Thora Wrote:Sadly, I haven't read much fiction at all. Is that a common technique for child or animal characters? I'd be fine with snippets of dialogue, but I think entire pages or chapters would give me a headache. :-)
Pure-kana isn't all too common, but variations in the amount of kana/kanji to reflect different character points of view isn't an unusual technique in writing. When writing from the point of view of children, animals, characters who are less educated, etc. kana is used more commonly in the prose to reflect the lack of education.
pm212 Wrote:I think it's hard to say -- I find the no-spaces sentence a little harder to read, but I suspect a lot of that is simply because I've had decades of practice reading with-spaces English text. If all text was written without spaces, would we have difficulty?
Exactly, spaces are only easier in English because that's what we're accustomed to, and language learning is all about what one is used to. For me, I find it irritating to read Japanese with spaces, because all my life there have never been spaces. There's one textbook a student was working on, where all the dialogues had a space after each word, and when I would read it my mind would take a breath/pause after each word due to the spaces, and it took me a while to be able to read it as a flow like normal spaceless text.
Thora Wrote:realize this was bit tongue in cheek, but I just want to emphasize that the comparison isn't very relevant to adult 2L learners. (it sometimes gets offered in all seriousness as an equivalent situation.)
It was tongue in cheek, but in contrast to learning to speak and listening comprehension, I believe that reading skills in a foreign language aren't learned that differently from how native children learn to read/write their language.
I often see students try to launch straight into material for adults, as they want to mirror what they read in their native language, but one cannot simply start off with the most difficult material. In that case it's simply tediously-slow decoding rather than reading. Children advance their reading skills through the gradual increase in difficulty and gaining familiarization with each step along the way, something many adults neglect.
There aren't really that many great graded-reader resources for English speakers learning Japanese, and I think that children's books are a wonderful resource.
When I learn a foreign language, I personally try to mirror the reading process of children, beginning with material such as picture books, then children's text books, books for teenagers, then finally adult novels and the like. That technique has always worked wonderfully for me at least.
But if that's what you want, give it a try! I hope my suggestions were helpful. 