Interactive Hiragana chart with audio
japanesecomplete.com
japanesecomplete.com
RealKana is great for drilling recognition (kana -> pronunciation), and I learned the individual kana by loading one column at a time (e.g. ka/ki/ku/ke/ko). Drag-n-Drop is good for speed-testing recognition, but also for recall (pronunciation -> kana), since it's invertible: you can either choose a pronunciation and go find its kana, or choose a kana and find which pronunciation it goes to.
I'm not sure you can really "learn" these characters without drilling like this -- the symbols are arbitrary, so you have to memorize the association between glyph and reading by brute force.
[1] https://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects/genki/hira_main....
(There's also combinations like kyu = ki + small-yu, but that also just builds on the kana you already know, and behaves pretty logically.)
Modification to /p/ might make more sense if you call it the F*-column rather than the H*-column.
Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard.
However, unlike western writing systems, there's also a third thing which is not an alphabet: Kanji. And this is a world of troubles, because Kanji is literally FUBAR. So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then. Korea used to use Chinese characters too, they eventually (mostly) dropped them in favor of something simpler.
Japanese words are lengthy compared to English as well. Kanji packs more content into less space.
I agree that the existence of “rare kanji” is a bit strange, but 8,000 or so characters seems reasonable, especially with so many compound kanji.
They could just start using spaces. They use the button anyway to cycle through the different kanji that they've typed out in kana or latin.
In latin script text we recognize words as "symbols" of the language. Words might be composed of characters, but you don't read them one character at a time. You see the start, the shape, and the end of word. Based on that you know what word it is and what it means. You can raed scrmabled text withuot isseus.
Japanese would gain the same kind of recognition if it were only written in hiragana and katakana. It already has that anyway. You don't scrutinize whether it is the actual correct kanji. If it looks close enough it's good enough.
I think a bigger potential problem would be homophones. Japanese words seem to like using the same sounds for a lot of different meanings. (I wonder if that's why their language has so many English loan words.)
I think it's definitely possible, but it's up to them. Having a harder language isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I’ve been following public discussions about the Japanese language in Japan for nearly forty years, and I think it’s safe to say that there is currently no significant advocacy for dropping kanji or drastically curtailing their use. Kanji are just too deeply embedded in the culture, economy, and educational system and in people’s linguistic identity.
The Japanese Wikipedia has an article about the history of the movement to switch to romaji [1]; the movement had some momentum up until the 1930s but was suppressed by the government during the Second World War. It was taken up again by the postwar Allied occupation [2], but nothing came of it. One of the last Japanese groups still advocating for a switch to romaji dissolved earlier this year after more than a century in existence, as the remaining members were too old to continue [3].
[1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%E5...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform#Reforms
I don't know Korean, but I've been told that it has plenty of Chinese loanwords (or Chinese-derived character compound "words") like Japanese, yet because it is less homophonous than Japanese, Korean people nowadays are very able to recognize such words by the shape of them when written in Hangul.
As a native Chinese speaker, Cantonese to be precise, my opinion is probably biased but I find Japanese to be so homophonous (for Sino-Japanese words 漢語 but even for native words 和語 to a degree) that even if Japanese adopted a more "efficient" syllabary like Hangul, words would still be difficult to decipher, spaces included. Pitch accent only helps so much (and of course that isn't written down in kana), the typical examples being 紙 ("kamì": paper), 髪 ("kamì": hair) and 神 ("kàmi": god). I'm trying to indicate the pitch accent in an adhoc manner with the accented letters; note that according to my (native) Japanese dictionary, 紙 and 髪 have the same pitch accent. So I think, a more phonetic writing system for Japanese, that remains efficient for reading, would end up annotating words with semantic or etymological hints, like the idiosyncratic spellings of Latin and Greek root words in English.
Also, the texts we read are allowed to use more sophisticated words, more literary words, with more complicated sentence structures. So while phonetic spelling ought to work to represent ordinary speech, that's not necessarily the case for general written expression. In practice, I find 漢語 in Japanese speech to be surprisingly difficult to comprehend, in the sense that, words are often too indistinct for me to pick them up by ear if I have not heard them in speech before, even if I have seen them in text before and would know the characters already (including their readings 音読み in Japanese).
That's different for me as a Cantonese speaker where I can pick up new literary compound words if their constituent characters are ones I know from other words/compounds, even rather infrequent ones. I would say it's because the sound system of Cantonese has 6 tones, mapping nearly one-to-one with the tones + voiced/voiceless distinction from Middle Chinese, which in turn is a much more monosyllabic language where characters have quite distinct sound values compared to any of the modern Chinese languages.
Incidentally I have a harder time picking up new terms in Mandarin by ear where many characters that are distinct in Cantonese sound the same; and it's widely agreed that Mandarin Chinese has evolved more disyllabic words to compensate. Again, yes, even when I know the compounds already through writing, learning to pattern-match for them in hearing in real time, has been, unfortunately, for me at least, a different story.
(Edit: added below)
I believe also that both Chinese and Japanese got more homophonous because they could get away with it (i.e. people got lazy in pronouncing more intricate sounds) when there was 漢字 to distinguish characters/words when needed. So there's certainly a feedback loop in there. If for the 2 to 3 thousand years of history there was no writing in ideographic characters, there would have been evolutionary linguistic pressure against too many homophones in the languages.
Apparently, some people do and some people don't; and each category is surprised the other exists. I'd be curious to know if the "visual" category is more prevalent for ideogram-based writing systems.
> my opinion is probably biased but I find Japanese to be so homophonous
It's difficult to evaluate what "so" means here, but it seems to me that homophony is made a bigger problem in this thread than it really is.
For instance, in French, we have words that have many homophones. For instance there is "vert" (green) "ver" (worm) "verre" (glass) "vair" (a type of squirrel) "vers" (the "to" conjunction) "vers" (verse) "verrent","verre" (conjugations of a very rare verb that means "to pounce" - probably most French speakers don't even know it; if you use it in a sentence their speech recognition module will probably segfault).
There's also common homophones "père" (father) and "paire" (pair) and "pair" (peer as in P2P), "mère" (mother) and "mer" (sea), "serre" (greenhouse) and "serre" (talon) and "sert" (conjugation of serve), "je suis" ("I am") and "je suis" ("I follow").
Some of these homophones double as homographs, as you can see. They are all "strict" homophones BTW, as we don't have distinctions between short and long vowels like English has, for instance.
But both in written and spoken language, grammar and context usually disambiguate the meaning - if any. Based on that observation, it seems to me it wouldn't be more difficult to figure which "kami" it is than which "vers" it is (worms, conjunction or verse), unless the sentence is specifically designed for that purpose.
Amusingly, the homophones "vair" and "verre" led to a small quarrel in the 19th century about what were the shoes of Cinderella made of - fur or glass? People who want to show off sometimes bring that up, because "vair" is a rarely used word [1].
You're right about the context and grammar being usually sufficient to disambiguate. I thought about the examples 話す ("hanâsu"; to talk) and 離す ("hanâsu"; to separate) I gave earlier, and I don't remember ever confusing the two in speech dialogue. But it's probably that there are enough non-homophonous near-synonyms for these words in Japanese that would get used in practice, if we imagine contexts where a word could conceivably be confused with another homophone, e.g. 言う【いう】, 喋る【しゃべる】, 語る【かたる】 in the case of 話す【はなす】.
The above words are "native" Japanese words 和語. Definitely the problem of homophones is way less serious for those words than for Sino-Japanese vocabulary, 漢語.
I think Japanese is untypical in that it's a language with a limited repertoire of syllables adopting words from a language with a much richer system of sounds, Chinese, and trying to map the (compound) words character by character. By the way, that probably relates to why most learners find pronunciation of any variety of Chinese to be difficult; the language needs to make the necessary aural distinctions, including tone (famously), which are apparently subtle to non-native speakers.
There are countless two-syllable compound words in Chinese, a good portion being used in common speech, but of the ones adopted into Japanese, many of them turn into essentially two "syllables" also. (Actually, some modern terms are back-borrowings from Japanese coinages through writing, just so that I'm being fair and historically accurate in this comment.)
Of these terms there is at least a few, that in Japanese, would be confused in speech, that in practice the pronunciation gets mangled to disambiguate. Here are some examples:
私立 ("privately established (institution, organization, etc.)") versus 市立 ("municipally established") has the following disambiguation in common speech:
私立【しりつ】→【わたくしりつ】
市立【しりつ】→【いちりつ】
化学【かがく】→【ばけがく】 (as if the word were 化け学 but it's never written that way)
For the reader's curiosity, there's also one case of pronunciation mangling that I know in Mandarin Chinese:
炎 ("inflammation") versus 癌 ("cancer"):
In Mandarin, we have 炎 yán, 癌 ái even though the sound value of 癌 ought to have been also yán, homophonous with 岩 according to the rules of sound change over the centuries. Contrast with the following:
Cantonese 炎 jim4, 癌 ngaam4, 岩 ngaam4
Japanese 炎 en エン 癌 gan ガン, 岩 gan ガン
I won't blame you, as this was my thought when I wrote it.
I currently read Japanese at an upper-intermediate level. For example, I can read most of Harry Potter in Japanese an only look up a word every page or two.
The biggest problem with switching Japanese to "all gana" is the homophones. Many similar words sound the same but have different nuanced meanings such as hear and listen -- 聞く and 聴く -- both pronounced "kiku". This happens so often, that I think dropping kanji would be a disaster.
An additional benefit to the kanji is that when you get to know enough of them, you can begin to guess the meaning of new words, similar to learning Latin roots and morphemes like "un-" or "re-".
I recently came upon 熱い and 暑い in my learning, and that was a trip. (Both pronounced あつい, both mean hot but with different meaning).
Native Japanese people writing these words also don't always distinguish them properly, e.g. using 聞く generally even if the more specialized meaning of 聴く would apply.
This particular kind of distinction is called 異字同訓 (の漢字の使い分け) in Japanese.
I think a better example is 話す versus 離す which I just discovered yesterday also seem to have the same pitch accent!
It’s very easy add spaces to written Japanese.
In case of Japanese, the pitch accent is not recorded in writing, but in spoken language it is probably very helpful to recognize word structure and boundaries.
Another example: Vietnamese swapped from using a modified Chinese script to a (modified?) Latin script.
The first time I visited Japan I set my phone wallpaper to a Katakana chart image and whenever I was waiting around (riding a train/subway, etc) I'd sit and read words on advertising. By the end of the week I no longer needed the chart.
This was back when data was extremely expensive and pocket wifis weren't a thing yet so there were far fewer distractions, I guess that helped...
They did consider it in the 20th century when Japan was modernizing and catching up with the Western world. Nowadays nobody takes you seriously if you propose abolishing it. The debate was settled in 1962-1966 [1] when the government officially gave up any attempt to remove kanji from the Japanese writing system. It’s a very much a fringe idea now.
[1]: See 国語国字問題 on Japanese Wikipedia. The full quote is 漢字仮名交じり文が審議の前提。漢字全廃は考えられない。
I can say that after just over three weeks I'm sounding out words. I think hours practiced are a better measure than weeks, but I don't know how many hours I've spent. (Even then sleep seems vital to processing the material, so you can't probably can't just count straight hours you've spent cramming.)
My study has involved using this deck [1]; writing out the hiragana and katakana charts several times; and using Tofugu [2][3] or YouTube for mnemonics, extra explanation, or stroke order.
[0] https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=japanese
[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/827975112
Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.
This is what many people don't realize when they wish they wouldn't have to learn Kanji or Hanzi. They make a lot of sense for languages with lots of homophones.
Edit: typo because of autocomplete
I think you meant homophones. At least I hope so.
In Korea, Hanja are still actively used for disambiguation of homophones in complex texts. Public debate was divided for a long time, and even though Hanja are slowly being phased out, it is a slow process. It's hard to tell for sure, but even in North Korea the process seems incomplete.
(They are not all anki, wanikani, flavor of the month SRS spammers like some of us)
- Skritter - Kana (free) - Japanese!
The parent comment is reasonable. Learning hiragana also takes no more than a week or two if you’re actively practicing writing.
The problem with learning this, is that when you know katakana and hiragana perfectly, you are still in the same learning spot that you are today to learn finnish or euskera, and much worse than german or danish (they have things in common with english).
I speak two languages — English and another language you probably haven't heard of that does not use English-looking letters (such as "a", "b" etc).
Anyway, provided I'm told that a given text is Japanese, I can tell if a letter is Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana.
Which I think is commendable — if I may say so myself — given I didn't even know about the existence of "Kanji", "Katakana", or "Hiragana" until 3 years ago.
One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. Including the text makes it more accessible to a wider audience regardless of what "dialect" is spoken in the show.
This isn't really true; there are characters that are exclusive to one or the other, like 冇. The stronger political position of Mandarin means that its idiosyncratic characters are viewed as "real" while the idiosyncratic characters required by other languages aren't, but it's a fundamentally symmetric situation.
> One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another.
The written versions of the language are also that different. The subtitles are in Mandarin, which everyone must learn to read.
(How common are hard-coded subtitles in modern Chinese media? They're on the older stuff, but it seems like a lot of modern shows don't bother.)
They're different, but not that different. If we believe Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese ):
> [Varieties of Min] form the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese.
So the divergence between Mandarin and Cantonese [neither belonging to the Min branch] could be dated back maybe 1500 years. The divergence between German and Italian is much, much older than that.
English and Swedish would make a more apt comparison than German and Italian.
I've spoken Mandarin for over 20 years, studied French and Spanish for a few years each and also learned a bit of Cantonese and a bit of Taiwanese. In my subjective experience, French and Spanish are by far the closest of any two of those languages. Cantonese and Taiwanese would be the next closest and Mandarin is considerably further from either than they are from each other.
This is precisely what you would expect from the divergence times.
> Cantonese and Taiwanese would be the next closest and Mandarin is considerably further from either than they are from each other.
This isn't; Taiwanese is the outgroup to the more closely related pair of Mandarin/Cantonese.
It's always possible that learning "a bit of Cantonese and a bit of Taiwanese" doesn't give you a good grasp of what's going on in Cantonese and Taiwanese.
If you see a bare reference to "Chinese", it will be referring to Mandarin.
There are several families of Chinese languages, with the most prominent being:
- 官话 (literally "mandarin speech"; Mandarin belongs to this family)
- 粤语 ("Yue language"; Cantonese belongs to this one)
- 吴语 ("Wu language"; Shanghainese belongs here)
- 闽南语 ("Southern Min language"; Hokkien belongs here)
It's also possible (and routine) to just label a variety of speech with the name of the place where it is spoken. This gives the names of specific dialects rather than broad families:
- 普通话 ("ordinary speech", this is Mandarin. It is conceived of as being an artificial standard rather than being specifically associated with any particular place.)
- 广东话 ("Cantonese", the speech of 广东, which is a large province)
- 上海话 ("Shanghainese", the speech of 上海, which while admittedly a large city is not as large as a province)
- 福建话 ("Hokkien", the speech of 福建, also a large province)
- 北京话 ("Beijingnese", again just a city. This construction applies at pretty much every scope.)
普通话 is the official name of Mandarin, but there are some important synonyms:
- 汉语 ("Han language" - Han is the ethnic term for the Chinese people. As noted, synonymous with Mandarin.)
- 中文 ("Chinese" - here the term is taken from the name of China, 中国. Also synonymous with Mandarin.)
Out of curiosity, which language is it? And which writing system are you talking about?
Sometimes harder than you might think.
e.g. consider:
＊ロ口
＊タ夕
＊かカ力
＊りリ (edit: these are more similar in the monotype font in the HN input box than the rendered comment)