This is something I just realized recently. All natural human languages originate from a spoken form, and writing systems are a recent invention of us, relatively speaking. What that means is that the words that we use in languages are *sound units* at their core.
So kanji is only useful in the context of reading. You can’t hear kanji, you can’t speak kanji, and although you *can* write kanji for communication purposes, you’re limiting yourself to a mute/deaf person’s level of communication, or even actually lower, assuming you don’t know how to sign.
For example: 生家 isn’t a word, it’s how the word せいか *happens to be written in kanji*.
The kanji gives you hint as to what the word could mean, but that’s it. If you know of the word せいか then you can hear it in speech and recognize it. Given the right context, you can say it, you can write it, either typed or handwritten, and know that others will know what you’re talking about. You can’t do all three, except the very latter, with 生家.
And so the **words that you see in kanji that you don’t know the reading of is going to be functionally useless for you**. If you want to learn the word “the house where one was born”, you should learn せいか, *and then* recognize that it can be written as 生家 in kanji.
Some practical considerations I think we can take based on this revelation are;
1. Furigana is actually way more useful than what most learners perceive them as. They’re allowing you to see the words for what they actually are (sound units that you can use in speech and writing), and the kanji is there to help you disambiguate them from other homophones.
2. [Don’t be frustrated](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/wfwwgs/accepting_the_fact_that_reading_in_japanese_is/) when you have to look up a word’s reading that you already know the meaning of. Because what you’re looking up is not “just the reading”, *it’s the very word itself*.
3. You could benefit way more than you might’ve thought from listening. Once again, there’s more utility that you can get from せいか rather than from 生家 , and you can acquire the former from listening without needing to know the latter.
7 comments
Something you can only preach if you haven’t learned the readings and discovered that they actually *are* very useful in helping with figuring out new vocabulary on the fly in purely spoken contexts. But, by all means, enjoy your underinformed pseudo-intellectual excuse for slacking off.
1. I’ve always found furigana to be more distracting than useful – maybe that’s just me though.
2. I don’t really get frustrated at that.
3. Absolutely agree. Listening practice is extremely useful.
Learning to read is also very important as well as that’s the form that most non-Japan-resident learners of Japanese will encounter. It’s also very helpful in disambiguation.
i don’t understand the point of this post??? like what 😭😭😭 when you learn a new word u learn the pronunciation of the word alongside the kanji, right?? like thats what everyone does so i dont understand the point of pitting kanji vs furigana against eachother like they arent complementary. ppl in the replies of that other thread you linked to was talking about skipping over a word if u dont know the reading which is pretty normal, i definitely do it reading japanese novels as long as i understand enough of the context, and hell i do it with english too if i see words like “solipsistic” (i mean i know that one now, but).
also u say if u dont learn the pronunciation u wont understand it in speech but thats really no different?? if im watching a show like succession and they start talking using professional business vocabulary my brain just kinda skips over that too and infers the meaning from context.
my view is, you can never ever learn an entire language’s lexicon. native language or second language. thats why its important to have strategies to comprehend texts which contain a few words you dont understand. of course as a second language learner you should take the effort to learn as many unknown words as you can, but there are always going to be words u dont know, and when ur at a certain level of proficiency inferring a words meaning through kanji or context is not necessarily a negative thing.
with that being said, maybe i missed the point of your whole post and this reply is totally irrelevant. apologies but the argument your post was making wasnt very clear to me.
Absolutely. My approach is, “how do children learn Japanese” and the sound always comes first. Kanji is something that kids grow into and so I try to emulate my relationship to it as much as possible.
>you’re limiting yourself to a mute/deaf person’s level, or even actually lower
This seems carelessly disrespectful; I feel like you could have chosen a better point of reference.
> And so the words that you see in kanji that you don’t know the reading of is going to be functionally useless for you.
Uh… No? When reading I can still guess the meaning of a word from context even if I don’t know how to read the kanji (and I can just look up the reading.)
> If you want to learn the word “the house where one was born”, you should learn せいか, and then recognize that it can be written as 生家 in kanji.
But I’ll remember 生家 better if I know that 生 means “birth” and 家 means “house”. And I know the reading of 生 from 生命, for instance, and 家 from 実家.
I’m not really sure what point this post is trying to make.
I think this is true to some extent. But you also have to recognize there is a feedback loop between speaking and writing. The way we speak influences the way we write, and the way we write influences the way we speak.
For example, the way 生家 is written influences the way it is read, because those characters tend to be read せい and か in Chinese compounds. While it does also have the reading しょうか, the more common reading is preferred due to the influence of speaking and standardization.
If speaking was completely detached from writing, we would expect more sound changes and corruptions of Chinese compounds, but those are relatively uncommon (in fact I can’t think of any good examples at the moment).