I've known the two kana syllabaries for DECADES, and still my kana reading is just pathetic. Let's say that if my reading of the Roman alphabet were equally bad, I'd be rightfully classified as functionally illiterate. Of course, I know all the kana, but somehow this knowledge does not translate to fluent, mistake-free reading.

It seems silly to work on learning kanji when my kana reading is so bad.

At this point I think the only way I'm going to train myself to read kana fluently is to read a lot of kana without the distraction of kanji. Are there all-kana readers out there? I'm interested in both all-hiragana and all-katakana readers. The perfect thing would be whole books written in hiragana- or katakana-only. I don't care if their contents are aimed at 4-year-olds. I'm more concerned with sheer volume than with content. My immediate goal is to get to the point of reading kana as effortlessly as I read roman characters. (I know, of course, that this will not be sufficient to read regular Japanese fluently, but it is a necessary step.)

Thanks in advance!

You're better than me - I know all the hiragana, sort of. But I know only part of the katakana alphabet. This makes it very difficult for me to recognize names and loanwords.

I ordered some children's books from amazon.co.jp, and I found that even they are dense in kanji - but with furigana, of course. They were actually easier for me to read than full kana, since the presence of kanji cues those are discrete words. I assumed that my kana reading ability will improve with exposure to normal written media, but you're right - that doesn't seem to happen, at least not quickly.

I remember though, when I was very young, like around 3 years old, that I used to read some simple story books that were entirely kana. I'm sure such books are readily available, but they're typically very short.

http://botsan.com/botsan.htm

This site has some very simple stories, all in kana.

Try the Little Prince http://rapidshare.com/files/405992047/Pe...e.rar.html

It's written almost entirely in kana with a tiny bit of simple kanji, and you can follow along with the audio, which is spoken at a pretty slow pace.

For katakana practice, Eleanor Harz Jorden's "Reading Japanese" has a lot of katakana reading drills.

I think trying to read text in all kana is going to do nothing but frustrate you. Just read some shonen manga that has furigana on all the words. That's plenty of kana practice and the kanji are there to help you with the meanings.

But surely the best way to get good at reading kana is to write with it. Just find some part of your studies into which you can incorporate writing down words or sentences with kana by hand. For the longest time, I couldn't get a handle on zhuyin, and then I started using it to write down the readings of words I was learning, and using it for the answer side of my SRS cards, and in less than a week, zhuyin and I were best pals.

If it floats your boats, there are many DS games in kana only. Pokemon for example.

I remember when I had learned the kana, but was REALLY slow. I thought, "gee, how long will it take me to ever get fluid?". Anki + sentences fixed it, and to my surprise I was reading it very quickly in no time. I used kanji sentence in the question field, and audio played with the kana in the answer. I would read and hear the kana, and re-read it a few times for each card. After doing that for a month I'd guess my kana was reading was around four times faster. And after a few months it was super fluid.

I really think you don't need to focus on kana only to get good at it. In fact I think reading like that might be really tedious. Just have the readings in your studies, and in short time it will flow. I also think hearing it as you read it does something helpful. And like JimmySeal said - write them.

I kind of think of it like how people use romaji. They know the kana, but feel it is too slow, and would rather read/learn new vocabulary more quickly. What they don't realize is that if they just used kana, they would be surprised at how easily/quickly they would get fluid with it. But they avoid it and their Japanese ends up suffering (IMOP). No point in avoiding Kanji and focusing on kana, just include it. If your learning Japanese there will be a LOT of kana over the course, and you will get it flowing. It is the least of your challenges.

I'm still shitty at Katakana - why? Because I don't see it too much (don't read Manga). I see Hiragana so damn much it naturally got trained. My fix for Katakana now is to put these type of words into my SRS. I never did that before, because I felt like I didn't need to SRS them to learn them. But putting them in now is mostly so I can get better at reading them. And it's working.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck, someday soon you will be blazing the kana like it's nothin'!

gfb345 Wrote:I'm more concerned with sheer volume than with content.e!

For decades you say :S? Anyway you should get better with familiarity. I'm sure you read any word with ～ましょう、でしょう、です at super high speeds, because you are so familiar with those shapes and constructions, even with the good old ～なければならない which used to trap me a few months ago, but now I tear through it, I just look at the front verb then skip right past the な　け　れ　ば　ブラーブラーブラー. After I learn a new kana-rised word, it becomes much easier to spot than compared to having gone through it the first time.

That's about as much as I can offer, but if you say you've studied for decades then you are way ahead of all of us here (or perhaps that was exaggerated?)

Just read manga, my reading speed trifolded with the first whole volume I ever read...

Thanks for all your suggestions!

Actually, I have two following-up questions/thoughts:

1. if such all-kana readers existed, what would be the generic name for them in Japanese? (The point is to improve my searches with Google, etc.)

2. is there software that will automatically translate normal kanji-using Japanese text into all-hiragana or all-katakana? even if it's not perfect, i imagine it would be much easier to do than the opposite (kana->kanji) conversion.


tia

Reading anything in all kana is such a nightmare. Trust me.

Just read something with kanji and furigana like already suggested. Seeing as you don't understand the kanji it won't make a difference because you can just read the furigana next to the kanji, but it will definitely help to distinguish the difference between particles, verbs, nouns etc. Without kanji it is too hard to tell where words start and end unless you are reading something with spaces (and even then there are many words that have the same reading, so you need kanji to distinguish the meaning)

Another option for some all-kana practice is through video games. You can get a NES or SNES emulator with old Japanese Final Fantasy games on it; I believe 1-5 are all in kana. Four might be your best bet, since out of those five it's the best game and has the most dialogue and story.

Note that remakes of the old games for DS, and so on, use kanji, so it only works with the originals.

Edit: Sorry, didn't see that someone else had mentioned video games.

Smart.fm has a kana option, doesn't it?
But I'd reccommend children's stories and games over that.

I still can't write the kanas from memory, and I was starting to consider myself fluent!!

RTK FTW!!!

gfb345 Wrote:1. if such all-kana readers existed, what would be the generic name for them in Japanese? (The point is to improve my searches with Google, etc.)

絵本 is picture books, these are the only kana only books I can think of. The problem is there's not really much text. If you're in Japan I'd go to the library.

But tbh I think reading a normal manga / novel you'll get enough and better practice from the furigana, unless your kanji reading ability is really good.

Does anyone know if it's useful to read words in kana that are usually written in kanji?

The reason I'm thinking it might not be is because I think we read the word as a shape rather than by the individual letters.

caivano Wrote:Does anyone know if it's useful to read words in kana that are usually written in kanji?

I think of reading kana, period, just like you and I read Roman characters. I don't think of being able to read particular words in Roman characters. Even words that I have not seen before I can read without any problem, upon first encounter, even if I have no idea of what I'm reading. I don't see why one shouldn't be able to do the same thing with kana.

gfb345 Wrote:I think of reading kana, period, just like you and I read Roman characters. I don't think of being able to read particular words in Roman characters. Even words that I have not seen before I can read without any problem, upon first encounter, even if I have no idea of what I'm reading. I don't see why one shouldn't be able to do the same thing with kana.

Becausejapanesedoesn'thavespacesinbetweenwordssoyou'llprobablyendupreadingabunchofjibberishandmissoutontheflowofthelanguage.

oregum Wrote:Becausejapanesedoesn'thavespacesinbetweenwordssoyou'llprobablyendupreadingabunchofjibberishandmissoutontheflowofthelanguage.

Wasn't A Tale of Genji entirely in hiragana? (Not that there's any chance I'd ever be able to read it in its native form.)

Yes, there is a benefit to reading kana in that you are forced to recognize words phonetically, as you would in speech and listening, rather than simply relying on memorization of the kanji form. If one does that, you're simply forming a direct correlation between the image and the meaning in your mind, and rather than comprehending it on the phonetic level you know it purely visually.
It's a very common symptom in students who have much stronger reading skills than they do listening or speaking due to being more immersed in literature than in speech. They may recognize a word perfectly if they see it, but if they hear it they won't recognize it. For students with that issue I sometimes have them work on reading texts entirely in kana to try and strengthen their abilities to phonetically recognize words they already know visually.

The best resources for that are children's books, and a lot of the time even adults find themselves truly enjoying the stories unfortunately children's books are both short and expensive, so it's not too much bang for your buck. If you enjoy manga you can get those giant monthly manga books for kids that have 500+ pages and are only a few dollars.

Also, texts written entirely in hiragana are most certainly comprehensible. Is it slower than reading kanji? Yes, but it's not really that much of a handicap. In the spoken language there is no kanji to differentiate between words that sound identical either, but it doesn't really matter: Context snuffs all the issues.

oregum Wrote:

gfb345 Wrote:I think of reading kana, period, just like you and I read Roman characters. I don't think of being able to read particular words in Roman characters. Even words that I have not seen before I can read without any problem, upon first encounter, even if I have no idea of what I'm reading. I don't see why one shouldn't be able to do the same thing with kana.

Becausejapanesedoesn'thavespacesinbetweenwordssoyou'llprobablyendupreadingabunchofjibberishandmissoutontheflowofthelanguage.

Most kana-only (or kanji-light) video games and children's books I've read have had spaces.

Aijin, I'm curious why you suggest uses hiragana to create the phonetic link instead of audio?

I mentioned this is another thread, but audio offers listening comprehension benefits at the same time and a direct linkage (unmediated by any visual input). Reading time can be spent developing the required combined phonetic and visual processing using normal Japanese. Reading hiragana will improve your hiragana reading speed, but it's a skill that will improve on its own with regular reading. And all kana reading speed itself isn't a particularly useful skill. It's not the best use of student time, imo. (At least for those intending to learn to read.)

Most kana-only stuff uses spaces, doesn't it? The OP asked about software to convert regular Japanese to all-kana (ie no spaces). This might be part of the reason people are saying it'd be difficult to read. [Difficult for anyone to read, but] especially difficult for beginners to determine out where words start and end.

If one is weak in listening comprehension then of course they'll benefit more from training that skill directly through listening exercises and media, but reading texts in kana is also an effective technique, and a variety of methods can add flavor to studying. I am not advocating that one try to read only kana for everything, but that if one is unable to read pages entirely in kana then it indicates a weakness in their language skills. Even students who have pretty good listening skills can easily stumble over kana-texts, or words written in kana if they're so overly used to the kanji form.

For students who have strong reading skills but poor listening skills, reading texts primarily in kana has a few benefits over pure listening comprehension training. A major one is material. There is a much wider array of written material than there is audio material, and it's much easier to access. Due to audio books being very unpopular in Japan, the audio material available is far more limited in scope. If the student wanted to read tales about Japanese ghost stories, for example, they could easily find books for children, whereas finding similar audio for it would be far more difficult. Comprehension is also easier for beginners/intermediate students, as one can easily look up unknown words, spend time on sentences they have trouble with, etc.

But of course it just entirely depends on the student. One of mine has very high reading comprehension, but low listening/speaking skills since he is primarily only interested in Japanese literature. Most listening exercises for students are pretty dull, being about generic topics such as school life, blah blah, and he had no interest in Japanese music, programs, movies, or any other audio media. So finding him material for younger audiences that still was about things he was interested in has really been helping his listening skills as well I've found.

It isn't true that kana is difficult for anyone to read, though. Beginners certainly have trouble figuring out where words begin and end, and don't have strong enough grammatical knowledge to process sentences well, but native speakers should have no problem whatsoever with kana. If confronted with a big block of kana people might be "blah" about it, but if they try to read it there should be no real issue in comprehension. Through childhood you learn to get by reading kana just fine

I am not familiar with any kana-heavy things with spaces. I don't play video games or anything like that, so whether or not spaces have come into practice in those or other forms of media I have no idea. I've read an obscene amount of children's books while babysitting though, and I can't recollect a single one with spaces though. The font size practically makes every character have a space anyway

gfb345 Wrote:

caivano Wrote:Does anyone know if it's useful to read words in kana that are usually written in kanji?

I think of reading kana, period, just like you and I read Roman characters. I don't think of being able to read particular words in Roman characters. Even words that I have not seen before I can read without any problem, upon first encounter, even if I have no idea of what I'm reading. I don't see why one shouldn't be able to do the same thing with kana.

Ah okay, so when I read that link, it's like my hiragana reading speed now, which is way slower than when I read English or Japanese with basic kanji.

I was thinking you wanted to get up to English reading speed with kana.

To get that speed I think what helped me was doing lots of writing exercises from textbooks. I couldn't write the kanji so most of the writing was in hiragana.