Katakana really slows me down. I’ve been thinking a lot about my slow reading speed and I noticed that katakana is the worst. With other words, either I know it or i don’t , and regardless I can just keep going. with katakana I feel the need to stop and sound it out, and try to map it to English
キリマンジャロ
Kilogram jar. No it’s: kill a man, jaro. That’s not it. Kelly Manjaro, the actress. Who’s she?
I wonder if anyone else feels this frustration.
5 comments
Probably because you *know* it’s supposed to be a foreign, likely English word, but the limited sounds of Japanese mean it doesn’t always sound like how you know it normally is. So it stumps you as you try to figure it out. Like you said, you can’t help trying to figure it which word it is. Also (shi, n, no, tsu and so) don’t help lol.
It’s not that you have to, it’s that you *can*! If you learned them the way you did fully japanese words they’d be just as fast
I totally feel the same way, katakana is the worst for me. I think it’s because for most students you have the least amount of practice reading Katakana. If you read most paragraphs, the majority of it is going to be in hiragana and kanji. It’s like being bad at reading italics or all caps, I guess. How often do you come across that? Not rare, but not THAT often.
Yep. Katakana loan words are the true final boss of Japanese. Sucks but you just gotta keep practicing.
I did read 3×3 eyes a few years ago and for Chinese characters they would write everything in kata so I guess that probably helped quite a bit.
I think because it’s more blocky than hiragana it blends together more at a glance… That and you naturally see it less often. I literally have a degree in this language and I still have to sound katakana out sometimes, so don’t worry!