comeauch
Member
From: Canada
Registered: 2011-11-04
Posts: 175
Since day 1 of my Japanese journey, I've always kept fearing one thing. Probably not super easy to answer and might have been already covered, but I didn't quite find it. So.
How practical is it to expand one's vocabulary through reading? Taking kanji readings into account. I've been quite successful at learning German and the reason why is that I must have read about a hundred novels so far. But Japanese is different, the conversion from written to spoken is not as clear as in German.
What I apprehend is the sight of having to doubt every new word (especially compounds) I come across while reading Japanese. Does it ever gets to the point where you know enough of the language that you can pick up new stuff without fearing too much of learning it with the wrong pronunciation and/or meaning? I'm not quite there yet, but I'm talking after being familiar with around 8,000-10,000 words or so.
Thanks!
comeauch wrote:
Does it ever gets to the point where you know enough of the language that you can pick up new stuff without fearing too much of learning it with the wrong pronunciation and/or meaning? I'm not quite there yet, but I'm talking after being familiar with around 8,000-10,000 words or so.
Thanks!
You can't ever be 100% sure, I don't think. I think after getting a vocabulary of maybe 12,000 words, I reached a point where most of the words I didn't know had furigana provided. My habit is, if I see a word three or four times and start getting a vague idea of it's meaning, I'll plug whatever pronunciation I guess at into an online dictionary just to confirm it. I probably have a hit rate around 80% if they're kanji I know, which is good enough for me.
It helps a lot to listen to documentaries and the news and audio readings of literature, and it helps to read stuff that has plentiful furigana, but in general I think the benefits of reading a whole lot outweigh the downsides of learning some wrong pronunciations.
(I wonder how much of a problem native Japanese have with this; there's a gag in the sequel to Shimotsuma Monogatari/Kamikaze Girls where the yankii girl Ichigo keeps pronouncing 偏見 as へんみ, to show that she's pretty uneducated.)
comeauch
Member
From: Canada
Registered: 2011-11-04
Posts: 175
Thanks for your answers everyone!
I still have trouble grasping that it's possible to read something without knowing how to pronounce it.
howtwosavealif3 wrote:
Besides roudoku yeah it gets easier. Roudoku gets easier too but I still come across that. I also read Japanese Internet so I'm not limiting myself to books
I didn't know that word "Roudoku". It almost sounds like an Olympic sport 
I've seen anime or dramas where students were asked to read something aloud, so I guess it's not always so easy for them either. Also, cool website, thanks!
Fillanzea wrote:
I reached a point where most of the words I didn't know had furigana provided. My habit is, if I see a word three or four times and start getting a vague idea of it's meaning, I'll plug whatever pronunciation I guess at into an online dictionary just to confirm it. I probably have a hit rate around 80% if they're kanji I know, which is good enough for me.
This is reassuring 
einahpets wrote:
I just use my dictionary a lot when I read. If I encounter a word I'm not sure about I make my best guess for its pronunciation and check it. I don't want to get in the habit of associating a wrong pronunciation with a word so I'd rather take the extra time to look things up.
This is probably a habit I'll have to acquire... Depending on how many words per page you need to look up, this might not be so time-consuming with appropriate material. This truly must be most complicated writing system in the world ><! I guess that's what makes it so appealing though 
comeauch wrote:
How practical is it to expand one's vocabulary through reading? Taking kanji readings into account. I've been quite successful at learning German and the reason why is that I must have read about a hundred novels so far. But Japanese is different, the conversion from written to spoken is not as clear as in German.
Ｉ think a lot of people on this forum take a reading-based approach to learning vocab. A novel may be a bit of a stretch, though, if you don't have enough words. I attempted ハリーポッターと不死鳥の騎士団 recently, and found it too frustrating at my current vocab level.
I currently pull my vocab from Internet articles, 漫画、and assisted readers. My general mode of attack is to read first w/ dictionary lookup, then do a second or third pass on the material later without any assistance. I add all of the unknown words I find to Anki, and tag them with the name of the article. That allows me to create a filtered deck containing just that article or manga's keywords so that I can study those specific words before making another pass at the material.
Last edited by gaiaslastlaugh (2012 August 05, 12:41 am)
comeauch wrote:
Thanks for your answers everyone!
I still have trouble grasping that it's possible to read something without knowing how to pronounce it.
well here's an example I came across recently
木立
luckily somehow, micraculously there is only one possible reading for it!
I'm writing like this like i'm so ecstatic because like someone else has stated sometimes there's multiple readings and sometimes depending on how you read it the meaning changes (one I came across recently is 出店＝でみせ・しゅってん) and sometimes the meaning is the same, it's just that there's many different ways to pronounce it.
so anyways
木立
means
群がって立っている木々
and the only possible way to read it is
こだち
now before I looked it up I knew all the possible readings for these 2 kanji
so for 木you have ki, ko, moku
examples with those readings
木木 き‐ぎ 、 草木 くさき
木陰＝こかげ
木質＝もくしつ
for 立 you have
たち AND りつ
立ち待ち ＝たちまち、旅立ち たびだち and since it's the second kanji it could be changed to dachi due to onten
設立 せつりつ 成立 せいりつ
so before I looked it up I assumed it was going to be
ki dachi because it feels like they'll be an onten just because kitachi sounds a bit harsher. But no I was off it was kodachi.
Surprisingly as simple as this word seems (from the kanji) I've never came across it before? or i did but i never looked up the reading? I don't really recall.
Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2012 August 16, 7:17 pm)
But the thing is like I feel like this will never end. That's just how Japanese is. I'm just equate "reading" Japanese (as in roudoku) to winning the spelling the bee in english (it's so intense)i. It's just irregular and there's always gonna be some word that doesn't have the onten or it does or it's not the reading I thought it was (even though i know all the possible readings of the kanji). Like for kidachi, I mean kodachi, even if I read it wrong, I still know what it means I personally wouldn't obsess over that. I think for Japanese you should focus on understanding than the reading of the kanji because there's no end to that crap. Liek I said before, I read a lot of internet and 50+books and listen to music and watch japaense tv shows blahblah but I still am unsure of readings sometimes. Sometimes my educated guess from experience is right and sometimes it's off, sometimes the correct reading is completely left field (it's an exception or special or whatevre).
Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2012 September 21, 4:59 pm)
