[Zgarbas]

So I was thinking about this these days.
When I was a kid I liked picking up whatever books were on the bookshelf and read them regardless of the fact that they were not written for my exact age (so I was 5 and reading Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, 7 and reading Harry Potter, 8 or so and reading stuff that was in the Gymnazium/High school reading list, stuff like that). Not anything genius-kid like, just going a biiit ahead of the curve. It's a bit hard to calculate the curve since stuff like Dumas or Jules Verne isn't exactly kids' books but everyone I know read them as kids.

But then I thought about how Japanese books probably look like to a Japanese kid, especially since many novels don't have furigana except for the non-joyo kanjis. Can they even read anything that's not directly aimed at their age group? Say, be 7 and picking up the Harry potter series? I imagine that adult books are out of the question from the get go. Do they have "childrens' version of X" with furigana/hiragana only? Or do they just wait till they're older and studied enough to be able to read them? The first sounds a bit like a waste of money and the latter makes me sad.

So, do you guys know anything about this?

I own a Harry Potter book with furigana.

I've wondered about this too. Reading was pretty much my favorite thing as a child, and I can't remember ever having to worry about the difficulty of a book. I can't remember the names of them, but it's been mentioned before that there are a couple of publishers that provide furiganad versions of books previously published without it, but I guess that just shows there is a problem. It does kinda make me glad I didn't grow up in Japan.

Thinking about it though, me feeling like I could read whatever I wanted as a child was probably a result of me only wanting to read children's books. A Japanese child that really enjoyed reading would probably have no problem reading books aimed at older children, so I can easily imagine them feeling they can read whatever they want to. Though I can also imagine a child that falls behind the curve losing all interest in reading.

This is a big problem with the Japanese writing system. Harry Potter has enough furigana that fairly young children can probably read it OK -- remember that for a native speaker, they don't need to have studied the kanji in school to be able to learn from it because they have a much larger spoken vocabulary than typical beginning learners do.

But this may be one reason why kids read more manga than books.

I was thinking about something like this the other day as well. I remember reading the newspaper as a kid without the slightest trouble. This is just not possible for J kids because of the writing system.

They have whole sections in book stores full of furiganized novels aimed at Japanese kids.

turvy Wrote:I was thinking about something like this the other day as well. I remember reading the newspaper as a kid without the slightest trouble. This is just not possible for J kids because of the writing system.

Most Japanese kids can "read" the newspaper perfectly fine around the 5th grade.

"Understanding" is a whole different thing though.

A lot of the books that you mention are available in heavily furigana'ed editions for children -- Iwanami Bunko does a lot of these, both foreign classics and Japanese classics (I have an edition of 坊っちゃん and 古事記物語 from them -- the latter of course isn't the real 古事記, but just an adaptation.)

I have not been in the position of being a Japanese kid, but I do think it's easy to overestimate how much you need the rarer kanji, when you've got good vocabulary knowledge plus context plus sound correspondences between kanji with the same elements to help you out. I was reading adult novels when my kanji skills were pretty bad -- like 4th-grade or 5th-grade level -- and I won't say that I understood everything but I understood enough to get by, and the limiting factor was more my vocabulary than the kanji.

Kids who read as a hobby pick up kanji and vocabulary ahead of the curve.

There's no need to "study" kanji just to be able to read them though!

To believe this would be a major problem for Japanese kids would be to believe that the only way a Japanese child can learn a new kanji compound is through formal classroom instruction and pacing.

Also people forget that most people, at least in America, can barely read at their grade level with a very large percentage reading below it. If the vast majority of native English speakers were reading college level material in the 3rd grade then maybe you would have an argument but they aren't. In fact I have a sneaking suspicion that if you compared the reading level of Japanese and American students in regards to their ability to read above their grade level that the Japanese would probably come out on top.

[Zgarbas]

The point is that there are indeed a few kids who only learn how to read when formal education teaches them how to where I'm from, but I imagine basic literacy is harder to pick up when it involves more than 36 letters in the alphabet. I'm not assuming that the only way to study kanji is in formal education, but I always imagined that the only way to study difficult, rare or whatnot kanjis was. Sure, I can picture some kids knowing 左＆右 before even signing up for school. I can't picture them knowing stuff that's more difficult tho.

The thing is, kids have a lot more tolerance for stuff like this. I spent years immersed in English environments where I didn't understand a thing - and picked up the language quickly because of this. I would grow frustrated and quit within a week if I tried this now.

A kid reading a novel with furigana in it would really have no trouble with comprehension, and would probably pick up a few kanji as he is reading. He would eventually get interested in a book without full furigana, and quickly finish that one as well: maybe not with perfect understanding (likely missing a few words due to difficult context), but sufficient enough. As long as the kid is interested in reading, he will keep doing it and won't get frustrated by the kanji, which will in turn make him much better at it.

^purely speculation on my part

kitakitsune Wrote:They have whole sections in book stores full of furiganized novels aimed at Japanese kids.

Onara Wrote:I own a Harry Potter book with furigana.

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I've tried to browse around amazon.co.jp for those furiganized novels and couldn't really find any (most likely due to the fact that my Japanese isn't really good enough for this ;P I've basically searched for 振り仮名 and there were just a couple of results). Does anyone knows where to find them? I'm not sure what Onara means with HP with furigana, maybe it's just the normal version of the book... but I'd certainly like full-furiganized adult novels (that aren't light novels), if such a thing really exist!

I think Onara was referring to the usual Harry Potter books. They have a good amount of furigana, but it's not complete coverage. Perhaps everything below about grade 5 or 6 is furigana-less.

The books in the 世にも不幸なできごと series are a slightly lower reading level and have somewhat more kanji. If you're looking for adult-level books with full furigana, you're probably out of luck, unless you use some digital version and some rikai-chan like functionality.

Fadeway Wrote:The thing is, kids have a lot more tolerance for stuff like this. I spent years immersed in English environments where I didn't understand a thing - and picked up the language quickly because of this. I would grow frustrated and quit within a week if I tried this now.

A kid reading a novel with furigana in it would really have no trouble with comprehension, and would probably pick up a few kanji as he is reading. He would eventually get interested in a book without full furigana, and quickly finish that one as well: maybe not with perfect understanding (likely missing a few words due to difficult context), but sufficient enough. As long as the kid is interested in reading, he will keep doing it and won't get frustrated by the kanji, which will in turn make him much better at it.

^purely speculation on my part

I think there is a lot of truth to this. I've been trying recently to really read through all my Japanese books, and despite the hundreds of pages of text, I feel that it is helping me think more accurately and more sophisticatedly in the language I love the most, 日本語．

As a kid I read way beyond my grade level. I just learned new words by context and assigned them a reading based on their spelling and other similar words. This mostly worked but I'd find, sometimes years later, that words were really pronounced wildly differently than what I had come up with (think like 'pseudo'). These mis-assignments never caused any real problems, and in fact made the correct pronunciation unforgettable.

I do a similar thing while reading Japanese - assign an arbitrary reading based on kana and kanji or kanji radical and move on (tadoku). If a word comes up a lot or bugs me I check it in a dictionary, and my made-up pronunciations are correct surprisingly often. When they aren't I learn some strange new onyomi or kunyomi. For less important words I usually run into them with furigana later to the same effect.

I don't have any convenient Japanese people to interrogate on the subject but I assume they follow a similar strategy?

Japanese novels aren't any harder than your average manga.

Realism Wrote:Japanese novels aren't any harder than your average manga.

Japanese novels are [varyingly] much more difficult than manga. Why would you even say this?

Realism Wrote:Japanese novels aren't any harder than your average manga.

Novels are guaranteed to use a much wider vocabulary because it's necessary to keep vocabulary fresh and descriptive. A book has to provide more information through words than manga, not to mention manga in general, from what I know uses quite simple language. Of course this depends on what you read, however.

You can't make generalizations about the type of language manga uses -- there are tens of thousands of manga series in all kinds of genres and targetted at all kinds of people. It's definitely not the case that all of them use "quite simple language". Manga of course has less text than a novel (in most cases), but the language itself can be easily as complicated as a novel, and sometimes even more depending on the series.

yudantaiteki Wrote:You can't make generalizations about the type of language manga uses -- there are tens of thousands of manga series in all kinds of genres and targetted at all kinds of people. It's definitely not the case that all of them use "quite simple language". Manga of course has less text than a novel (in most cases), but the language itself can be easily as complicated as a novel, and sometimes even more depending on the series.

Don't you fill sometimes like this guy?

Inny Jan Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:You can't make generalizations about the type of language manga uses -- there are tens of thousands of manga series in all kinds of genres and targetted at all kinds of people. It's definitely not the case that all of them use "quite simple language". Manga of course has less text than a novel (in most cases), but the language itself can be easily as complicated as a novel, and sometimes even more depending on the series.

Don't you fill sometimes like this guy?

http://coconutheadsets.com/wp-content/up...syphus.jpg

Naked?

This purely anecdotal, so don't take it too seriously, but...

You don't really need to know a whole lot of kanji to be able to guesstimate the gaps in your knowledge as long as you're a native speaker. For example, if a child know just 苦 in the word 苦労 within the phrase 「苦労は買ってでもした方がいい」 with clear context of the situation, it isn't all that hard to figure out that it probably reads くろう since they probably heard it orally elsewhere. As a bonus, since natives only really need to guess the sound, kanji is a lot more forgiving since you already know the oral words. For example, if you can read 令（れい） , you can guess the sound of a lot of others, such as 零, 冷, or 齢.

Also, children are able "read" compounds without actually totally knowing the individual kanji within it. For example I personally knew how to read 大丈夫　without knowing what either 丈 or 夫 meant or even how to write them, but when put together, it was a recognizable "shape" that I would parse as a word due to having seen it so many times in manga.

In my case, I was able to read light novels with more than 80% comprehension with less than 1000 kanji studied, and before that, I had plenty of manga to read with furigana. A 6th year elementary school student would be able to understand most novels with guessing and occasional dictionary look-ups given that they can understand the content itself. There are also books and newspapers (子供新聞) aimed at children with furigana on everything.

tl;dr, it's not really as tough as you'd think.

weirdo Wrote:In my case, I was able to read light novels with more than 80% comprehension with less than 1000 kanji studied

The Pareto principle ftw.

What would be interesting is to have Japanese kids do RTK in grades 1-5. Someone should try it out on their half-Japanese kid. They'd probably become literate years before their peers (they'd probably be considered a genius and get fast-tracked to Toudai or something). Heck, it takes them 6 years of school to get to kanji like 洗、　泣、　泉 judging by their 6th grade textbook.

TheVinster Wrote:

Inny Jan Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:You can't make generalizations about the type of language manga uses -- there are tens of thousands of manga series in all kinds of genres and targetted at all kinds of people. It's definitely not the case that all of them use "quite simple language". Manga of course has less text than a novel (in most cases), but the language itself can be easily as complicated as a novel, and sometimes even more depending on the series.

Don't you fill sometimes like this guy?

http://coconutheadsets.com/wp-content/up...syphus.jpg

Naked?

And very butch.