Kanji, 2,045. After learning these you can read a newspaper. After that, there`s another 4,000 until you "know" enough to pass the highest level test the country has to offer. Some have over 50 strokes and as many as 12 compounds.

Hiragan, 52. Katakana, 52. Some hiragana and katakana of the same sound also look the same. No letter is more than 4 strokes.

They don`t even compare.

Yet when I'm at work or a social situation, Japanese poeple that I know seem to always think that kana is very difficult for a foreigner to know. I've studied Japanese for almost 5 years, I minored in it in college. I speak Japanese fairly well conversationally, and I've gotten to the point where I can read and write about 550 kanji (largely thanks to Heisig's book and this site).

I'm always told how impressive it is that I speak Japanese "well" (I know this is just flattery, as I have many weaknesses and a limited vocabulary), and that my knowledge of Kanji is surprisingly broad. Yet, whenever they write something in hiragana or katakana, they assume I can't read it. Not at all. They're always saying things like "oh, you can`t read katakana, can you?", or "This is in hiragana, I`ll write it in English underneath", or even the very patronising speech in which they explain what hiragana and katakana are to me.

If there is a foreigner in America, speaking English to me, who I know has lived in the country several months, I'm going to assume that they know the alphabet. at the very least I'm going to assume that they know what the alphabet is.

I learned the kana for the first time about 5 years ago. I knew that I would be taking Japanese in college, so, like I did when I studied Ancient Greek, I knew I would have to learn the alphabet first. It took me one weekend with some flahscards to learn first hiragana and then katakana. It was no harder than cramming for a quiz or test in any language. There were only about 100 pieces of new information. From reading these forums I know that if one is determined, they can learn 20-60 new kanji every day, which are far more complex in stroke number and order, meaning, and reading than any of the kana. So on a daily basis one is learning more than the equivalent of the kana.

And on a daily basis, someone implies that I'm practically illiterate.

Has anyone else encountered this attitude towards the kana?

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). 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). I know 2000 kanji, but still can't manage to wrap my head around zhuyin fuhao. Phonetic systems are hard.

For me, kana are hard in the sense that I can read kanji infinitely faster than I can kana: as far as Pokemon and Doraemon are concerned, I'm both illiterate and prone to headaches.

But, dang, really? I would expect sentiments to be the opposite: people not expecting you to know kanji, but to have the kana down pat. I believe Heisig's other book quotes six hours as a viable period to learn the kana in, although I certainly wouldn't advocate that.

That's true. Congratulations on knowing 2,000 kanji, maybe someday, if you study really hard, you'll learn Katakana!

I just think that anyone learning Japanese should see the kana as their base of learning, and that Japanese people should realize this too, just as the alphabet is their begining when studying English.

Also, good job learning that phone.

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...

Actually I get the opposite from most of the teachers (that I speak with anyway), I've had more than one teacher say to me "You can read Kanji, can't you?"... Although this may be due to the fact that I do most of my RTK reviewing at school in my free periods, and then leave my notebook on my desk when I go to class...

On the other hand, a teacher at different school, one that I only do 2 lessons a week at, asked me if I could read hiragana... She just didn't know, and it's like amthomas points out, there are plenty of Gaijin who don't really study all that much.

At one of my school's last year I got messages from each kid bound up by class. The usual thank you for teaching us etc etc.

The kids had obviously been told that I couldn't 'read' kanji, so tended to just stick to kana, which was fine. Apart from one class, where the teacher obviously wasn't sure if I could read Hiragana, but as I could speak English decided I must know the Katakana. So, his entire class wrote in katakana only. It makes it really difficult to read :|

My Kocho sensei, whose desk I sat opposite for a year while he watched me studying kanji in any free time I had, feeling free to comment frequently on my studies, presented me with a beautiful framed piece of calligraphy as a leaving present. He'd specifically chosen one which was entirely hiragana, explaining to me (in Japanese), that he'd done so because he knew how hard kanji was for foreigners to learn, and wanted something that would be easy for me to understand. I think he was genuinely pleased that he'd managed to be so considerate of a foreigner's needs.

It's true that it's also some foreigners who may contribute to this attitude that I've observed about kana in some Japanese people. I have a friend who's been living in Japan for 8 months in a small town where almost no one speaks English. It would seem to be an almost ideal immersive environment. She's even told me that she's been taking regular "Japanese classes" from one of her JTE's at least every week. And yet, not only can she not read a single letter of katakana, hiragana, or kanji, but she doesn't even know the difference between the three, or what they're called.

Perhaps all of the discrimination I've received from my colleagues so far has been due to attitudes of people like this.

Incidentally, she has politely declined my help in teacing her the kana, and is not convinced of their usefulness in learning Japanese. Also, learning Japanese is one of the main reasons she has chosen to live here. I just can't fathom this.

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esgrove Wrote:From reading these forums I know that if one is determined, they can learn 20-60 new kanji every day, which are far more complex in stroke number and order, meaning, and reading than any of the kana.

Keep in mind that the complexity of the character is not directly proportional to how difficult it is to learn, as you have probably already found out in Heisig's method.

That's why the kana (hiragana, katakana) can be just as hard or even harder because they are even more abstract than the kanji. Hence Heisig's "Remembering the Kana".

Learning katakana isn't that hard, but reading katakana can be hard because the words are so long. Something complicated like 大和証券総合研究所 isn't too hard to read, but if you write ダイワショウケンソウゴウケンキュウジョ it just becomes a huge mess. 　I also find it very difficult to remember how to "spell" katakana words. For example, how would you write "Sweden" in katakana? 　スウェーデン seems to be right, but how are you going to remember that it's not スエデン　or スウエデン　or スウェデーン? Learning the katakana for a foreigner with a long name is also a nightmare. I think the Japanese struggle with this as well, which may be why they think reading katakana is hard for foreigners.　

For me, at the beginning, Katakana seemed easy because most of the words came from English, and I didn't have any grounding in the Japanese Language. I think that once you attain a certain level of proficiency with Japanese, that Kana become difficult as you have to slow down and try and figure out what is meant, as opposed to Kanji where generally you either know it, or you don't.

Perhaps in the next stage Kana are easy again.

When it comes to when your learning Kana, Katakana can be difficult because of the close similarities. For instance, [kana]SO[/kana] and [kana]N[/kana], [kana]SHI[/kana] and [kana]TSU[/kana] (I'm not sure why tsu in katakana isn't working on this forum). Hiragana was easy for me, because the symbols are not so alike, so it's easier to learn. When it comes to actually reading the Kana, it takes a moment of staring to compute what they're saying; 'ummm... o... ha... yo... okay, now I get it! ohayo!' Also, I agree with brose when he says:

brose Wrote:I also find it very difficult to remember how to "spell" katakana words. For example, how would you write "Sweden" in katakana? 　スウェーデン seems to be right, but how are you going to remember that it's not スエデン　or スウエデン　or スウェデーン? Learning the katakana for a foreigner with a long name is also a nightmare. I think the Japanese struggle with this as well, which may be why they think reading katakana is hard for foreigners.　

Also, when you don't know how the word is spelled in roman letters, it's hard to know how you write in Kana. For instance, in order to say 'Morning', it's ohayo, right? So you write it as [kana]ohayo[/kana]. But, someone might mistake it for oheyo, it would be [kana]oheyo[/kana], which is incorrect. So, all in all, with kana's twists and turns such as combined kana ([kana]nyo[/kana]), kana can be a very difficult thing to learn.

ツ　ツ　testing...testing...

charliechip95 Wrote:Also, when you don't know how the word is spelled in roman letters, it's hard to know how you write in Kana.

That's a transcription error that has virtually nothing to do with the difficulty of the kana (really, the only alternative would be for spellings that are not phonetic and as English speakers know, that works real well). However, I wholly agree with the [kana]SHI, SO, N, TSU[/kana] remark: those things are insipid.

Oh, lookie, I, too, am unable to post a [kana]tsu[/kana] in katakana using the kana code. ツツツツ. Works just fine if I copy and paste though.

charliechip95, you look new: welcome to Reviewing the Kanji. Here's hoping you enjoy your stay.

Even Japanese people struggle with Katakana spellings, especially when it comes to English loan words. It all depends on who is saying the word that they're trying to transcribe. There's a huge variety of accents when it comes to English speakers.
Take 'tomato'. In Japanese it becomes トマト which is using the English pronunciation. If the word had come from America it would be トメト.
That's a simple example because both versions fit quite nicely into Japanese, but when you get to all the sounds that aren't in Japanese it becomes a veritable minefield...

Now that you mention it, English loanwords generally have a British flair to them. I never thought of that, and it makes perfect sense.

i disagree fully that loan words are given a British flair. I am from the UK and have noticed a few things about カタカナ words in Japan.

There are many differences between American and British pronunciation, but a few that I can think of now are:
* As a brit, "u"'s in my words are much more pronounced.
words like サブ in japanese. in English: sub. my pronunciation, "スブ"
* again, on the *u constructions (su, bu, etc.) this is usually translated into サ、バ equivalents which I do not think is close to the British pronunciation.
* If you see a Japanese person doing an impression of a foreigner speaking (or trying to) Japanese, they will often put an accent on the second syllable and an intonation in tone. I believe that this is a much closer to the American way of speaking.

if you also consider that the Japanese are learning "American English" in schools, why then would they adopt an British pronunciation?

Having said all that though, the amount of accents in Britain means that I can only really speak on a personal level. Londoners (which I am not) have a much different accent from me which may fit the katakana equivalents much closer.

The English they teach in schools and how they do imitations of foreigners are both completely unrelated to the design of their loanwords, many of which entered the language over 100 years ago. British English speakers were in Japan for a long time before any Americans came.

Do you really pronounce "sub" like /soob/? That's the first time I've ever heard of something like that.

The most marked similarity between Br. English and katakana loanwords is that a lot of /r/s are pronounced as /a/s, which you fellers seem to do an awful lot. Of course it could be that case that they just think アー is closer to an actual /r/ sound than ル is.

I wasn't suggesting that all loan words were of British descent. If they were it would be easier. I was saying that they come from many English speaking countries, hence the confusion.

Also, while kids today maybe learning American English in school, there was a time when it was British English. One of the older female teachers at my school last year was confused in a game when we were using the word 'Fall' as a season [The kids already knew the word so I wasn't going to try and make them learn what I say!]. She came up to me after the lesson to ask if Fall was Autumn. I confirmed and she explained that she learnt Autumn when she was at school so didn't know Fall...

well, not exactly "soob", but its definitely not "sab" which in my opinion is much more American sounding that British. maybe this is a specific case though.

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JimmySeal Wrote:ツ　ツ　testing...testing...

I think he means when using the custom BBCode tags that I added in the forum : [ kana ] and [ / kana ] , looks like [ kana ] TSU [ / kana ] doesn't work.

[kana]TSU[/kana] <- when that shows ツ instead of "Tス" it will be fixed

Thanks charliechip.

megaqwerty Wrote:Oh, lookie, I, too, am unable to post a つ in katakana using the kana code. ツツツツ. Works just fine if I copy and paste though.

I'll have a look at it.

ファブリス Wrote:I think he means when using the custom BBCode tags that I added in the forum : [ kana ] and [ / kana ] , looks like [ kana ] TSU [ / kana ] doesn't work.

I'll have a look at it.

While you're at it, I noticed the other day in someone else's post that ji became [kana]ji[/kana] (dji/di), not じ, as I would expect.

yorkii Wrote:well, not exactly "soob", but its definitely not "sab" which in my opinion is much more American sounding that British. maybe this is a specific case though.

In my opinion, schwa (ə) sounds a lot more like あ than it sounds like う, so a katakanization of a word containing a schwa (up - アップ, under - アンダー) could have just as easily come from either variety of English.

Megaqwerty Wrote:charliechip95, you look new: welcome to Reviewing the Kanji. Here's hoping you enjoy your stay.

[kana]domo arigato gozaimasu ![/kana] (Thank you very much!) I bought the book online and it should come around the beginning of July. I've been using a small preview of the beginning of the book I found, so I've been using that to study (until I've gotten the book in the mail, of course).

ファブリス Wrote:I think he means when using the custom BBCode tags that I added in the forum : [ kana ] and [ / kana ] , looks like [ kana ] TSU [ / kana ] doesn't work.

Tス <- when that shows ツ instead of "Tス" it will be fixed

Thanks charliechip.

Your welcome, glad to help.