I was wondering, when learning Japanese, when you read a text, does knowledge of kana and the words written with kana aid in infering the meaning of kanji when understanding thereof is incomplete?
Aside from the presence of okurigana letting the reader know it’s a word using kun’yomi, not really.
There are a lot of add ons to help you read kanji if need be. There are also sites like jisho, where you could idealy copy paste it. It depends on your language goal how important kanji even is to you. Just grind anki for vocab tbf.
Are you referring to furigana (the small “pronunciatiom guide” printed next to kanji in manga and books for younger readers) or simply the surrounding words? I don’t know if the furigana would necessarily help you understand the meaning unless you already know the meaning of the word the kanji is representing. If you know the meaning of たべる (to eat) but don’t know that the kanji is written as 食べる then yes, the furigana will let you know that this word is in fact たべる. But if you don’t know the meaning of the word, the kana isn’t going to help you. It’s probably more likely that knowledge of KANJI is going to get you closer to the meaning of an unfamiliar word because you can use the kanji to piece it together. As for knowing the SURROUNDING kana, I think we can mark this as a definite yes, because it allows for you to piece together the meaning via context, just like in English if you don’t know the meaning of a word you can use the surrounding sentence to figure it out. For example, if you see ごはんを食べてください and don’t know the kanji 食 but do know the meaning for ごはん (rice), you can probably piece together that they’re saying something about eating rice and 食 means “eat”. Suffice it to say, you need all the tools of Japanese in your toolbox in order to learn the language. That means kanji AND kana.
Study the most basic, common words on anki. Not a thousand but you can set that goal yourself. After learning some words, you should try reading native material.
You should read manga or visual novels as they are at your own pace. I’d recommend VNs as you can pair it with textractor and yomichan. If you’re gonna read manga use the jisho dictionary on another device. I’d recommend よつば or ルリドラゴン。
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Aside from the presence of okurigana letting the reader know it’s a word using kun’yomi, not really.
There are a lot of add ons to help you read kanji if need be. There are also sites like jisho, where you could idealy copy paste it.
It depends on your language goal how important kanji even is to you. Just grind anki for vocab tbf.
Are you referring to furigana (the small “pronunciatiom guide” printed next to kanji in manga and books for younger readers) or simply the surrounding words?
I don’t know if the furigana would necessarily help you understand the meaning unless you already know the meaning of the word the kanji is representing. If you know the meaning of たべる (to eat) but don’t know that the kanji is written as 食べる then yes, the furigana will let you know that this word is in fact たべる. But if you don’t know the meaning of the word, the kana isn’t going to help you. It’s probably more likely that knowledge of KANJI is going to get you closer to the meaning of an unfamiliar word because you can use the kanji to piece it together.
As for knowing the SURROUNDING kana, I think we can mark this as a definite yes, because it allows for you to piece together the meaning via context, just like in English if you don’t know the meaning of a word you can use the surrounding sentence to figure it out.
For example, if you see ごはんを食べてください and don’t know the kanji 食 but do know the meaning for ごはん (rice), you can probably piece together that they’re saying something about eating rice and 食 means “eat”.
Suffice it to say, you need all the tools of Japanese in your toolbox in order to learn the language. That means kanji AND kana.
Study the most basic, common words on anki. Not a thousand but you can set that goal yourself. After learning some words, you should try reading native material.
You should read manga or visual novels as they are at your own pace. I’d recommend VNs as you can pair it with textractor and yomichan. If you’re gonna read manga use the jisho dictionary on another device. I’d recommend よつば or ルリドラゴン。
I’d suggest you look into this https://sakubi.neocities.org/ and [Cure dolly](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj) if you’re not confident at your current grammar level. I’d check dolly for the first 20 vids or so, less if you’d like but she is a great teacher. Then check on sakubi as it has great tips.
Good luck, the hardest part is getting the ball rolling.