Why Are Newbies Learning The Freakin Kanji?!

[AJBryant]

There's a difference between thread drift and hijacking.


Tony

[Chris Hart]

AJBryant wrote:
There's a difference between thread drift and hijacking.


Tony

Agreed. In this thread, notice the on topic comments that brought Gallagher into the conversation, and how the thread just flowed. Contrast this with echizenyorokobi's post.

[two_heads_talking]

Yudan Taiteki wrote:
Although that is kind of ironic coming directly after a series of posts talking about Gallagher. .

I tend to agree.

[Krysta]

Learning kanji is fun, but thats only a small part of learning Japanese.
I have Japanese 4 days a week and only one day we learn new kanji.
8-10 every week.
Thats because knowing kanji doesnt mean you know japanese.
We spent most of the time learning the grammar.

[mj12axy88]

For those who learn JP just for fun/without a real need -

Would you ever learn JP if it weren't a hieroglyphic language?

[MoogleFan]

Once I learned hiragana and katakana (which simultaneously studying conversational Japanese, as well) I became increasingly determined to tackle kanji, to wash away all memories of the romaji-only method I had been "tainted" with early on in my study...I've got all the 1st and 2nd grade kanji down, as well as an assortment of other grade kanji (and I've made flash cards for almost all of the Joyo kanji), but I've shifted my focus more to the conversational and grammatical aspects of Japanese. I write everything Japanese in hiragana and katakana while I am completing my lessons (be it in a book like "Japanese For Everyone" or self-study projects) as well as in whatever kanji that I happen to know. I'm trying not to get so bent-out-of-shape if I don't know what kanji to use in a sentence as opposed to the hiragana; I want to be much more proficient in speaking and understanding conversation before I study kanji more intensively.

[latenight2736]

A lot of people credit Japanese as being difficult mostly because of having to know kanji to read/write like a native. Although that definetly contributes to the difficulty of the language that doesn't mean that it is the paramount thing to study. Let's face it, although it is a great triumph to learn kanji quickly and to know a lot of them, the thing that is really more imortant and in my opinion more difficult is speaking and listening. Outside of a classroom there are no pauses to gather our thoughts, no prompts for what you should be saying and nobody to speak slowly and help you along. That is why beginners students should learn Kanji slowly, because it just isn't important enough at the time.

The bad part is that most beginners get intimidated by real japanese writing and believe that knowing kanji is much more important than it is. That results in worse japanese in the end, sure you can write a sentence full of kanji in some post on this website that I can't read, but could you hold a conversation with me? How long did it take to write that sentence?

[everdream]

mj12axy88 wrote:
For those who learn JP just for fun/without a real need -

Would you ever learn JP if it weren't a hieroglyphic language?

Hmm, that is a good point. I really can't say. One of the things that interested me about the language was the use of kana/kanji as oppossed to the roman alphabet. So maybe yes, but maybe not.

[kevinnwhat]

mj12axy88 wrote:
For those who learn JP just for fun/without a real need -

Would you ever learn JP if it weren't a hieroglyphic language?

of course, japanese culture is what made me want to learn the language. Not the writing system. To be honest i think the roman system of writing is better just because its so much more simple, and straight to the point. Thats just my opinion though

[Christine Tham]

mj12axy88 wrote:
For those who learn JP just for fun/without a real need -

Would you ever learn JP if it weren't a hieroglyphic language?

To me, that's kind of like asking "Would you ever learn JP if it wasn't JP?"

Seriously, whether we like it or not, Kanji is part of Modern Japanese. There was an attempt to switch to romaji after World War II, suggested by the American occupying forces, but it didn't work - there are too many words which sound the same and the only way to tell them apart is by using Kanji.

By the way, strictly speaking, Japanese is not a "hieroglyphic language". Kana are "syllabaries," and Kanji is used as an extended syllabary and to disambiguate homonyms. Very few Kanji characters are "hieroglyphics" - there are only around 150 pure pictographs/ideographs in the Jouyou set (152 to be exact, if I recall). The majority of Kanji characters are phonetic/semantic composites.

[AJBryant]

Christine Tham wrote:
By the way, strictly speaking, Japanese is not a "hieroglyphic language".

In Russian, it is. It's a linguistic holdover from what the term is in the poster's native language.

Tony

[Christine Tham]

AJBryant wrote:
In Russian, it is. It's a linguistic holdover from what the term is in the poster's native language.

Tony

Fine, but the poster is posting in English.

[chikara]

Christine Tham wrote:
Fine, but the poster is posting in English.

If they posted in Russian would you understand their point better?

The poster has their location as Riga, Latvia so it is a reasonable assumption that English is not their native language. Please try and take this into account before nit picking at posts.

[JaySee]

AJBryant wrote:

Christine Tham wrote:
By the way, strictly speaking, Japanese is not a "hieroglyphic language".

In Russian, it is. It's a linguistic holdover from what the term is in the poster's native language.

Tony

I think in Latvia they speak Latvian though, which is not even a Slavic language. I agree that people should go easy on the non-natives, though I don't see any wrong in correcting their mistakes in a friendly way.

[Christine Tham]

chikara wrote:
The poster has their location as Riga, Latvia so it is a reasonable assumption that English is not their native language. Please try and take this into account before nit picking at posts.

Let me get this straight. I should not "nit pick" on someone in Latvia posting in English because they could be thinking in Russian.

And here I thought I was simply being helpful by clarifying a common (?) misconception about Kanji. Oh well, can't please them all.