I wrote an article on learning Japanese. It is good

This is, technically, a good point that Japanese is not perfectly 1-to-1 writing-to-pronunciation in the kana syllabaries (I guess in particular Hiragana, as I imagine it’s probably rare to write actual Japanese particles like the topic particle as Katakana (ハ). And, it is commonly claimed (even in some textbooks; even when they go on, in the next few pages to contradict themselves) that learning the ‘defined’ Hiragana sounds allows you to correctly read all Japanese written in Hiragana.

Exceptions do indeed exist.

On the other hand, the way you wrote it, you were seemingly claiming that it was common with Kanji for the official reading to be different from the official pronunciation. I don’t have hardly any experience with Japanese-in-the-wild yet, only really from learning resources (will remedy that soon, but that’s the situation for the moment), but I haven’t run across any examples I can remember, off the top of my head, where a Japanese word’s given reading is different from how it’s actually pronounced.

Because, although it’s natural to assume that kanji have prescribed/strictly-official readings (and I even basically made it sound like that above), my understanding has shifted a bit recently, and it seems to me more accurate to say that pronunciations are more tightly associated with words than kanji, and the kanji guide the typical pronunciation of the word, but some words (for example) started with some particular pronunciation, and the kanji was associated with the word later on.

Sometimes that would mean that the kanji would pick up a ‘new reading’, like I imagine how they picked up the kunyomi readings. But there are some words, even very common words, where the kanji is used purely for meaning and not pronunciation, and there are even words where although it the kanji seems totally natural and seems like it should define the pronunciation, nevertheless the word has an unrelated pronunciation.

Yet – and this is my main point – all this really means to me is that the pronunciation is more associated with the word itself. And the kanji, while often being used to guide the pronunciation (e.g. of a newly-created word formed by combining a couple of kanji) – and of course it’s much better if words and their kanji match in a systematic way – kanji don’t strictly prescribe the pronunciation. It’s more accurate to say that the word itself does.

E.g. I recently learned the word for ‘speech’, 台詞, which – like other part-of-speech-type words that end in -詞 tend to end with the reading -し – I expected would probably be pronounced something like だいし or たいし.

But in this case, this word for ‘speech’ has a seemingly completely unrelated pronunciation, せりふ. And neither 台 nor 詞 are listed (in Jisho.org, at least) as having any readings in any way similar to any part of せりふ.

So, however it happened, historically, or whatever, the word is pronounced せりふ, and that’s that. The kanji, in this case, are more or less just ‘along for the ride’, though they do carry some semantic meaning.

So, even in this case, I wouldn’t consider this a case of the kanji having ‘exceptions’ or ‘inconsistent’ readings. There are, according to Jisho.org, at least (I haven’t done any research on this), no official or prescriptive (even if uncommon) readings of 台 or 詞 that give the kanji a ‘reading’ of せ, り, ふ, せり, りふ, or せりふ.

It’s the word that is has the ‘reading’ せりふ. And the fact that this word has this reading and this kanji, doesn’t automatically imply that now the kanji also have any such ‘readings’. In this case, the kanji are being used for some other purpose than ‘reading’. (Presumably semantic, but who knows (I don’t!), there could be a bazillion possible historical/accidental reasons how this word, its reading, and its official kanji came to be conjoined together.)

Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe there’s a more logical way to express the correct relationships, I don’t know. Maybe it truly is an example of an ‘exception’ in Japanese. But to me, it doesn’t feel that way. To me, the reading, expressed in Hiragana, is せりふ. That’s the reading given, and that’s also how it’s pronounced when spoken. The kanji ‘doesn’t get a say in the matter’, it seems to me, so it’s not really a difference between how the word is ‘read’ in terms of characters and how it’s ‘read’ in terms of pronunciation.

Anyway, hopefully that example helps to illuminate why people were disagreeing with what you wrote about kanji having differences/exceptions between textual and verbal expressions. (Again, I could easily be wrong; anyone feel free to correct me if so, please! :blush:)

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I wonder if you meant this ironically/sarcastically or something? Because it actually sounds quite a bit like the “Don’t learn Japanese because blah blah blah” advice at the beginning of the article.

Who are you (or anyone) to say what @Jazzter would be better off spending time doing? Jazzter bothered to discuss it with some friends, write it up, and had the courage to post it here and expose it to public critique. Might not be important to you, but maybe it is to Jazzter.

I could easily make a similar (and just as empty and dismissive) discouragement to just about anyone for just about anything they do. For example – and this is meant solely for irony, it’s not serious, but maybe it will illustrate my point more clearly – I could easily say to you (or anyone, ‘you’ in the generic sense, not you specifically):

I would really think you’d be better off spending the time you’re reading and replying to this forum thread simply putting all your time and effort into becoming the ultimate, perfect, ideal, most-flawless entity in the entire universe.

But who am I to make such a suggestion? I hope the absurdity of it enhances the point, rather than distracts from it.


Well, technically, you just used them, so …

:wink:

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I haven’t read every last thing in this thread but I am a little impressed with Jazzters replies, how s/he’s taking criticism and thinking about improving their work.

Jazzters seems to have and certainly is going to need a pretty thick skin if s/he is going to continue writing anything read by the Internet. What I ment in my comment really was nothing more than the old advice to all budding authors and writers starting out ‘Write what you know’.

If you read

from me writing

then I don’t know what to say. I literally said the opposite of what you think I ment, so who knows what you could take from this reply.

Please don’t take anything I say and then write “it actually sounds quite a bit like” or “if you boil down what you said” or “what I think you mean is”

Yeah I was thinking about that when we was saying there are no good free resources. Memorizing the charts sounds exhausting but that doesn’t mean you gotta shell out tons of money for good mnemonics. That one webpage taught me the hiragana in under a week (and I was taking it pretty slow)

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Yeah I’m a bit surprised about insisting on paid apps for the quickest and easiest part of Japanese. Most people can read and write hiragana and katakana after a few weeks of study. I never bought anything just transcribed words in a notebook. I’m not exactly a genius either. I’m sure those apps can be beneficial but I wonder if the money is worth the “time” savings since I’m assuming most people regardless of method learn within a few weeks.

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thanks again for the massive feedback, will go through every response when the time comes and try to take it all in objectively

For the article/material I plan to update it a year from now, let’s see how far I come with the hour a day I have on average

Edit: For later reference, I was level 15 at the time of writing this comment.

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When article mentioned Matt, i just couldn’t take it seriously.
Also Rosetta Stone, some shitty app. Better use WK or Torii SRS with Kanji Senpai. Or Renshuu plus Anki desks.

Log

Last time I wrote I was around level 20. Been a while.
Doing 30 min a day currently plus whatever I need to level up except on Sunday, where I do several hundreds of reviews. Kinda works for me. Sometimes I have a little time and log in just to do literally 5-10 on my phone (e.g. when waiting in line somewhere).

Confusion guesser and correction script still the best scripts. Confusion guesser definately a candidate to be a native feature from level ~10 onwards. There are just a lot of very similar characters.

Speech ability not increasing much. Bunpro is ok here and there but not really doing it for me much currently. Tried some YouTube content like jpn 101 and jpn ammo, feel it’s very slow.

Thinking of memorizing some more core sentences similar to これをください or 時間がありませんですから

Still looking for a script to remove burning items.

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Seems you’ve started using this as a kind of study log!

Be careful not to put です after ~ます/ません/ました forms. Of course, you can say ~ませんでした for negative past tense.

How are you practicing speech? Do you have a conversation partner, or do you try to make sentences on your own?

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First I tried material for toddlers, but it was too boring.
Problem with the adult videos is that the there is so much subtlety and so little clear vocabulary

So far I got “feels good”, “stop!”, “aww, stawp it”, “ausch” and “more”

Edit: Also for some reason people always seem to go somewhere even though they are clearly not. No idea why but they sure say they are coming a lot

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Are… Are you trying to learn Japanese from porn?

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Yes, I do believe that was the implied punchline. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Outrageous. Please be proffesional. While I am not sure what kind of misunderstanding this is, I assure you this to be a coincidence.

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For speaking, I realized the only thing that really helps is speaking with an actual person…
From watching content online, for other languages, my understanding increased only. I also tried shadowing and this practice dialogs but they improve mostly just pronunciation and learning some more idioms but not my ability to actually converse with another human and to be able to respond spontaneously…

If you are patient, you might use apps like HelloTalk and Tandem to find language partners but I haven’t been much successful as it rarely goes beneath the chatting online stage and if it does, at some point, the weekly conversations suddenly end.
Also, language partners are also for both sides - it is important to be aware of that the other person also likes to learn your language. Not all people are aware of that, sadly.

So if you are having time contrasts - whether it’s being not wanting to search for a language partner or not wanting to spend your time on speaking your native language with another person or you just weren’t successful with finding someone, you might want to try to hire a tutor.

On iTalki, I found great language tutors and they are not very expensive, especially not community tutors. I pay for mine, e.g. 8-10 € for 45 min. (I have 2, one for only speaking, one for going together through Tobira; in total I have classes 2 times per week).
=> After I started taking conversation classes, my speaking abilities improved very fast. Also I learned a lot of new vocabulary as we spoke about several topics, like my hobbies or society, so topics, I would also talk about with people who are speaking my native language or English.
There are teachers with several backgrounds, so if you want to practice Business conversations, there are also tutors for that.

For speaking, there is no application that beats the efficiency of the interaction with a human being. All of them, which promise, they do, are supplements in my experience.

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Regarding speaking

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