I like kana because it's easier to review them.  You can just imagine the standard "akasatana hamayarawan" table in your head, and go over all of them when you are bored.

Kanji, on the other hand, are much harder to systemize.  You can use spaced repetition to review them to a certain extent, but how can you list the kanji you know?  Without outside materials to test yourself with, how do you even know what you know?

So basically, I think it depends on the way your brain can memorize things better..

Also, another thing: due to exposing myself to too much romaji Japanese early on, I am now struggling to unlearn romaji and think in Japanese writing when I hear Japanese, rather than thinking in romaji.  I see hiragana or katakana characters I run across as a means to that end, and it's hard to hate them when I approach them in that manner.

TL;DR: If hearing Japanese does not trigger romaji in your head, count your blessings and praise the kana

Last edited by Silty (2013 May 16, 5:49 pm)

amtrack wrote:

So I started taking my kanji studies more seriously, and as a result, I have developed a burning dislike for hiragana.  Even though kanji is a pain, and perhaps convoluted, it is infinitely easier to read once you start learning it.  Hiragana can burn for all i care; a full sentence of hiragana = eye-gouge

EDIT:  And by easier to read, I mean quicker to comprehend.  Hiragana runs together with no spaces; gives me a headache just looking at it.  Kanji is much neater.

The first video game I tried to play entirely in Japanese was Mother 2, because it was all in kana. "Surely this will be easier to read than looking up kanji," I foolishly thought.

...anyway, yeah, I don't like all-kana writing. But I think kana, the writing system itself, is easy enough to read, and nice to look at/draw.

I don't really get what you mean.  Kana-only materials (basically, children's books, RPGs before 1994, and poetry--am I missing anything?) are kind of annoying to read, but easily avoidable.  In the vast majority of materials kana is mixed with kanji, is easy to read, and requires so much less effort to learn than kanji.

I like kana more than kanji, personally.  All kana is tough at first but once you get used to it, it's not that bad.

Silty wrote:

Before I had all of my kana down, I either remembered it immediately or sat there for minutes agonizing over it.  10 minutes seems like an odd number.

The 10 minutes thing was completely arbitrary. It's actually a <5 minute job to reproduce 92 kana without thinking, but that took me 4 days (of agonising and repeating the process until I was satisfied with my handwriting).

I think that writing is definitely worth the time investment when learning languages:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 … 095458.htm
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar … 5706000649

Very interesting stuff I find that vocabulary is especially reinforced by writing their kanji and kana out.

Animosophy wrote:

Silty wrote:

Before I had all of my kana down, I either remembered it immediately or sat there for minutes agonizing over it.  10 minutes seems like an odd number.

The 10 minutes thing was completely arbitrary. It's actually a <5 minute job to reproduce 92 kana without thinking, but that took me 4 days (of agonising and repeating the process until I was satisfied with my handwriting).

I think that writing is definitely worth the time investment when learning languages:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 … 095458.htm
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar … 5706000649

Very interesting stuff I find that vocabulary is especially reinforced by writing their kanji and kana out.

Ah, true.  I guess there's a difference between being able to visualize something and being able to put it on paper.  Some people don't care about stroke order, but you even went a step above those who do care about stroke order.

Whenever I see Chinese text I praise the Japanese for inventing kana. It just looks so much better in my opinion.

All-kana texts are a bit of a pain to read, but it's not like they're that common to begin with. And the option to write all-kana when you can't remember a kanji during an exam is priceless.

amtrack wrote:

So I started taking my kanji studies more seriously, and as a result, I have developed a burning dislike for hiragana.  Even though kanji is a pain, and perhaps convoluted, it is infinitely easier to read once you start learning it.  Hiragana can burn for all i care; a full sentence of hiragana = eye-gouge

EDIT:  And by easier to read, I mean quicker to comprehend.  Hiragana runs together with no spaces; gives me a headache just looking at it.  Kanji is much neater.

I like Kana when mixed with Kanji, Chinese not having Kana makes it seem harder to me. Sentences of pure kana with no spaces are evil, you need to be really comfortable with grammar/particles to differentiate the words quickly.

As someone who recently wrapped up RTK1 and has been going through vocabulary and grammar for the past few months, I wholeheartedly agree.  Occasionally when I come across a comic or game I try to read and it has little/no kanji it is horrible, mostly because my grammar and vocab haven't caught up to my kanji study.

I find in this short time span after RTK I'm treating kanji more like a crutch, and I'm translating them directly to english meaning without pausing and forcing myself to remember the reading.

This is mostly on new words though, more mature ones in my vocab deck are easy to read correctly.  I can definitely say though, that RTK has not been a detriment at all and makes it so easy to learn new words, if the reading takes a little while longer to catch on.

Last edited by muteki99 (2013 May 17, 8:09 am)

Silty wrote:

Pinyin seems like something made for foreigners.

It may look like that, but it was created by native Chinese who wanted to use it as part of script reform in China.  It is considered official by the Chinese government and used in limited contexts in China.  It's not as foreigner friendly as some of the older systems like Wade-Giles.  It may seem foreign because it's based on roman letters, but kana isn't a native script either, it's just simplified Chinese characters.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2013 May 17, 9:47 am)

Yes.  It creates a strange situation where children are able to write well at the beginning because it's pretty easy to learn the purely phonetic romanization, but then as they start learning characters they suddenly get less literate before they learn the characters they need to catch up to their speech ability.

Definitely.  It's a little better in the case of Japanese because writing unknown words in kana, while somewhat childish, is not as jarring/unusual as pinyin in a Chinese sentence.  Also Chinese has no standard way like furigana to show the pronunciation of a hard character in a normal text.