Japanese is a wierd and hard language!!!

[Gamer4Life]

Originally Posted by kirakira

You tell me which one is easier to read.
うらにわにはにわ、にわにはにわにわとりがいる。
裏庭には庭、庭には二羽鶏がいる

庭 - Garden
裏庭 - Backyard
羽 - Counter for Chicken
鶏 - Chicken

hiragana its easier for me ofcourse cause thats the one i learn the most. i understand that kanji would make it shorter and easier, but that problem is that many of them have the same name which confuses many people.

[kirakira]

Originally Posted by Nyororin

I`ve never seen a Korean children`s book... How do they make it easier to read? I`ve always thought Korean was technically phonetic, with pieces combined to make individual "characters"... (Please correct me if I`m wrong.)

You are right, but now they NEED spaces because they almost wiped out Hanja/Kanji from their writing system. But I still see Hanja used every now and then in the newspaper.

[kirakira]

Originally Posted by Gamer4Life

hiragana its easier for me ofcourse cause thats the one i learn the most. i understand that kanji would make it shorter and easier, but that problem is that many of them have the same name which confuses many people.

Look I don't disagree with you that I think it's a terribly confusing system, but... we all have to put up with it and it's fantastic quiz material. All the quiz shows in Japan feature in some form another, Kanji quizes.

Just to make you feel better, they tried to get rid of Kanji after the war, and firstly restrict it to something like 1800 characters, and they THOUGHT at the time they can reduce this as time progresses. Well now we are in 2009, Kanji Aptitude Test (Kanken) is one of the most popular cert in Japan, even more popular than English, and there is a so called Kanji boom happening. So obviously that didn't work.

[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by Gamer4Life

really? well for me its really easy to read hiragana. i study so much that it's no problem. and with the spaces added is so much easier and thats suppose to help. i dont understand why its hard for u.

I didn`t say it was hard to read. I said it was frustrating.

If you only know a small number of words, I`m sure it`s easy. But it`s a whole lot easier to sight read than it is to read by sound. A good example would be to read something letter by letter. I`m sure that in English you`re not sounding out every word you read as you get to it, right? As you become better at reading, you "sight read" words you know without ever giving thought to how you would sound them out.

With Hiragana only sentences, you cannot do this. You have to read it sound by sound and then combine those sounds into a word. This takes three or more times the amount it would take to just read something with Kanji.

Have someone spell a sentence out to you with no pause between each word, and see how natural it feels.

[Gamer4Life]

Originally Posted by Nyororin

I didn`t say it was hard to read. I said it was frustrating.

If you only know a small number of words, I`m sure it`s easy. But it`s a whole lot easier to sight read than it is to read by sound. A good example would be to read something letter by letter. I`m sure that in English you`re not sounding out every word you read as you get to it, right? As you become better at reading, you "sight read" words you know without ever giving thought to how you would sound them out.

With Hiragana only sentences, you cannot do this. You have to read it sound by sound and then combine those sounds into a word. This takes three or more times the amount it would take to just read something with Kanji.

Have someone spell a sentence out to you with no pause between each word, and see how natural it feels.

true,lol. Kanji makes easier but the problem is that many have the same name. Sometimes i just get confuse.

[MMM]

Originally Posted by Gamer4Life

true,lol. Kanji makes easier but the problem is that many have the same name. Sometimes i just get confuse.

So how would it be easier if you removed the distinctions the kanji give you, considering there are so many with the same pronunciation (as in Kirakira's example).

Fluent readers read hiragana, but see kanji. The characters have meaning, where hiragana doesn't. Because of the limited sounds in Japanese, this is part of the reason getting rid of them would be near insanity.

[blushyy]

I understand what you mean. I can read hiragana faster and easier than kanji, since sometimes I forget how to pronounce certain kanji characters, woops. But having kanji makes it a lot easier to understand the meaning of what is being written. Kanji is great. Once you know more and more kanji, you'd be much happier, haha.

[RadioKid]

It is easy for Japanese children to learn Japanese. Because they learn the words as sound and write down in hiragana then gradually learn kanji adding the concept of the words.

Kanji is useful because it carries higher or complicated concept in short form.

Korean people already found they need Kanji and will get back to Kanji world.

[SceptileMaster]

I personally never had a problem with having to learn the 3. It was something I knew I was going to have to do before I started learning the language. I also like the idea of the Kanji having meanings.

Also it's more like learning 1 as hiragana and katakana didn't take long at all. Both in a few days each or something, and that's probably slower than a lot of people have learnt it in.

[Sinestra]

Originally Posted by Gamer4Life

I took japanese for 1 year in college and im starting to feel sorry for the japanese kids when they have to learn this language. I dont understand why they need to have 3 alphabets(hiragana,katakana,and kanji). I think its kind of stupid to have katakana for foreingn words. And Kanji, i think its the worst to learn. Many kanji have the same name which makes them hard to learn.
They should just had stick with Hiragana.
This is just my opinion.

I fail to see why Japanese is a weird language. It can be difficult because it is so different from western languages i have been taking formal lessons for about 4 weeks now and i am not having half of the problems people state they hit when they start. If you have these preconceptions and notions of the language you are not going to do well. I dont find Japanese weird i see as a language that has evolved over time like every language does and the result is what we see today. I knew i was going to have learn all 3 languages so even before i started my lessons i was self studying. I will admit i do get frustrated sometimes but I still dont think of it as weird.

are you still learning or have you given up?