So I was thinking about this these days.
When I was a kid I liked picking up whatever books were on the bookshelf and read them regardless of the fact that they were not written for my exact age (so I was 5 and reading Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, 7 and reading Harry Potter, 8 or so and reading stuff that was in the Gymnazium/High school reading list, stuff like that). Not anything genius-kid like, just going a biiit ahead of the curve. It's a bit hard to calculate the curve since stuff like Dumas or Jules Verne isn't exactly kids' books but everyone I know read them as kids.
But then I thought about how Japanese books probably look like to a Japanese kid, especially since many novels don't have furigana except for the non-joyo kanjis. Can they even read anything that's not directly aimed at their age group? Say, be 7 and picking up the Harry potter series? I imagine that adult books are out of the question from the get go. Do they have "childrens' version of X" with furigana/hiragana only? Or do they just wait till they're older and studied enough to be able to read them? The first sounds a bit like a waste of money and the latter makes me sad.
So, do you guys know anything about this?
Fadeway
Member
From: Sofia Bulgaria
Registered: 2012-01-01
Posts: 90
The thing is, kids have a lot more tolerance for stuff like this. I spent years immersed in English environments where I didn't understand a thing - and picked up the language quickly because of this. I would grow frustrated and quit within a week if I tried this now.
A kid reading a novel with furigana in it would really have no trouble with comprehension, and would probably pick up a few kanji as he is reading. He would eventually get interested in a book without full furigana, and quickly finish that one as well: maybe not with perfect understanding (likely missing a few words due to difficult context), but sufficient enough. As long as the kid is interested in reading, he will keep doing it and won't get frustrated by the kanji, which will in turn make him much better at it.
^purely speculation on my part
weirdo
Member
From: california
Registered: 2010-01-14
Posts: 34
This purely anecdotal, so don't take it too seriously, but...
You don't really need to know a whole lot of kanji to be able to guesstimate the gaps in your knowledge as long as you're a native speaker. For example, if a child know just 苦 in the word 苦労 within the phrase 「苦労は買ってでもした方がいい」 with clear context of the situation, it isn't all that hard to figure out that it probably reads くろう since they probably heard it orally elsewhere. As a bonus, since natives only really need to guess the sound, kanji is a lot more forgiving since you already know the oral words. For example, if you can read 令（れい） , you can guess the sound of a lot of others, such as 零, 冷, or 齢.
Also, children are able "read" compounds without actually totally knowing the individual kanji within it. For example I personally knew how to read 大丈夫 without knowing what either 丈 or 夫 meant or even how to write them, but when put together, it was a recognizable "shape" that I would parse as a word due to having seen it so many times in manga.
In my case, I was able to read light novels with more than 80% comprehension with less than 1000 kanji studied, and before that, I had plenty of manga to read with furigana. A 6th year elementary school student would be able to understand most novels with guessing and occasional dictionary look-ups given that they can understand the content itself. There are also books and newspapers (子供新聞) aimed at children with furigana on everything.
tl;dr, it's not really as tough as you'd think.
Last edited by weirdo (2012 October 10, 3:23 pm)
