For the record, I’m Chinese-American. I’m a native English speaker and I can read Chinese at about a 3rd grade level in Simplified Chinese and speak Mandarin so my perspective is fairly narrow but also a bit unique because I can see both sides of the learning foundation (Kanji knowers vs. Western Anglophones).
I had an epiphany the other day. So you hear very often just how many advantages there are to learning Japanese if you already know Chinese. Some folks have already mentioned here that the challenges are different. It is easier in some ways, but harder in other ways. You have to go from morphing your 1-syllable 1-reading per character system to the multi-syllable multi-readings per Kanji system. But this doesn’t mean that much to a lot of Anglophones because they only see the massive hill that Kanji presents in the first place and can only imagine there’s some huge advantage. There is a huge advantage, I won’t deny, but we’re not here to discuss that.
I had a moment the other day where I was also struggling mightily with katakana readings in passages. My reading crawls to a snail’s pace, and I have to pause to understand what I just read, or skim and guess that first katakana character is relating to some noun I read previously.
Yet the young chinese international students in my college class have absolutely no issues with katakana. When we do readings, they read it and understand it just as quickly as hiragana. I thought about this and saw the parallels.
I’ll give an example. This particular passage was about prominent scientists. When you see アインスタイン, do you automatically recognize that as Einstein? Lets be real, your whole life, you’ve been internalizing the Roman alphabet spelling as the representation of this historic person’s last name, and for me, reading Katakana was simplified to a phonetic puzzle of subvocalizing it and trying to piece together what English loan word it’s relating back to. After 1.5 years, I feel like this is a really suboptimal way to learn Katakana. I’m just as bad at it today as I was a year ago. And yet, the native Chinese learners in my class, because their English is only so-so, don’t have all of that baggage, and read and internalize Einstein in its katakana form fairly easily.
But for them, our katakana problem is what they deal with in Kanji.
Too many characters have similar meanings, that my brain wants badly to take the shortcut. If I see 特別な図書館, I automatically read it as tebie de/na tushuguan. Not tokubetsu na toshokan. The meaning is the same, and I’ve spent 35 years reading it as tushuguan, it’s incredibly hard to get out of the “stop taking shortcuts in your reading” mode. The Chinese learners in my class are always struggling with not being able to keep up with learning the pronunciation and proper readings of words, while still acing tests. Our instructor even said that this is such a common problem that she encourages her Chinese students to read everything out loud and stop whenever they cannot pronounce something.
I’m 1.5 years in, and this has absolutely gotten better since the first months of learning. Common Kanji is well-internalized for me, but new kanji still suffers from this same problem and I have to actively fight it. Since the goal is to learn Japanese in the way that would lead to connecting everything together under one umbrella: the meaning, the pronunciation, and the writing, I try to think of new Kanji as Kanji, and not as Chinese characters with a new reading and pronunciation. It’s still a struggle.
For katakana, the problem is similar, as an English speaker, I need to stop taking shortcuts and actually read the alphabet in a way that would let me internalize the meaning instead of relating it back to English. I’m much worse at this because I didn’t recognize what I was doing until recently.
Anyway, that’s all I got. I’m still relatively new at this so if I’m repeating things everyone already knows sorry about that!
by kaevne