So I started taking my kanji studies more seriously, and as a result, I have developed a burning dislike for hiragana. Even though kanji is a pain, and perhaps convoluted, it is infinitely easier to read once you start learning it. Hiragana can burn for all i care; a full sentence of hiragana = eye-gouge

EDIT: And by easier to read, I mean quicker to comprehend. Hiragana runs together with no spaces; gives me a headache just looking at it. Kanji is much neater.

I like kana because it's easier to review them. You can just imagine the standard "akasatana hamayarawan" table in your head, and go over all of them when you are bored.

Kanji, on the other hand, are much harder to systemize. You can use spaced repetition to review them to a certain extent, but how can you list the kanji you know? Without outside materials to test yourself with, how do you even know what you know?

So basically, I think it depends on the way your brain can memorize things better..

Also, another thing: due to exposing myself to too much romaji Japanese early on, I am now struggling to unlearn romaji and think in Japanese writing when I hear Japanese, rather than thinking in romaji. I see hiragana or katakana characters I run across as a means to that end, and it's hard to hate them when I approach them in that manner.

TL;DR: If hearing Japanese does not trigger romaji in your head, count your blessings and praise the kana

Instead of reviewing the kana on anki (because it's a little overkill and slows you down), try this...

While waiting for your computer to start-up, write down both kana scripts in the correct order (vowels > ka > sa... etc.). It takes a few days to do this effortlessly and in less than 10 minutes between them. Then do it less often (weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly)...

My computer is fairly slow to boot so I always have stuff like that to do. I currently do most of this http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/numbers

I write and read loads of numbers between 0.0001 and 10^12 but always include the irregular readings, I write and read aloud the days of the week/month, random dates, write out 1 o'clock - 12 o'clock, 1 minute - 10 minutes, then random lengths of time, and eventually I'll get to using the other counters and learning their exceptions in pronunciation. It's actually a very engaging part of my day. I'd recommend this kind of ritual to anyone.

amtrack Wrote:So I started taking my kanji studies more seriously, and as a result, I have developed a burning dislike for hiragana. Even though kanji is a pain, and perhaps convoluted, it is infinitely easier to read once you start learning it. Hiragana can burn for all i care; a full sentence of hiragana = eye-gouge

EDIT: And by easier to read, I mean quicker to comprehend. Hiragana runs together with no spaces; gives me a headache just looking at it. Kanji is much neater.

The first video game I tried to play entirely in Japanese was Mother 2, because it was all in kana. "Surely this will be easier to read than looking up kanji," I foolishly thought.

...anyway, yeah, I don't like all-kana writing. But I think kana, the writing system itself, is easy enough to read, and nice to look at/draw.

Khakionion Wrote:The first video game I tried to play entirely in Japanese was Mother 2, because it was all in kana. "Surely this will be easier to read than looking up kanji," I foolishly thought.

LOL I cannot imagine how much that had to suck. I love hiragana by itself, but the minute it becomes a sentence I wish it would go the way of the dodo

I don't really get what you mean. Kana-only materials (basically, children's books, RPGs before 1994, and poetry--am I missing anything?) are kind of annoying to read, but easily avoidable. In the vast majority of materials kana is mixed with kanji, is easy to read, and requires so much less effort to learn than kanji.

Tzadeck Wrote:I don't really get what you mean. Kana-only materials (basically, children's books, RPGs before 1994, and poetry--am I missing anything?) are kind of annoying to read, but easily avoidable. In the vast majority of materials kana is mixed with kanji, is easy to read, and requires so much less effort to learn than kanji.

Well that's what I meant; I can't read kanji yet, but I'm working on that so I can thoroughly avoid kana-only of anything. Furigana would help, but pockets are strapped for furigana materials atm.

I like kana more than kanji, personally. All kana is tough at first but once you get used to it, it's not that bad.

Animosophy Wrote:Instead of reviewing the kana on anki (because it's a little overkill and slows you down), try this...

While waiting for your computer to start-up, write down both kana scripts in the correct order (vowels > ka > sa... etc.).

Yeah, I do something similar, but I just imagine how they look inside my head, stroke order and all. Even writing seems overkill.

That's why I find it hard to hate kana - it's very hard to do such a review method for Kanji because it's not organized in any particular order. Or even if you use something like a dictionary order, you run the risk of having to plow past super-obscure kanji before getting to the reasonably useful ones. Or JLPT or Jouyou order.. seems like it's arbitrary and could change in the future.

Animosophy Wrote:It takes a few days to do this effortlessly and in less than 10 minutes between them. Then do it less often (weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly)...

10 minutes? That sounds like a long time to write what is only about twice as long as the English alphabet.

Before I had all of my kana down, I either remembered it immediately or sat there for minutes agonizing over it. 10 minutes seems like an odd number.

Silty Wrote:Before I had all of my kana down, I either remembered it immediately or sat there for minutes agonizing over it. 10 minutes seems like an odd number.

The 10 minutes thing was completely arbitrary. It's actually a <5 minute job to reproduce 92 kana without thinking, but that took me 4 days (of agonising and repeating the process until I was satisfied with my handwriting).

I think that writing is definitely worth the time investment when learning languages:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...095458.htm
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...5706000649

Very interesting stuff I find that vocabulary is especially reinforced by writing their kanji and kana out.

They use kana a lot so get used to it. Just be glad it's not korean they use like no kanji which pisses me off lol for the reasons everyone mentioned Abt the wonders of kanji. But hanguel is not kana since u build sounds. I just wished they used as much kanji as the Japanese with writing

Animosophy Wrote:

Silty Wrote:Before I had all of my kana down, I either remembered it immediately or sat there for minutes agonizing over it. 10 minutes seems like an odd number.

The 10 minutes thing was completely arbitrary. It's actually a <5 minute job to reproduce 92 kana without thinking, but that took me 4 days (of agonising and repeating the process until I was satisfied with my handwriting).

I think that writing is definitely worth the time investment when learning languages:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...095458.htm
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...5706000649

Very interesting stuff I find that vocabulary is especially reinforced by writing their kanji and kana out.

Ah, true. I guess there's a difference between being able to visualize something and being able to put it on paper. Some people don't care about stroke order, but you even went a step above those who do care about stroke order.

I was thrown off by 冒とく today, but perhaps 冒涜 wouldn't have been any easier.

[Zgarbas]

Whenever I see Chinese text I praise the Japanese for inventing kana. It just looks so much better in my opinion.

All-kana texts are a bit of a pain to read, but it's not like they're that common to begin with. And the option to write all-kana when you can't remember a kanji during an exam is priceless.

Kana isn't so bad, however I was playing a game on my friend's DS that was all kana and ran into a villain that spoke only in katakana. I thought my brain was gonna explode.

[RawToast]

amtrack Wrote:So I started taking my kanji studies more seriously, and as a result, I have developed a burning dislike for hiragana. Even though kanji is a pain, and perhaps convoluted, it is infinitely easier to read once you start learning it. Hiragana can burn for all i care; a full sentence of hiragana = eye-gouge

EDIT: And by easier to read, I mean quicker to comprehend. Hiragana runs together with no spaces; gives me a headache just looking at it. Kanji is much neater.

I like Kana when mixed with Kanji, Chinese not having Kana makes it seem harder to me. Sentences of pure kana with no spaces are evil, you need to be really comfortable with grammar/particles to differentiate the words quickly.

Javizy Wrote:I was thrown off by 冒とく today, but perhaps 冒涜 wouldn't have been any easier.

I don't like seeing that kind of thing, also 覚せい剤 or ほ乳類. Luckily that seems less common recently, but it does interrupt my concentration to see that.

As someone who recently wrapped up RTK1 and has been going through vocabulary and grammar for the past few months, I wholeheartedly agree. Occasionally when I come across a comic or game I try to read and it has little/no kanji it is horrible, mostly because my grammar and vocab haven't caught up to my kanji study.

I find in this short time span after RTK I'm treating kanji more like a crutch, and I'm translating them directly to english meaning without pausing and forcing myself to remember the reading.

This is mostly on new words though, more mature ones in my vocab deck are easy to read correctly. I can definitely say though, that RTK has not been a detriment at all and makes it so easy to learn new words, if the reading takes a little while longer to catch on.

Zgarbas Wrote:Whenever I see Chinese text I praise the Japanese for inventing kana. It just looks so much better in my opinion.

All-kana texts are a bit of a pain to read, but it's not like they're that common to begin with. And the option to write all-kana when you can't remember a kanji during an exam is priceless.

Agreed, there's a sense of "where do I start??" when trying to learn how to pronounce the Chinese language. Pinyin seems like something made for foreigners. Japanese at least has its own phonetic alphabet that lets you latch your kanji onto some phonetic symbols.

Silty Wrote:Pinyin seems like something made for foreigners.

It may look like that, but it was created by native Chinese who wanted to use it as part of script reform in China. It is considered official by the Chinese government and used in limited contexts in China. It's not as foreigner friendly as some of the older systems like Wade-Giles. It may seem foreign because it's based on roman letters, but kana isn't a native script either, it's just simplified Chinese characters.

Don't Chinese kids learn pinyin before characters nowadays?

Yes. It creates a strange situation where children are able to write well at the beginning because it's pretty easy to learn the purely phonetic romanization, but then as they start learning characters they suddenly get less literate before they learn the characters they need to catch up to their speech ability.

The benefit is that they have some sort of reference for the character's pronunciaton - a roll filled by kana in Japanese.

But I do agree with you. However, couldn't that be said about Japanese as well? I mean, they do learn the phonetic alphabet (the kana sets) before they start with kanji..

Definitely. It's a little better in the case of Japanese because writing unknown words in kana, while somewhat childish, is not as jarring/unusual as pinyin in a Chinese sentence. Also Chinese has no standard way like furigana to show the pronunciation of a hard character in a normal text.

At first I thought from the title that you hate Hiragana and Katakana themselves, and I though that they aren't really that bad.

But from your post I realized you are talking about reading Japanese in Kana, which I totally agree with you about! Reading sentences in Kana makes my eyes BURN (even with spaces)!! It's so annoying to the point that I've once rewritten a small all-Kana post in Japanese by my teacher on Facebook in Kanji, and wrote "sorry, had to do it" after that LOL!

As you said Kanji is easier to comprehend, and makes the sentence much more neat!