Stansfield123 Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:Since the only reasons why people suggest getting rid of Kanji is to simplify and "integrate better" with the world by helping communication, I don't see how that suggestion is significantly different from just throwing away the language. The only difference is in the degree of the change.

I believe that's known as a "straw man argument". Because they're not willing to abandon language all together and communicate by banging two sticks together, they shouldn't change it at all?

Well that's a straw man argument. You're misrepresenting my argument and then attacking your version of it. I didn't say anything about banging sticks together.

The strawman against the strawman was intended as a joke... maybe i should have added a .

I do, however, still disagree with you. Changing the writing system of a language (especially a relatively minor reform like getting rid of kanji in place of hiragana) is a totally different level to changing the language all together. The former has no effect on the spoken language. Seriously, when has language reform *ever* been able to stop people speaking their own language in their own home? Writing system reform is far more common and successful. Unless you're proposing they speak Japanese and write in English? I guess there are historical cases of that like Latin and Classical Chinese.

nest0r Wrote:It's not really a straw man argument. Essentially that's what people promoting the abolishment of kanji are doing. Going for an unworkable, illogical, and inferior top-down extreme based on principles derived from delusions of alphabetical/phonocentric Western linguistic superiority that follows the logic, as ironically paraphrased by Jun Yamada decades ago: “If pigs had feathers, and wings, and claws, and walked on 2 feet, etc., then there would be no difference between pigs and chickens.”

I agree, it's a matter of degree. But just because 10 is bigger than 2 doesn't mean it's similar to 1000. Just because getting rid of kanji is a near-impossible task (and of questionable merit), doesn't mean it's in the same league as converting to english.

I should add that i'm *not* in favour of abolishing kanji... I'm just picking fights.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Are you saying the only reason why Japan shouldn't just switch to English is because it would be difficult? That other than that, it would be a perfectly good idea? Because if that were true, then my analogy, while still not weak, would definitely be pointless. Its sole purpose was to offer a more obviously horrible extreme to the 'switching to romaji' suggestion.

In theory, the fewer languages there are in the world, the easier global communication becomes. It's all about whether the potential effort and cost of the switch is worth the benefit. I personally believe the long-term benefit of a switch to romaji would be worth the short-term problems it would cause, but I don't believe the same is true of a switch to English (which I still think is basically impossible on a practical level).

zigmonty:

Quote:The former has no effect on the spoken language.

There would probably be some effect. I think it's likely that a switch to romanization would reduce the frequency of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, although the reduction would be more severe in the case of written material than the spoken language. It would be interesting to know if Korea or Vietnam have seen a decrease in Chinese-derived vocabulary.

Although it might not have much of an effect -- it's hard to judge. I don't know whether previous writing reforms had much effect on the spoken language. There were also a lot of reforms in writing style, not just orthography, with the (essentially) complete abandonment of kanbun, soro-bun, and such. But when you have writing that doesn't match the way people speak, using a more vernacular style probably doesn't affect the spoken language much.

nadiatims Wrote:I don't think the same can be said of Japanese kids reading texts that aren't heavy in furigana, and that means a japanese kid (or beginner) is limited in their reading material or needs to use a dictionary. And Japanese kids spend a lot more time on Kanji at school and Juku than the average English speaker spends getting literate in English. I was done learning how to write and spell by the end of primary (elemantary) school. If you've ever looked in a Japanese Junior high school library, everything is full of furigana or uses limited kanji. I wonder if the average 12 y.o japanese kid could read japanese wikipedia as well as the average english kid can read the english version assuming the same quality of education.

I can back this up with personal evidence. When I was in Japan I was at a (prestigious private) high school, and there was one class where they had to go up and make a presentation on some kind of article from a newspaper.

They bumbled, were silent, and were sweating their way through their presentations. I asked my host brother why after class because it was just so uncomfortable watching them stand there cluelessly, and he told me it was because they were unable to read some of the Kanjis and couldn't understand it all themselves, so they were scared the teacher would ask them a question that they didn't know how to answer because they weren't able to read that portion of the article.

I disagree with Nestor on that Kanji are more efficient in terms of learning than English. Like nadia said, perhaps scientifically it is 'faster' to learn kanji rather than alphabet and specific words, but in my honest opinion it's a lot easier to learn alphabet (as a child/elementary school) and then words later (throughout your life) rather than combining it into one thing. Like nadia said, the kids are still learning Kanjis until they are graduating high school and may or may not have a complete mastery of it when they graduate.

so maybe if you had some way to compare the time it takes to memorize one kanji compound and the time it takes to learn a word (And it's alphabet) then yes kanji are faster because of the pictographic type of word they are, but alphabet streamlines the process of learning new words really well in combination with listening because you are able to quickly make the connection to words you have heard to words you are reading through sounding out/basic logic.

PS: I'm not saying Kanji should be removed or anything. I think Kanji are interesting and different and are a big part of Japanese. But that doesn't mean that they are better... or worse...

The writing system, spoken and written language modalities, and sociolinguistic elements cannot be easily disentangled. It's not simply an ideological or mechanistic issue to be cutely elided in a kind of counter-prevarication, it's about the ways certain advocates see language, which are flawed and misguided, that are unveiled through talk of orthographic reform. I think they're the product of outdated science and ethnocentric biases, and that allowing them to proceed in this fashion of dismissing kanji's value, then dismissing kanji, then adding spaces, and the alphabet, etc.—that's just allowing the inferior presuppositions which are unacceptable to flourish into degenerate scenarios, hypothetical or otherwise, that could've been avoided. Time wasted that could've been spent talking about how to augment and improve kanji usage and Japanese language pedagogy using the latest tools and scientific research.

As for the rest, feels like we're broken records again, and I find repeating myself as tiresome as it is to read the same arguments being made to me, so. This is the last comment I'll ever make on the subject. ^_^

Edit: Just to repeat, you encounter more new words in reading than speaking as you become literate, so seeing a sequence of letters and roughly approximating their pronunciation isn't going to tell you anything for such a majority of words you haven't learned in spoken language. Thus you want to maximize the visual-semantic potential of the text through icons in addition to letters/kana (the latter for those initial rudimentary words you learn when you first start), as you learn new words over time, so that when you encounter new words in text you're able to use past textual familiarity and the mnemonic opportunities available through the complementary complexity of kanji to memorize these new words, while at the same time having the kana bridge back to speech. With that in mind, improving kanji learning both in updating pedagogy and streamlining the orthography itself will help Japanese meet the ideal, while optimizing the various types of literacy that exist beyond strict sound-letter mappings whether they're taken advantage of or not.

If one of us took over the gov't and made Heisig and SRS mandatory for say 3rd-4th graders in Japan Kanji in newspapers would be a non issue for highschoolers.

I support change in teaching methods.

SRS mandatory? Sorry, I refuse to join the hive mind.

Just because we enjoy learning Japanese doesn't mean everyone does.

I despise english class... especially the homework. If they made me SRS vocab words every time I got new ones since 3rd grade, I would quit school.

zachandhobbes Wrote:SRS mandatory? Sorry, I refuse to join the hive mind.

Just because we enjoy learning Japanese doesn't mean everyone does.

I despise english class... especially the homework. If they made me SRS vocab words every time I got new ones since 3rd grade, I would quit school.

As you said you despise English classes, and so do I. The same can probably be said for a lot of Japanese kids going to school and learning all the Kanjis. So if there was a way to expedite the process then it may not be a bad idea.

However, I don't know what that way would be. All I know is that talking about the education system in Japan, and how long it takes them to get a solid grasp on the Kanji makes me wonder about China. Maybe it's easier in a way, because each Kanji is only pronounced one way(I think... I don't know much about Chinese) but still they have a much larger amount of characters to learn. And no alternative way to read without said characters like the Japanese have with Kana/Furigana.

I kinda feel like there has to be a way to improve the Kanji learning process for the average Japanese person, but I'm completely clueless as to what it would be.

arch9443 Wrote:However, I don't know what that way would be. All I know is that talking about the education system in Japan, and how long it takes them to get a solid grasp on the Kanji makes me wonder about China. Maybe it's easier in a way, because each Kanji is only pronounced one way(I think... I don't know much about Chinese) but still they have a much larger amount of characters to learn. And no way to alternative to read without said characters like the Japanese have with Kana/Furigana.

Typically, Chinese people and Chinese learners have a much easier time with the characters because:
-Most characters have only one pronunciation, and very rarely more than two
-Shared phonetic elements greatly ease the learning process
-Chinese words don't have anything like rendaku (though they do have tone sandhi [which is completely uniform] and tone neutralization [which is irregular, but often predictable])

IMHO, Japan took a pretty good system and made a hopeless clusterf*%# out of it, and I feel sorry for anyone learning kanji who doesn't enjoy it. Then again, I can't say I know how they could have done any better either.

In terms of pedagogy, SRS is a must to incorporate as early as possible to make learning more efficient and fun, and less rote and wastefully redundant. Get the “desirable difficulty” and “flow” happening. It would need to be a more streamlined, almost gamified system though, I think. Something closer to smart.fm or RevTK than Anki for the early years. It wouldn't even need to be a tool, necessarily, but the way materials are designed and new information is introduced.

At the same time, more appreciation of the bottom-up imaginative techniques not only because it's superior for learning kanji but because it will teach bootstrapping techniques for the encountering of new kanji; there's aso corpus-based as well as systematized structuring of which and what kinds of materials to provide. As for literacy development outside the classroom, I believe Reading Japan Cool has some interesting ideas for analysing how children do this and improving it. There's a lot of stuff in applied linguistics at the moment that are focusing on the production and reception of text in a variety of contexts across multiple texts (where text encompass spoken and written modalities as well as images). Cohesive ties, normative forces, etc.

We're not talking about adults, so while children can learn kanji easier and more quickly and in larger numbers as methods and materials evolve, I don't think they need to memorize a bunch of kanji up front the way most of we RevTKers do as adults in our assembly line appoach. The aim is to get the kana and a pool of kanji internalized and then progressively add clusters of kanji as well as ad hoc characters as one's reading level increases, as new words are encountered in text. With kanji, since the bulk of new words will be textual and unfamiliar in speech, an emphasis on spelling/pronunciation is misguided, these aren't as important as recognizing visual forms in a meaningful way for reading comprehension/exposure. Focusing on recognizing partially familiar radicals/kanji-icons and relating them to meanings rather than memorizing sequences of letters and relating them to incorrect/unfamiliar sounds and then meanings.

Readings are supplementary to this, so streamlining these to make the orthography shallower or whathave you would not be as prioritized as taking advantage of the lexical density and greater nominal focus of written language and using what we know of iconicity to quickly internalize the logograms and invest them with meaning. More focus on how kanji is processed by the eye and brain as icons, finding the sweet spot between the minimal combinability of strokes to maximize iconicity and distinguishability, the optimum spatial layout of characters, etc. Understanding the benefits of multimedia learning and the importance of more surgical rather than rote incorporation of muscle memory would also help tighten methods and keep things cohesive across modalities and contexts.

Then there's all the other ideas related to grammar, i+N, descriptive, functional...

arch9443 Wrote:

zachandhobbes Wrote:SRS mandatory? Sorry, I refuse to join the hive mind.

Just because we enjoy learning Japanese doesn't mean everyone does.

I despise english class... especially the homework. If they made me SRS vocab words every time I got new ones since 3rd grade, I would quit school.

As you said you despise English classes, and so do I. The same can probably be said for a lot of Japanese kids going to school and learning all the Kanjis. So if there was a way to expedite the process then it may not be a bad idea.

However, I don't know what that way would be. All I know is that talking about the education system in Japan, and how long it takes them to get a solid grasp on the Kanji makes me wonder about China. Maybe it's easier in a way, because each Kanji is only pronounced one way(I think... I don't know much about Chinese) but still they have a much larger amount of characters to learn. And no alternative way to read without said characters like the Japanese have with Kana/Furigana.

I kinda feel like there has to be a way to improve the Kanji learning process for the average Japanese person, but I'm completely clueless as to what it would be.

I don't hate them because they're hard, I hate them because they are boring.

I study my vocab for quizzes about 10 minutes before - I've never not gotten an A in english or anything. If they forced me to do vocab review every day to 'check my progress' with SRS I would be upset about it.

zachandhobbes Wrote:I don't hate them because they're hard, I hate them because they are boring.

I study my vocab for quizzes about 10 minutes before - I've never not gotten an A in English or anything. If they forced me to do vocab review every day to 'check my progress' with SRS I would be upset about it.

I'm not saying that an SRS is necessarily the proper way to go about it. I was just thinking that there may be a way to go about improving the Kanji learning process for Japanese kids.

Although I don't think English classes for us is really comparable to the Kanji learning process the Japanese have to go through. I don't feel like we really NEED the English classes. I went to a private school, and because of that I didn't even have any English related class until the 5th grade, because the private school was very math focused.

I never really learned proper grammar in English, and the English classes I've had that tried to teach me didn't accomplish much. But the Kanji learning process for the Japanese is different. It is something they absolutely do need to read, and to a lesser extent write. I think that because the Kanji are so important improving the learning process should be fairly important.

Of course I've never gone through the Japanese school system, so maybe it just looks bad from the outside. *shrug*

yudantaiteki Wrote:It would be interesting to know if Korea or Vietnam have seen a decrease in Chinese-derived vocabulary.

The Vietnamese have recently been eliminating some Sino-Vietnamese usage in the language. For example, for "the White House" they're now using "Nhà Trắng" in place of the Chinese "Tòa Bạch Ốc". Quốc ngữ (the Vietnamese romanized alphabet) has been in use for more than a century, so some Sino-Vietnamese words are slowly being forgotten. There are also certain limitations in translating Chinese words into quốc ngữ that have aided in their disappearance.