors? I cannot imagine Mishima transcribing his texts...

Being of the camp that believe that RTK 3 is a waste of time, I tend to agree with JimmySeal: the first volume gives one enough Method to be able to decypher and succesfully retain pretty much every single kanji that one comes across later. Personally, I spend a lot of time on my Chinese these days, working my way to 6,000 characters (plus an undisclosed number of simplifieds), so every new kanji I come across in Japanese texts usually gets sneered upon.

I've read four books by Murakami Haruki (in the Russian translation, actually) and have drawn a line at his fiction: there is nothing I can relate to either in his main character (that seems to be recycled from novel to novel) or in his character's philosophy. But Japanese thirty-somethings seem to love him. I now have one of his non-fiction books by my bed ('Imi ga nakereba suingu wa nai'), haven't started it yet.

I'm a much bigger fan of Murakami Ryu. I found his 'In za miso supu' very easy to read and but couldn't get through the first pages of his 'Coinlocker babies' - my vocabulary was just inadequate. Will have to revisit it at some point of time in the future...

Currently reading a book by Alex Kerr (美しき日本の残像) - one of the few Western authors that actually writes in Japanese. His language is very simple except when he gets down to describing phenomena of the Japanese traditional culture and comes up with kabuki terms and the like... When I was reading his other book ('Dogs and demons of the modern Japan') in English, I never imagined his Japanese would be so easy to read...

I'm afraid I'm not adding to the RTK 3 usefulness discussion but I am very interested in Murakami's furigana usage. Why on earth did he add furigana to 角? It's also interesting that some authors choose foreign, in this case English, words as readings for kanji compounds. This appears to be what he's done with シスター. What about リンボ, is that a name? Any ideas about where the reading came from?

wrightak Wrote:Why on earth did he add furigana to 角?

I can think of two possible reasons for this. The first is that 角, appearing by itself, has 5 possible readings. Two of these are fairly uncommon, but the other three aren't. Also, he is using the word figuratively:
それに加えて彼女のしゃべり方にはどことなく角があった。
I guess he wanted to make it clear that her manner of speaking had a "corner" to it, and not an angle, nook, or horns.

Quote:It's also interesting that some authors choose foreign, in this case English, words as readings for kanji compounds. This appears to be what he's done with シスター. What about リンボ, is that a name? Any ideas about where the reading came from?

It seems that he wants to express a few Western concepts that do not fundamentally exist in Japanese, but is using kanji to approximate their meaning. Here it seems he is using 修道尼 perhaps to distinguish シスター from a biological sister, and conversely using シスター to show that he is referring to a Christian nun, and not any other kind.
For リンボ　(limbo, i.e. purgatory), I haven't looked up 辺土 in a dictionary, but my guess would be that 辺土(へんど) has some meaning in Buddhism that's similar to the Western idea of limbo, but not quite what he's going for.

I am curious about why he doesn't use furigana anywhere else in the first 50 pages. It clearly reflects some personal philosophy of his, but without researching further, one can only guess at what that philosophy is. It could be that he thinks using furigana at this reading level is pointless: maybe he thinks that if a reader can't recognize the character without furigana, the character has no meaning to them anyway, so giving kanji with furigana gives no benefit over just writing hiragana. It could also be that he thinks furigana clutters the appearance of a clean page of text and wants to avoid it within reasonable limits. He might also think that 2000 kanji is not enough for Japanese and is only inviting readers that are willing to deal with some degree above that. I have noticed that there is a limit to what he expects of his readers. He uses the following word:
陰うつ
rather than writing it out as 陰鬱, perhaps because 鬱 is a character he doesn't think people should have to know, though it's pretty easily recognizable.

Quote:I am curious about why he doesn't use furigana anywhere else in the first 50 pages. It clearly reflects some personal philosophy of his, but without researching further, one can only guess at what that philosophy is.

Maybe the printers were running out of ink and so they skimped on furigana here and there.......

>>> To what kind of book are you referring when you say "junior high school level?" Can you provide an example? <<<


I have read "The Manzai" http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_MANZAI_...%E8%AA%AC)

which is (i believe) a higher elementary // junior high school targeted book.

Hm, well, I guess that doesn't really tell me much.

It sounds like you might still be a few months away from tackling a Murakami book (assuming they're all like this one) with ease, but there's nothing wrong with giving it a try. If it's too hard, you can always read a few other books and come back to it

true.

ill probably give it a miss for the time-being anyway. i spoke to a few of my friends about weather they have read any books by the author and if I would be able to read them. they gave me the very Japanese way of saying "You'll never be able to read that," by just tilting their head to the side, saying nothing but 「どうかなぁ・・・」. hehe.

Well I wouldn't take どうかなぁ to mean anything that pessimistic. It probably just means they have no idea.
I think putting it off for a bit is a good call, but don't let anything Japanese people say discourage you. A lot of them think that no foreigner could ever read a whole book that even Japanese people have trouble reading (gasp!). This is partly because they think their language is unique and arcane, but also comes from their own insecurity with English and other languages.

For anyone interested, I found that list of non-RTK1 kanji from the first 50 pages (I forgot it at a local restaurant and they returned it to me yesterday ).

Also, I just found the compound 陰鬱 on page 69 (no furigana) though it appeared as 陰うつ earlier in the book. The mystery deepens.

俺 2058
囁 2157
噛 2172
唄 2178
庇 2236
撞 2245
捉 2260
紐 2261
怯 2275
辿 2413
迂 2415
曖 2437
昧 2445
肘 2464
柵 2507
稜 2610
糊 2650
蝉 2692
訊 2713
蹴 2742
鞄 2785
頬 2792
歪 2862
鹸 2867
殆 2871
骸 2874
雀 2878
睨 non-RTK
拗 non-RTK
傲 non-RTK
褪 non-RTK
奢 non-RTK

JimmySeal Wrote:I have counted 31 distinct non-RTK1 kanji in the first 50 pages. So my question is - does this prove the usefulness of RTK3? Allow me to note here that I have not done RTK3 yet, so what I'm asking is, do books like this prove that RTK3 would be useful? I can read about 85% of the non-RTK1 kanji in the book just by looking at 'em 'cause I've seen them so many times in other books with furigana, and I'm sure that if I looked up the readings for the rest, I would have little trouble remembering how to read them. I can't imagine a situation (besides the kanken level 2 and up) where writing these from memory would help me much in any way, and RTK1 has trained me to recognize characters so well, I have no trouble recognizing new ones, and little trouble even writing them from memory, without ever learning a keyword for them or making up a story.

What about meaning?

JimmySeal Wrote:What do you other people think? If you were experiencing this, would you still do RTK3?

Thanks to the links you posted in another thread re: reading without a dictionary, I am experiencing this. I think it does prove the usefulness of RTK3. However I just can't face going through RTK3 from start to finish right now. I hope to get down to business in a couple of months.

What I find a bit frustrating is seeing kanji (from the book I'm currently reading) like 俯 or 頷 and thinking, as they are made up of RTK1 primatives, I should know them. These two aren't in RTK3 either...there are however kanji appearing that are in RTK3 so to have them down would obviously be handy.

synewave Wrote:What about meaning?

Learning without a dictionary, "meaning" becomes a bit of a hazy subject and a lot harder to pin down, but I would say that seeing a familiar non-RTK kanji does tend to trigger a sense of what the word means, and once I recall how it's read, that helps me to recall even further, and being able to test my memory immediately by seeing if my memory of the word fits in with the context is a satisfying feeling.
I think you may have misunderstood where I'm coming from (or maybe not). I've never touched RTK3, and still I have little trouble recognizing non-RTK1 kanji nowadays. Since my new learning philosophy involves trying to keep English out of my Japanese studies as much as possible, I am curious about whether RTK3 might do more harm than good.


The following isn't about remembering kanji, but I'll give a little anecdote about something I experienced in this book. There is a passage like this:
昼食が済むとキズキは僕に午後の授業はすっぽかして玉でも撞きにいかないかと言った。僕もとくに午後の授業に興味があるわけではなかったので学校を出てぶらぶらと坂を下って港の方まで行き、ビリヤード屋に入って四ゲームほど玉を撞いた。

The first time I read through the first sentence, I was a bit lost. I had never seen the kanji 撞 before, and いかない could potentially have a wide variety of meanings (like when it appears in expressions like わけにはいかない). But when I read up to the part where it said they went to a billiard, it all clicked. I could tell that Kizuki was inviting "boku" to go do something, and what else would you do at a billiard but play pool? Of course I knew what 玉 means in a general sense so I quickly surmised that 玉を撞く means "to shoot pool," without even knowing how to pronounce 撞く or having ever seen the character before. So for the time being, I only know the word in the context of pool, but if I ever see it in another context, that will broaden my understanding of the word, and the knowledge I already have will help me to piece together the new sense of it.

Quote:Thanks to the links you posted in another thread re: reading without a dictionary, I am experiencing this.

That article has helped me immeasurably, and I owe brose a debt of gratitude for posting the follow up article. That one taught me that it's possible to read not just using a dictionary sparingly, but rather, without using a dictionary at all, and I am using the technique to learn other languages from the very beginning, and I think it's working.

Quote:What I find a bit frustrating is seeing kanji andd thinking, as they are made up of RTK1 primatives, I should know them.

I know how you feel. I've had the same feeling with characters like 庄, 庇, 捉, 怯 and 拗.

JimmySeal Wrote:I have little trouble recognizing non-RTK1 kanji nowadays.

Not sure I understand what you mean. Is it simply you have little trouble recognizing a kanji isn't in RTK1? Or that you have learned a fair few non-RTK1 kanji through context hence are not sure if RTK3 would be worth your while? Or something else?

When I was talking about meaning before I could have been clearer. I wasn't referring to having a Heisig keyword per se. More, did your text have too much un-recognizable kanji to be understandable? If not, then it's really a personal decision as to whether to attack RTK3 or not.

The stuff I'm reading just now does have non-RTK1 kanji, but not too much to make it impossible. If a kanji keeps coming up, I'll have a look to see if it's in RTK3 and if so, add it to my reviews. Mostly though, through context I'm just getting a feel of kanji I haven't formally studied yet, and I like it.

At the same time, Heisig's system does short cut a lot of the time it takes to guess stuff through context. So that's why I hope to go through RTK3. Whether or not I use Heisig's keywords is another matter...

JimmySeal Wrote:That one taught me that it's possible to read not just using a dictionary sparingly, but rather, without using a dictionary at all, and I am using the technique to learn other languages from the very beginning, and I think it's working.

Maybe we need a separate thread for this... But how is a dictionary now becoming an enemy rather than a friend?!

I'm all for learning from the context but there are limits to how much precision context can supply. The Japanese and Chinese languages present their own unique difficulties with regards to readings of characters (which for most part cannot be resolved without a dictionary) but even if we forget about these for a moment... how can one correctly guess a plant sort, for example?! Let's say one is reading the phrase 'a [tree sort] table'. You can get the idea that it's a tree sort (which is even easier in Chinese and Japanese) but how can you guess whether it's an 'oak' or a 'teak' table, for example? The only way would be to look up the word in Google Images or to look for a picture in Wikipedia but that can hardly be quicker and more efficient than using a dictionary. The above is only an example, there must be plenty of word categories like this one.

I have scanned through the articles in the links from the neighbouring topic and they go on about differences in word usage and English vs. French way of expressing things. This is all very true and even more valid for languages like Japanese. But a good dictionary - especially, a monolingual dictionary - provides a plethora of examples and additional contexts that actually help one to understand the word much better. If one makes no assumptions about how the word is used - beyond what has transpired from these contexts - how does a dictionary become a enemy?

I'm well aware of dangers and redundancy of translation: words like 'yappari' have no direct equivalent that reflect all its connotations in European languages. But even for this type of words, getting a general flavour of its meaning from a bilingual or a monolingual dictionary can be a great help.

To summarise, I believe there is plenty of valid points in this argument but if one follows this tactics too rigorously, there is danger to throw away the baby with the bath water...

Out of interest - which other languages are you now learning without a dictionary?

synewave Wrote:Not sure I understand what you mean. Is it simply you have little trouble recognizing a kanji isn't in RTK1? Or that you have learned a fair few non-RTK1 kanji through context hence are not sure if RTK3 would be worth your while? Or something else?

Hm, sort of the second one, but a little different. This isn't really about their meanings or picking things up from context, and I surely don't know so many that RTK3 would have nothing to teach me.
For me, the main value of Heisig's book was not that I now know one meaning for each kanji, but rather that I was able to give each character a spot in my brain. The characters are so numerous and so complex that telling them all apart is really hard without an organized system. Without Heisig, there are so many "Now what was that one again?" moments. But now that I know the first 2042, my brain is trained to deal with kanji. When I see an unfamiliar one, it's not a random jumble of strokes, but a friendly combination of two or three primitives, so even if I see one that I haven't formally learned or ever looked up in a dictionary, I just see it and go "Oh, that one's にらむ" as long as I've seen it with furigana a few times. And at that point when I can bridge the gap between the kanji and the sound, I can go about figuring out what that sound means (from the context) whenever I see that word.
So I guess that what I'm saying is that it has become quite easy to remember how to pronounce kanji after I've seen it with furigana, and as long as I can pronounce it, I can eventually figure out what it means. So while going through RTK3 would speed up the process a bit and add more order to everything, it would add artificiality to the learning process by (1) placing English meanings onto more characters and (2) by assigning definitions to characters when I could be making more intimate connections with them by discovering their meanings on my own.
I should note here that I haven't made this thread to ask for advice, but made it because I think this is an interesting dilemma and wanted to share it with everyone else.

Quote:More, did your text have too much un-recognizable kanji to be understandable? If not, then it's really a personal decision as to whether to attack RTK3 or not.

The non-RTK1 kanji are pretty sparse, and of those that are non-RTK1 characters, I can remember how to pronounce most of them just from having seen them so many times with furigana elsewhere. The question I was asking myself was whether I'd really know the characters much better if I did RTK3, 'cause it feels like I'm doing fine without it.

I think your question does need to be split into a separate thread, Serge, so I've created one:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=4917#pid4917