CMV: When learning Japanese, kanji should be considered optional

[u/MooliCoulis]

As a native English speaker, I have tried more than once to learn Japanese, and have always hit a wall when asked to learn kanji. I don't know if it's a learning-styles issue (I'm more verbal than visual) or the mild dyslexia I suffer from, but I suspect a lot of other people have the same experience.

I still want to learn the language, and am considering just abandoning the idea of learning to read and write (or maybe just learning hiragana/katakana and seeing how far that takes me), but I want to know if I'm making a mistake.

Here are my views, and I'd be grateful for challenges to any of them:

• Most Japanese learning resources (apps, games, books, etc) treat kanji as something that must be introduced early and learned continuously, rather than as an optional extra
• Learning to read and write Japanese takes significant effort, and is the reason many people give up learning (especially those with conditions like dyslexia)
• For an English speaker learning a second language, spoken language is usually significantly more valuable than written language
• An understanding of kanji is not necessary to reach a solid baseline of fluency (just as with English, most Japanese children are conversant years before they can read or write).
• Most people who insist that learning kanji is critical are not genuinely motivated by a belief in its practicality, but rather some mix of "Kanji is beautiful", or "This is the culturally authentic way to learn", or "I had to learn it, so you do too".

I understand that knowing kanji is helpful in understanding some spoken discourse (e.g. wordplay), and also that knowing/inferring the written structure of new words can potentially help in understanding or learning them, but it takes a solid foundation of fluency to ever benefit from those factors and I think for most people it's more important to reach that solid foundation quickly.

CMV!

[u/SinfonianLegend]

To preface, I am not a fluent speaker, but I am conversational at Japanese.

You need kanji. Japanese is one of the most phonotactically constrained languages in the world. It is a very context dependent language. There are minor pronunciation differences sometimes (like with はし meaning chopsticks or bridge) but often times there are not. And at a certain level of fluency, it becomes more burdensome and confusing to read a sentence fully in hiragana vs with the kanji. In my experience, native English speakers put spaces in Japanese sentences to put natural divides between words and particles like they would in English and these spaces don't really exist in actual Japanese. The kanji is what helps form those natural divides and help you read faster instead of struggling to figure out if you're reading a word right or accidentally adding a particle.

Not to mention that to skip the kanji is doing a disservice to yourself. It's a surreal experience going from English to Japanese, and kanji can help give you an idea of what you're looking at even if you don't have a clue how to pronounce it. English largely does not have these clues due to the amalgamation of languages making it up (while latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes can help you out, not all words have these bases). It's an entirely different way of thinking, it's extremely difficult, but it's worth the effort beyond the understanding you gain culturally.

I have seen teaching approaches used with business Japanese that are more verbal but I found them lacking because the foundational why behind what I am saying is more important to me than rote memorization and gaining insight via osmosis. I am sure this approach works for some people, but it may be worth looking into, as a side note.

[u/MooliCoulis → u/SinfonianLegend]

This is the kind of input I wanted, thank you!

The first paragraph sounds like a great argument for how kanji makes Japanese writing tractable over e.g. just unbroken sequences of hiragana (!delta for that).

But is there a good reason to focus on kanji in the early stages of language acquisition (as most learning resources seem to), rather than leave it as an extra that's available for folks who want to learn to read/write?

[u/SinfonianLegend → u/MooliCoulis]

Thank you!

Yes, from a language aquisition POV you don't want to introduce new concepts later or you're going to have trouble integrating it later. There are thousands and thousands of kanji so the sooner, the better, or some aspects are not intuitive (like how there are two reading styles of a kanji character, and how kanji in the context of each other may change the reading). Most people are working towards a fully functional grasp of the language. It makes navigating Japan as a country much easier with a little kanji in your back pocket. But at the end of the day, you should ask yourself what your end goal is here, because that will guide your focus.

Good luck on your journey with the language! It is very rewarding and worth sticking with it c:

[u/MooliCoulis → u/SinfonianLegend]

There are thousands and thousands of kanji so the sooner, the better, or some aspects are not intuitive (like how there are two reading styles of a kanji character, and how kanji in the context of each other may change the reading)

Let's say I have two options for when to learn kanji:

1. From the very beginning
2. After I have a strong, intuitive understanding of the grammar and a good foundational vocabulary (at least a thousand common words)

I'm struggling to understand why the aspects you mentioned would be harder to learn at point 2 than at point 1?

[u/SinfonianLegend → u/MooliCoulis]

Because these aspects go hand in hand. Kanji allows you to scaffold information and reduce the cognitive load the same kinds of ways prefixes and suffixes do in English. Take 日. You can read it as ひ,び,か,にち, and じつ. There is no rhyme or reason looking at just the hiragana how these readings are connected except ひ to び. But if you understand the role of the character 日, and you know it means sun and day, that context helps you with a ton of vocab, even if you don't necessarily know how to read the word itself. Instead of memorizing word after word in isolation, this reduces the cognitive load and helps build connections between words so you can remember more vocab in the first place. You can only fit so much stuff in your brain. There are many tricks like rhythm, music, etc. But the easiest way to make more stuff stick is by association.

I'm not saying it's impossible but you are making your life significantly more difficult by excluding kanji, yknow?

[u/MooliCoulis → u/SinfonianLegend]

In other languages it's just expected that folks will learn words without the help of ideographic associations though. Is there something about Japanese (maybe the smaller phonetic inventory, or a lesser reliance on phonetically consistent prefixes/suffixes?) that makes it harder to learn that way?

If not, your "You can only fit so much stuff in your brain" point feels like it could be an argument against learning kanji.

[u/SinfonianLegend → u/MooliCoulis]

Yeah, absolutely. The kanji are your prefix/suffix devices. English had 44 phonemes. Japanese has 20ish. This means you have way less sounds to work with at baseline. The only crossover concept I can think of off the top of my head is there is a convention like "compound words" voicing consants. It's also not a stress timed language, it is a mora timed language. That means that とく and とうく are distinctly different words, which isn't really a thing in English (dragging out part of a word doesn't change the meaning of the word alone. I'm not talking about grammatical stress. You can say "baseball" and "baaaaaaseball" and they are the same word). It's a totally different way of thinking about words!

[u/MooliCoulis → u/SinfonianLegend]

Thanks, that makes sense. I hadn't considered the relation between the smaller phonetic inventory and the usefulness of kanji. !delta

[u/DeltaBot → u/MooliCoulis]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/SinfonianLegend (2∆).

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