FooSoft
Member
From: Seattle, WA
Registered: 2009-02-15
Posts: 513
Website
So I've been playing with this idea, but I'm not sure if it's good or bad... Basically a lot of sentences I mine oftentimes have vocab written in kana, instead of kanji. When I look up the words up in denshi jisho, most of them aren't tagged as "normally written as kana". So what what if I replaced the given words with their equivalent in kanji?
Couple of reasons I want to do this:
1) Maximize exposure to kanji, learn as many readings as fast as possible (also learn new kanji sooner than later).
2) I find it easier to memorize vocab w/ kanji, since they give hints as to what the word means. After I learned it, I don't have issues with it even in kana form since I can think back to the word in kanji.
Do any of you guys do this? Any reasons for or against this technique?
Last edited by FooSoft (2010 March 17, 3:25 pm)
ruiner
Member
Registered: 2009-08-20
Posts: 751
We had a conversation about this in another thread, but my feeling is that when you're first learning readings for kanji, it's a viable strategy to replace the kana with kanji, as long as you make sure to note the actual usage or the usual usage (especially if the dictionary says it's usually kana/'uk'). I used to do it sometimes when learning readings and had no problems, but I only did it with like one card with that initial learning. I guess if you overdid it you'd end up writing like Jarvik7 often makes fun of, overusing kanji. That's the other reason I mentioned using kanji too (in the Goodbye Sentences thread), it helped with initial meanings (and sounds) as well, come to think of it.
At any rate, it's not something I'd go out of my way to recommend, but if you find it useful, I'd say go for it with the above cautions. Likewise often some of our resources made for L2 folks, even as you said when there's no 'uk' type of indicator, will kana-simplify words typically used with kanji so it's fair game.
Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 17, 3:48 pm)
FooSoft wrote:
So I've been playing with this idea, but I'm not sure if it's good or bad... Basically a lot of sentences I mine oftentimes have vocab written in kana, instead of kanji. When I look up the words up in denshi jisho, most of them aren't tagged as "normally written as kana". So what what if I replaced the given words with their equivalent in kanji?
Where are you getting these sources? If you are getting them from actual native Japanese, I would not change anything. I don't think there's any purpose to learning kanji forms of words that are rarely written in kanji, and it's good practice to read all the varieties of native orthography.
If they are from textbooks that are writing words in kana that would normally be in kanji, then it's OK.
2) I find it easier to memorize vocab w/ kanji, since they give hints as to what the word means. After I learned it, I don't have issues with it even in kana form since I can think back to the word in kanji.
This is a bad habit to develop, IMO. If you have trouble memorizing words in kana, you just need more experience, not additional kanji. Having to stop when you're reading and think of kanji in order to understand the passage slows you down, and it doesn't help you for aural Japanese either.
Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 March 17, 4:15 pm)
ruiner
Member
Registered: 2009-08-20
Posts: 751
Yeah, for me, that initial study for the kanjified word--with its usual use/context noted, was very quickly and easily mastered and dissolved in Anki; the kanji, when I bothered converting, simply created meaning/yomi 'hooks' that associated readings with kanji, and eased and sped up my subsequent reading of the versions used in kana. (Of course, that's just my experience from actually doing this method, so if you want to take yudantaiteki's advice, who doesn't like RTK and has no experience associating hundreds/thousands of partially learned kanji with readings, and even though he hates kanji and wants to use every opportunity to abolish it, then FINE!! ;p) You win this round, y_t.
This was especially true for common words where it'd be downright weird to think of the kanji simply because you used it in one card, and especially in prefab sentence decks such as Core 2000/KO2001 that are part of the 'assembly line approach', as I tend to call the post-RTK sentence experience where you're learning words+readings together. That being because there's so much repetition in those sentences.
Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 17, 5:35 pm)
FooSoft
Member
From: Seattle, WA
Registered: 2009-02-15
Posts: 513
Website
How can somebody not like kanji???? 
Every time I see a new kanji in text (doesn't happen that often), I get all happy and excited hehe.
I think some logical part of me (ironically, quite illogically), finds it convenient to think of all vocab being essentially kanji, and kana as the glue that holds them together through various particles and other grammar constructs.
Last edited by FooSoft (2010 March 17, 5:52 pm)
ruiner
Member
Registered: 2009-08-20
Posts: 751
y_t, You need to open the drapes, crack the window, and read some recreational stuff, geez. Get out of the lab-rary. With your skills, only reading Genji, academic work which has clearly driven you mad, two Soseki novels and some Akutagawa short stories just doesn't cut it.
Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 17, 9:25 pm)
Well, that depends. The corpus search problem is not as bad in English because we now have a standard spelling system; for instance, there is no dispute that the name should now be spelled "Shakespeare" instead of any of the other variant ways it could have been modernized. Few words have variant recognized spellings in modern texts. So that if I search a corpus that has modernized spelling editions of Shakespeare, Dickens, etc., variant spellings probably aren't something I'm going to have to worry that much about.
Japanese unfortunately does not have this; editors basically choose more or less arbitrarily how they're going to write things. I posted in another thread how I was looking at a poem from the Genji, and among 6 modern editions I looked at, there were 5 different ways to modernize the orthography.
It creates an odd situation that for me I often have better luck using printed concordances and indexes to search Japanese texts because they list everything by kana and disregard whether or not it's written in kanji or kana in the actual text. Unfortunately the poetry index books usually only have the first line of the poem, which is fine for some purposes (e.g. trying to see where an unattributed poem in a commentary is taken from), but not for other purposes (e.g. trying to find all the poems that contain a particular word or words).
(I mentioned elsewhere that OSU a few years ago got a large collection of Meiji-era microfiches, but the cataloguing of them is such a monumental project that it's still not completed and isn't really that close to completion, and the single reason for that is the difficulty of reading the titles and names written in kanji. If this were a set taken from a culture with a phonetic writing system the cataloguing would have been finished long ago. I know that there are microfiches in that set that would be helpful to me, but I can't access them until the cataloguing project gets finished, but using the resources to figure out the old kanji and the name readings is a skill that not many people have.)
Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 March 18, 2:25 pm)
Thora
Member
From: Canada
Registered: 2007-02-23
Posts: 1691
Folks who do this work must love the historical puzzle or treasure hunt aspects of it. What patience! Hang in there.
For English, I was thinking more of researching original and old secondary texts that use the old forms. Tracing the variations, etc. To the extent that they've been digitized, the search will include known variations. I assume not all your Japanese work is modern commentary.
For Japanese cataloguing, where readings still aren't known, why don't they just include the kanji for the time being and let people search by kanji? (including variations) I understand sets of characters and glyphs(?) have been created to represent unused forms digitally.
Is fundingan issue? It sounds like a perfect way for research assistants to pay their dues. Spend their entire summers in musty library basements with ancient headache-inducing microfiche readers and nasty fluorescent lighting. :-) I suppose Google will get to 1000-year old Japanese poetry eventually. They did claim they were doing it to enhance humanity, not profit...
btw - while we're a bit off topic - A friend just gave me a translation of "The Confessions of Lady Nijo" (~1300). She remembers the excitement when the memoir was discovered and published in the 1940s. This Lady Nijo certainly led an interesting and ...uh...uninhibited life. From courtesan to nun. Do you know anything about how this memoir is viewed in the academic world?
Last edited by Thora (2010 March 18, 3:30 pm)
It's a well known work of Japanese literature, often read in classes. I haven't read all of it (it's past my time period) but I think what Nijo experiences is similar to what other aristocratic women in the Emperor's service went through, including becoming a nun. Several women in the Tale of Genji become nuns after having romance problems with multiple men.
(And yes, old orthography of any country can cause problems; I was just explaining my own issues with kanji in my research.)
Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 March 18, 3:36 pm)
ruiner
Member
Registered: 2009-08-20
Posts: 751
Thora wrote:
For Japanese cataloguing, where readings still aren't known, why don't they just include the kanji for the time being and let people search by kanji? (including variations) I understand sets of characters and glyphs(?) have been created to represent unused forms digitally.
That's along the lines of what I was wondering as well. I suppose I'd need to know more about the process/tools before I could utilize the luxury I have to speculate further about ways of prioritizing the kanji amidst the cataloguing, if only when readings and suchlike are unknown/inconsistent/weren't meant to be prioritized in the first place (those crazy Meiji folks... )
By the way, when was furigana introduced in Japanese writing? For the life of me I can't find it.
Also, my editor-bashing is at the ready, but I suppose I'll wait till I can do 'primary' research myself. ;p
Cataloguing requires romanization and the original Japanese; it's a national standard. Anything put on OSU's catalogue gets propagated to other places as well so they have to follow the standard.
Furigana are very old; they were used to annotate Buddhist texts before Chinese characters were used to write Japanese. You can find furigana in almost any period of Japanese writing, although their use was inconsistent. Before WW2 it was common for books and newspapers to be published with all furigana no matter what their age target, but after the Touyou list was produced, this practice ceased.
(Another anecdote I have is that this quarter I was taking a seminar in Japanese literature; among other things, we read a Noh play that was a 未刊 play (i.e. one not in the standard repertoire). The combined efforts of multiple grad students and the teacher, who has spent the decades of her scholarly career doing Noh and has even acted in Noh, were insufficient to figure out how to read some of the words in the play. And this is an example where I don't think you can say that the kanji are more important than the readings because Noh plays were primarily meant to be performed, not read. The issue of how to read the character 御 has been a topic of debate for at least 700 years.)
Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 March 18, 6:14 pm)
ruiner
Member
Registered: 2009-08-20
Posts: 751
@y_t - That's cool and I can see how that's problematic and requires quite a bit of license, but overall that's a universal issue with plays, especially with older ones, even in English... Shakespeare, for example, part of the beauty is the many ways of speaking the lines (well, not just for Shakespeare, for all plays, methinks). I think there are fascinating studies as to the level of inbuilt notes from the playright to describe how to perform plays... If I remember correctly, Shakespeare was known for being very loose with his scripts in terms of written directions.
As for romanization, I can see the practical aspects of that, but I'm not sure why it must be so neurotically accurate, rather than just arbitrating cataloguing systematization for kanji, since it has no real bearing on the original, no? Feel free to roll your eyes at the n00b making suggestions, at this point. ;p
And wow, I had no idea furigana was so old.
Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 18, 6:12 pm)
Well, in this case I actually agree that it would be a lot more efficient to just catalogue everything by the kanji so that at least they're in the system, and then go back and put the romanization in later, but I'm not in charge of the project. 
(Re: the plays, I think there's a big difference between issues of how to perform a play, and not even being able to pronounce the words in the text of the play. I know that in Shakespeare there are some issues of pronunciation, but I never said that English orthography was perfect!)
Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 March 18, 6:17 pm)
