So I have a question to people who are fluent in Japanese.
I’m quite new to the language, maybe between n5 and n4. And in a text I read one kanji/kana after another, and then combine them in a cohesive sentence in my head. However in English (not my mother tongue either) I don’t read singular letters one after another; at this point I visually recognize the whole word by its appearance, you know what I mean?
So my question is – does something similar happen in Japanese as well, when one is fluent enough? Like can you recognize the whole word (like 図書館 or クリスマス) by its appearance, or do you still read one sign after another and then combine them in your head, but just faster?
5 comments
I absolutely know what you mean.
And yes! This will happen to you in Japanese too.
This phenomenon is called “sight reading”.
I’m a native English speaker and I remember learning how to read. It definitely was a process of reading and sounding out one letter after another, then figuring out the whole word, then combining the several words into a cohesive sentence.
So yeah, same thing. I can’t sight read all Japanese yet, I’m still picking up a lot of vocabulary, but I can sight read quite a bit.
Here’s the old school word for how we read in chunks: Gestalt Reading.
Understand that for any language the units are likely to be words, not entire sentences.
Kanji makes this easier, which is why so many people suggest learning Kanji all at once, early on so you see 図書舘 as a unit that means library instead of an misspelling, that you fight with as it does not appear in a dictionary,
There are a bunch of these than Natives do not even notice: 完壁 instead of 完璧, etc. 徴妙 instead of 微妙．It’s a reasonable response to just say that’s because the differences between the replaced kanji are just fine differences, but that’s what native Gestalt Reading is all about: making predictions based on experience, experience gained by reading native materials. I talk a fair bit about the fact that natives speaking their languages only hear 60-80% of what it said, and reconstruct the rest based on expected patterns. But written materials work the same way which is why natives can read xerox’d sheets that have kanji that cannot be resolved, as long as it is actual native materials.
If you have an interest in the topic,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_the_Spring refers to a fact that natives do not read the error, while ESL people see it. Better to do a image search to see it in action, but it is a thing once seen, cannot easily be unseen.
That Man Yuta has an interesting video about something we can read that native Japanese cannot, because we pattern match differently than a Japanese person would. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZLsd163Sw8
He also does a bunch of man on the street Gestalt Reading quizzes.
I love the fact that in the introduction to this video about whether he can fool Japanese people about Kanji:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IARguDQIGVs
He is wearing a shirt that probably says count on it, but because of the letter spacing, and the way he is holding his mic, I keep reading C-U-N-T on it. He probably never saw that in the edit, where my Gestalt captured it.
I am nowhere near proficient in Japanese but after just a few months of kanji study I can already recognize a lot of kanji the way you describe. So I’d say it’s just a matter of familiarity and the more you practice, the easier it will get.
I’m not fluent, but yes. Gain familiarity with script by reading a lot and eventually it takes more conscious effort to break down a lot of words than to just recognize words. I see a word and know what it means before realising its composition
you read words. words are always the basic unit of japanese. never at any point do you choose how to “pronounce a kanji”.