nac_est Wrote:Very interesting, JimmySeal, thanks!

You're welcome ;-)

pm215 Wrote:I assume it also has the old pre-kana-reform spellings, but I don't propose to wade through it looking for an example :-)

Yup, here's one, right at the end or my snippet:
疑ハサル

There are also some old verb forms like these:
鞏固ナラシムル
承クル

And plenty more to muse on.

I thought the kana were formed wen women weren't allowed to learn Kanji so they developed kana. (That's what I learned)

犬はは「ヲッフヲッフ」と言いますね。：D

gyuujuice Wrote:I thought the kana were formed wen women weren't allowed to learn Kanji so they developed kana. (That's what I learned)

犬はは「ヲッフヲッフ」と言いますね。

That is only true for hiragana. Katakana was developed as abbreviations by those in monasteries.

gyuujuice Wrote:I thought the kana were formed wen women weren't allowed to learn Kanji so they developed kana. (That's what I learned)

犬はは「ヲッフヲッフ」と言いますね。：D

That's a lie! They say ワンワン!

I was just teasing with the ヲッフヲッフ！：P
ヲツアップ？：P

ヲ〜！　omg~

ヲ is useless :{

It is important to remember ヲ is pronounced オ
You are thinking of ウォ

gyuujuice Wrote:I thought the kana were formed wen women weren't allowed to learn Kanji so they developed kana. (That's what I learned)

...and the good literature from that period was written by the chicks. hmm :-)

smujohnson Wrote:

oregum Wrote:I always had a problem reading katakana, but never had any difficulties with hiragana. Also, never understood why Japanese people say that katakana is much easier.

I do agree with whoever said that myself, because the characters are more angular and distinguished. Hiragana has a lot of chars that look very similar. I don't see why people would think hiragana is any easier. [あ　お]　[ぬ,め] [れ,わ,ね] [る,　ろ]　[け　は　ほ]

oregum Wrote:Anyways, after RtK1+3 I'll see what Heisig has to say about remembering the kana

RTK uses katakana for onyomi and hiragana for the compounds. So you're going to learn it quite fast whether you like it or not!

hmm i find katakana very difficult to read.. perhaps my brain just recognises curves better than other people.. those angular lines of katakana make them all look the same to me.. however i do find them easier to write because its very difficult for me to make curved lines because of my poor fine motor control.. ive never mastered katakana.. i only have a problem with chi and sa in hiragana.. i think it just might be different for different people.. the hiragana that you listed as being simalar looking i find to look very different. i guess my brain works different.. which isnt a surprise.. i do have a couple of learning disabilitys.. my dyslexia really messes with me when i try to read katakana..

I always felt the same way about hiragana being easier... I think it's my RTK-trained mind. The hiragana have subtle variations, but because the components are different, the stories I made when I learned them are totally different. The story for あ, for example, was nothing like お so in my mind these characters are very different (even though it's been so long I can't remember the stories anymore).

Katakana, on the other hand, I learned pretty much by rote. And things like ク and タ are easily confused for me (still).

Katakana is no harder to read than hiragana. There is just much less katakana present in normal writing so you get less practice at it.

シツソン,フヌス,クケ
はほまも,のぬめ,るろゐゑ

They both have characters that look alike.

Smackle Wrote:

gyuujuice Wrote:I thought the kana were formed wen women weren't allowed to learn Kanji so they developed kana. (That's what I learned)

犬はは「ヲッフヲッフ」と言いますね。

That is only true for hiragana. Katakana was developed as abbreviations by those in monasteries.

Actually neither of those statements are true. Katakana was clerical shorthand for the kanji (which is why they resemble the source characters much more), hiragana was a cursive shorthand used by both men and women to write waka and other private text. Women were allowed to learn kanji, but it was considered unattractive for a woman to have an education in the classics. They were never banned outright, women actually a had a lot of rights in pre-shogunate Japan. Women just never used katakana since they never did clerical work.

Neither one was "developed" outright, it's just a shorthand that became more and more abstract as time went on. Everyone had their own specific way of writing (which is why old texts are so hard to read). Eventually the man'yougana associations faded away and they became simple sounds. Hentaigana never totally disappeared until much much later though with incremental reforms & standardizations in late Edo/Meiji/postWW2.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Katakana is no harder to read than hiragana. There is just much less katakana present in normal writing so you get less practice at it.

シツソン,フヌス,クケ
はほまも,のぬめ,るろゐゑ

They both have characters that look alike.

It's subjectively harder... I much prefer hiragana to katakana. I find Korean hangul similar to katakana in this way.

I've never understood the big deal about kana... I learned katakana in one day (honestly, I just went on japanese.about.com, took a pad of paper and drilled) for instance -- I don't have particularly good memory skills, I just drilled it for a while and it stuck! Originally I would occasionally forget one or the other kana (generally writing it rather than reading it), but over about two weeks of learning the language this disappeared. It boggles my mind how anyone could spend longer than, say, a few weeks mastering them.

I had hiragana and katakana down in one evening as well, did a few repetitions of each row, added the next, drilled, added next row etc. and it was super easy.

By the end of the night I could write out the entire hiragana/katakana syllabary charts from memory, then I used them while making all my flashcards and they stuck pretty quick.

How someone can think the kana? don't ask me, but if it's that hard for them they should quit Japanese since that, in my opinion, is one of the easiest aspects to master ^^

That was some nice necromancy.

I also learned hiragana & katakana both in one day, between handling customers at the konbini I worked at at the time.

I think kana is just viewed as hard by many since it's the first thing many people learn in Japanese. People that have absolutely no dedication stop at that point. Many people at that point also don't know how to study, hence the glut of horrible kana drilling software and very little that's beyond that.

Jarvik7 Wrote:That was some nice necromancy.

I also learned hiragana & katakana both in one day, between handling customers at the konbini I worked at at the time.

Hey, not as nice as the one-year necro earlier in the thread. I thought I would give my 2p.

I think anyone who has that much trouble learning the kana as was discussed earlier -- one year to read -- is not going to succeed at learning to read Japanese to any sufficient extent at all.

JimmySeal Wrote:On at least two occasions Japanese people (who know I've read entire books in Japanese) have asked me if I can read katakana. I don't know why. One of those people also expressed surprise and admiration when he found out that I can navigate my phone in Japanese.

I must say, though, that learning kana is a drag compared to learning kanji. They are sounds, not morphemes, and hiragana has all those curvy squiggly strokes, and katakana all look the same (sort of). I know 2000 kanji, but still can't manage to wrap my head around zhuyin fuhao. Phonetic systems are hard.

I don't mean to be rude, seriouslly I don't... But I am so curious, because I often see stuff like this on this forum.
"It took me a good several months to be able to read kana smoothly (there was a time when I thought I'd never be able to do it). "

REALLY? You are just saying that or really?! I mean you can just take like 2 hours at it and read a childrens book, there are many available on the internet for free. They are all in Kana, and if you wanted Katakana practice you can just convert the hiragana to katakana... I mean months? how much did you try, it is easy to get comfortable in a few days let alone a few months!? I mean I know everyone is different, but I mean come on it's kana, its phonetics, Even as a child after we first learned to read, we got pretty comfortable with out little alphabet pretty quickly or so I thought anyways.

分からない・・・・

amthomas Wrote:I don't think it's just Japanese people. I know a guy whose entire goal for his 1 year in Japan is to learn how to *read* - not write - the Hiragana and Katakana before he's finished. That's his *entire* *goal*.

I was all, "Dude, in a year you can learn like 1000 kanji, no sweat. Check out my mad skillZ thanks to this roxxorZ website." and he was all, "Not a chance. That's completely and utterly impossible. I'll be happy with just having the ability to read the two sets of kana."

I realize that not everyone is as enthusiastic about studying kanji as we zealots are here, but still... I was floored. That's like learning to *read* one kana every few days. *scoff scoff*

So, somehow foreigners and Japanese people alike are able to fall into the "Kana are hard" trap. *shrug* Who knows what they're thinking.

Anyway, now that I've confessed that I'm an egotistical maniac...

I seriouslly laughed a lot just now, thank you.

I agree I learned the Kana REALLY easily in year9(13 years old) at highschool and the rest of the class were all struggling, one guy even referred to the bit of paper with the kana with romaji underneath as his "decoder" - Meanwhile I was being a twat learning the most USELESS kanji ever for my level just cause I thought the meanings were cool like
"oh yeah it's like a party in my hands WHOOO 鷲嵐龍　oh by the way miss what does 何　mean?"