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So I was flipping through my Haruhi light novel for fun (I'm still quite a ways from being able to read this) and I noticed that it has some furigana in it, but not a ton. So I looked at some of the Kanji it had furigana for and a lot of them were of the very few kanji I actually know how to pronounce. it just seemed odd.
like there was furigana for 猫 色 面白い 奴 and a few others that I already knew. This just seemed really odd to me. I mean really my vocabulary is absolutely miserable and I'm a complete beginner to the language, and I can recognize a few of these and already know their reading. So what are the chances a Japanese person isn't going to know them? I'd estimate somewhere around 0%.
On a side note about Kanji. I've recently started going through Pokemon heart gold in Japanese, and I'm noticing that without Kanji it is quite a bit more difficult for me to recognize vocab that I'm already familiar with. Or even if I do recognize the word it still takes quite a bit longer for the word to register in my head? Would this kind of thing be normal for a beginning learner?
For example I saw the word やまおとこ But it actually took me about 10 seconds of thinking about it to realize I knew what that meant. Where as if I would have seen 山男 I would have known instantly what it means and how to pronounce it.
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奴 is not (currently) Joyo kanji, and 猫 is, but is considered pretty high level within Joyo kanji for some reason, so it would make perfect sense that both would have furigana in a book for young adults.
What was the furigana on 色 and 面白い? Perhaps they were unusual or invented readings.
Edited: 2010-06-29, 10:48 pm
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Iron Man movies had some fun furigana
戦略国土調停補強配備局 (S.H.I.E.L.D)
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Was 色 part of another word? When they do compounds, like 橙色（だいだいいろ), if they put furigana over one kanji they also put it over the other, no matter what.
But furigana usage is often pretty arbitrary, so it's very common to see "odd" usages.
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could have been an odd reading case.
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It is indeed normal, but as Tobberoth said, it's not exactly a good thing. If you recognize the kanji form but not the hiragana, then it simply means that you've memorized the word through visual cues. You've made a direct link in your mind between the image (kanji) and the meaning. While this is fine for reading comprehension alone, it indicates that you haven't learned the word on the audio level: if you hear the word as spoken syllables alone (which hiragana is) you won't comprehend it. So for speech and listening comprehension it's necessary to be able to process the language through hiragana as well, as that indicates you have learned it on the audio level rather than purely visual.
As your oral comprehension increases you'll recognize the words when written purely through phonetics. Directly you can improve the skill by reading things written primarily in hiragana (manga and books for kids)
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Definitely -- I think sometimes people almost take it as a point of pride if they can't understand all hiragana text because all-hiragana sounds like something for children or beginners. But Tobberoth and Aijin have it right.
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Or develop the phonetic recognition from audio since: you won't ever be reading all hiragana, you need to develop listening skills anyway, audio is more readily available than all hiragana texts, and you can use your reading time to develop reading fluency and an awareness of what's typical in written Japanese.
One advantage Japanese kids and spoken-first learners have is knowing many words before putting kanji to them. The approach taken by some people here seems to be weighted a bit too heavily on reading (which is simpler for self-learners.) So resources that can be used as audio-only would be helpful, imo, for both grammar, vocab and general listening skills. (structured, level appropriate stuff - not background 'immersion')
It may not be fashionable now, but audio-only sentence exercises (substitution/transformation patterns) saved me. For eg, those various conjugations of different verbs need to roll off your tongue automatically ... before the listener wanders off. It's not easy. Beginner readers tend to comprehend the verbs, but gloss over the nuances of the conjugations and have a false sense of their ability to use them.
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Material aimed children is great for learning. Bonus if you enjoy it. I enjoyed the fairytale stories (and it increased my cultural knowledge a bit.)
I guess I was referring more generally to the problem of immediately recognizing words only in kanji form - which applies more from the late beginner/intermediate level. To remedy that common problem, I think it's better to listen to the appropriate material rather than read a hiragana version of it.
Edited: 2010-06-30, 4:35 pm
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Hiragana texts take a bit longer to be understood. It is normal.
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Yeah -- I think maybe to clarify what I said, I should say that there's not a big problem if you read all hiragana text slowly, or have to go back and re-read parts. That's normal, even for native speakers. If you are literally unable to understand a sentence in hiragana without having the kanji, that's a problem.
(EDIT: And by this I don't mean any arbitrary sentence in hiragana, I mean an actual text in all hiragana from something made by Japanese people for Japanese people.)
Edited: 2010-06-30, 7:21 pm
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だれ>誰 (apparently this kanji isn't common, but it's used pretty commonly, i've heard it so many times)
I found this in the recent book I was reading called: "秘境駅へ行こう". It's fiction. Bought it online for cheap, since it was a huge sale, selling books for 4-10$.
