My mom’s japanese and many years ago, she bought a lot of books in Japanese directed for kids (with furigana) most of these books are science and historical-related books and like 70% of those books have furigana.
I would like to know your experience and your opinion on reading japanese content with furigana
8 comments
I read about 9 books which had furigana
pros:
* dictionary lookups are fast!
* good way to build vocab (not everything has kanji)
* good way to practice grammar and even learn new grammar
* good language exposure
* if it’s a book, it is a thing you can easily bring with you and use in-between times like at a waiting room or on an airplane
cons:
* your kanji won’t improve and may even get worse since you aren’t practicing it a lot more of the time
that’s a pretty big con
overall my thoughts are they are good as a stepping stone into more complicated works
if you have access to a popup-dictionary (yomichan etc) you can basically have furigana “at will” will still practicing your kanji before each click, it’s another route and it’s better, but requires digital reading material
Furigana is normal and great to use. People that say you need to stop cold turkey just learn differently. There is a reason children’s books and texts that are meant for younger or less learned people have furigana. Plus they even use furigana in higher level texts for kanji that are uncommon. It’s a great way to know how to pronounce kanji, and you can ignore them if you want to see if you know the word without looking.
Romaji is the one I cut out as soon as possible. Kana has an easy system with each character having a set sound, so it’s great to learn that right away. But with furigana I don’t see why it matters. You use it until you know the words and once you recognize the kanji you automatically ignore the furigana anyway.
That being said it is cool to read without it if possible. Never good to rely on any crutch for too long. I like reading things with it when I’m feeling tired or need something less taxing on my brain, then other times I challenge myself with harder texts.
Just do what feels right for you, and those science/history books sound like an amazing resource to learn from!
I don’t mind when it’s occasionally used for rare words, but using it for everything is just distracting. That being said, I heavily focused on kanji from day 1 and it’s undoubtedly my forte in Japanese.
Furigana is great. I feel that your eyes eventually start not reading the furigana once you’re learning more and more kanji but rather naturally gravitate towards the kanji instead.
In the beginning, it can get frustrating really fast trying to tackle no-furigana texts. There’s a good reason why furigana exists in the first place. In my experience, it’s not really a crutch you have to abandon but rather training wheels you eventually don’t need anymore with enough practice and kanji study.
I read lots and lots of books with furigana – you get used to it just being there even if you do not need it, but when you do it helps look up words. Contrary to u/Chezni19 I find that furigana helped me remember the pronunciation because I knew the Kanji because I did RTK. Furigana is a crutch in a way, but at the same time it is a great way to learn so long as you are first trying to read the Kanji and consciously try to commit it to memory or add to your SRS if it seems important.
In fiction you will sometimes see furigana which does not match the Kanji which is used with authorial intent for different purposes – using various flavorful words or using different readings with purpose or to show different levels of understanding between characters. This type is common in fantasy and sci-fi where you might have 古城 with the furigana シャトー or some such variation. The name escapes me right now, but it is like ateji in a way.
Unless you’re reading *just* to learn Kanji, there are no downsides. I read lots of kids books and they’ve really improved my comprehension. After a while you just stop looking at the furigana.
I think these books might be very useful to you assuming they contain a fair amount of kanji. Furigana in general is useful when you’re an intermediate and/or just want to read for enjoyment and not have to worry about not knowing how to read a word.
For some works like Jujutsu Kaisen and Bungou Stray Dogs it’s a must considering what kind of kanji both use.
Good for learning. Drop them later on when you get familiar with more words.
It’s no difference from training wheels for bicycles. You don’t want them on forever when you get better at riding one.