Took only slightly longer than it would have with kanji. To be honest, that's actually one of the least obnoxious all-kana sentences I've seen recently; the main trap is an artifact of orthographic reform, and only mildly worsened by the absence of kanji.

~J

Last edited by woodwojr (2009 February 16, 9:19 pm)

That's not a sentence. "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is (mind the capitalization!).

~J

Free fortune-telling for you: you will make many friends in the old-man pun circles.    I hate things like these, but I always seem to come up with them on my own anyway.  I guess that's natural for types like us.

にわにはにわにわとりがいる

That's a '早口言葉', which tend to have the same effect written out.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A9% … 0%E8%91%89

If somehow the use of kanji was abandoned (which would be a shame), there would be solutions to avoid this problem like better punctuation and spaces. Maybe some way to mark grammatical particles...

kfmfe04 wrote:

Raichu wrote:

I prefer my version of the niwa sentence with 7 consecutive niwas.

Actually this is not an example at all of why kanji are a good thing (helpful as they are in this sentence). Kanji are not a good thing, they were a ludicrous idea.

In fact, this is an example of why most modern languages put spaces between words. If I wrote はは　は　は　を　みがく, then it makes it much easier.

NB If I wrote it as "haha wa ha o migaku", then it makes it easier still, but that's another story.

My opinion about Kanji's usefulness has changed over time.
As a beginner, I thought they were horrible.

After studying them for a while, I find that they do make reading easier - for example, it would be much harder/slower to read a newspaper all in kana.

OTOH, I find that having a gazillion readings for a Kanji "charming" but not adding much value at all...

So true. After having dabbled in Mandarin a bit, I really can't stand several readings. It's cool from a linguistic perspective but it's such a nuisance. It adds a huge barrier to the language which really isn't needed.

Tobberoth wrote:

So true. After having dabbled in Mandarin a bit, I really can't stand several readings. It's cool from a linguistic perspective but it's such a nuisance. It adds a huge barrier to the language which really isn't needed.

That's kinda the same argument people use against kanji in the first place, how it's such a huge barrier to become familiar with the characters. I love the multiple readings, but then again, I do kinda have all the onyomi memorized.

It's like my camera. I use an old manual Pentax 35mm SLR. Sure, it's a bit of a learning curve, but it's so much fun and better than the average digital camera.

kfmfe04 wrote:

Well, memorizing all the onyomi is a "good start", but there is still a lot more to go.  We have all felt the rush of being able to guess the reading of a word, at the stage of moving from beginning to intermediate Japanese, and then you hit a list where you can't read anything.

Read through this thread if you haven't already.

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=2928

Ooo, some animal names that a couple days and an SRS will fix. BFD.

kazelee wrote:

Zarxrax wrote:

Here's a little sentence that I just made up--written only in hiragana.

ははははをみがく。

Do you understand it? Let's see some more sentences like this

やっぱり Is is strange that I understood this...?  I think...

@kfmfe04

I'm sure that animal thing happens in other languages as well.

How would it happen in other languages? If it says "ant" in English, you can't very well read it "belofratong".

Remembering one on'yomi for each kanji isn't something I would call getting over the barrier. Like kfmfe04 said, it's just a good start. There's tons of kun'yomi, tons of kanji has several on'yomi, most kanji are pronunced completely different in names. No matter how long you study for, you can never be 100% sure how a word is read, you will always be stuck at the stage of an "educated guess" and I would suppose Japanese is pretty much unique in this regard.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2009 March 28, 5:15 am)

julz6453 wrote:

If you think about it, blunt memorisation of how words are pronounced happens in English as well. Foreigners have to learn that the 'ea' sound in 'bread' and 'break' are pronounced differently. We just picked it up naturally as kids. So even though you can memorise 音読み and 訓読み, you'll still have to learn a lot of words just from context.

+1

English spelling is the revenge of yomikata.  Not as extreme perhaps, but I still wouldn't want to be on the outside looking in.

julz6453 wrote:

If you think about it, blunt memorisation of how words are pronounced happens in English as well. Foreigners have to learn that the 'ea' sound in 'bread' and 'break' are pronounced differently. We just picked it up naturally as kids. So even though you can memorise 音読み and 訓読み, you'll still have to learn a lot of words just from context.

I'd say learning English pronunciation is more like learning pitch accent; even if you get it wrong, people will still understand most of what you say, by the context. Multiple readings and Rendaku have no real equivalents.

edit: typo

Last edited by iSoron (2009 March 28, 8:31 am)