Logographic writing systems are great, it’s what out minds are predisposed to. After all, even alphabets were logographic once.
One single problem though – after some time the meanings start to come through faster than the pronunciation of the symbol.
I guess it’s fine, but it’s very annoying! I have an inner narrator when I am reading and god it feels awful to read “Study-shiteiru” instead of “benkyoushiteiru” when I see 勉強している!
I am literally angry because the meaning of a word is associated with the picture moreso than the sound or reading of it, which is how I expect people associate meanings in languages that have alphabets or syllabaries (I know hiragana and katakana are the latter, but I am talking about kanji, not those 2).
So in fact, I am actually saving time when reading but it feels so wrong! And, I feel like I forget how to say some of the words more often because of this same reason. I might not remember how to read/say the word at all, but I perfectly understand the meaning!
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
EDIT: Copying a comment to explain the whole thing better
>Ok, I explained myself incorrectly. I do not actually subvocalize the word as “study” whenever that happens. I do, but it happens later.
>When I see the word, I understand what it means. Idk how to describe it. I “get” the meaning, I “see” the concept or whatever. Kind of like if you see an apple you just know it’s an apple and your brain thinks of it. Only after that my brain translates the meaning to the word I am more familiar with which would be any of the 2 languages I speak.
>Basically what happens to me is whatever happens when you look at an object. You know it’s that object and maybe after a brief pause you subconsciously subvocalize the word. When I wrote “study-shiteiru” I didn’t mean that I literally say the word “study” in my head. It’s just that whatever is associated with studying appears there first and only then the Japanese pronunciation.
>A better example on my part would’ve been a word like 車 – a picture of a car pops in my head faster than I can think about reading it as kuruma.
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I get what you mean.
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大 and 無い come with a big delay for me because of that.
I hope it tapers of eventually.
it’ll taper off for words you know
and for words you don’t know, it will occasionally be helpful in identifying their approximate meaning
As a beginner in Japanese, I was wondering about this, because I can imagine possibly getting to the point of reading long passages or even books and recognising what the kanji means faster than my brain actually processes the sounds they make.
As a couple of others have said, hopefully it just tapers off eventually the more we practice.
Just sounds like you’re subvocalising in English still…
How familiar are you with a word before learning the kanji? I’ve found it mostly an issue when I try to introduce the kanji before I’ve got the word really down. So, for your example, when I learned 勉強 I already knew べんきょう so it wasn’t like I was learning the meaning of the kanji to be “study” but that the kanji for べんきょう is 勉強
But, at the point of knowing and wanting to use/read the kanji then I’ve found reading aloud helps and it does get easier eventually.
Weird, as a beginner I have the exact opposite problem. Most kanji for me, the reading comes first and then from the reading I remember the meaning.
You may want to try additional approaches to studying to help with this too,
e.g., doing listening practice then writing the kanji for words you recognize where you know the kanji to help build Japanese-Japanese associations, or the reverse of writing furigana each time you see a kanji. Ideas like that.
Otherwise it’s about practice for sure but you’re already making progress by knowing meanings, which is awesome 😎👍.
Japanese kids learn to speak the language years before they learn the Kanji. I don’t want to discount the fact that, as adults and having learnt Kanji, Japanese people can add another layer of nuance through careful use of Kanji (e.g. in literature), but fundamentally Kanji are representations of spoken language and not the other way around.
The fact that you’re recalling the meaning of the Kanji before the reading (something that probably happens to every Japanese learner, myself included) is more an artifact of how we learn Japanese as adults where typically we put an emphasis on Kanji much earlier (probably because this makes it easier to consume written material in the absence of everyday conversation opportunities). In fact, I do sometimes wonder if the excessive focus on Kanji (and reading in general) is not sometimes a bit harmful. For example, my listening and speaking skills are severely lagging behind my reading skills.
(It’s also IMHO silly to claim that logographic writing is something we’re predisposed to. For the most part of human history, writing in the modern sense wasn’t a thing. You can debate whether the human mind is innately pre-disposed for *spoken* language (this is an old debate), but to my mind nobody claims that our species is biologically wired to acquire writing, let alone of a particular form, much like nobody would argue that we have a natural capability to drive cars or use computers.
If anything, historically the spread of alphabetic scripts over alternatives, might seem to indicate a certain potential evolutionary advantage of alphabets, but that’s quite a different thing than claiming that it’s natural or something like that.
Note also that no writing system is 100% logographic, in Japanese this is e.g. exemplified not only by kana, but also by ateji.)
“A rough, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman emerged from a slough to walk through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing.”
Context sometimes matters just as much even with an alphabetical system.
I mean, this isn’t really a kanji problem. This is a “thinking in English” problem.
The problem isn’t that you’re associating kanji with “meanings rather than readings”, it’s that you’re associating them with English words rather than Japanese ones.
If you were as comfortable with the Japanese word べんきょう as the English word “study”, then you wouldn’t be having this problem.
I don’t say this to be insulting, but blaming this on kanji being “logographic” is really just kind of an excuse. When your English-speaking brain wants to say or subvocalize “study”, you have to stop yourself and train it to think べんきょう instead. That’s the only way around it.
I don’t have that problem
>A better example on my part would’ve been a word like 車 – a picture of a car pops in my head faster than I can think about reading it as kuruma.
As it should be. There are relatively few times kuruma is what you want when you see it. Lots of times you need (means of transportation with some round, rotating part)
車両、車椅子、自動車、アメ車、自転車、
Yeah… you just need more practice to stop doing that and pretty much that there’s no more to say really
It’s a bless meanings are seen before sounds.
Listening more can solve this. You can listen to audio of new vocabs and its sentences as shadow for the rest of the day after learning new words. It works for me. I found that i can remember new vocabularies better and also improve listening skills.
Which is why during the learning process, when you’re trying to recall the meaning, you should visualize the scene WITHOUT translating. This is a step not needed. Visualizing the scene is enough. Try to avoid thinking in an other language as much as possible, and you’ll get fluent quicker.
What I do is that i try to learn the reading first and associate it with the topic. Like はたらく which means to work. Then I try to learn how the word is written in kanji.
I try as much as i can to only associate the kanji with the reading example, 働く is read as はたらく. That’s the only time when I try to guess what topic it is representing. Most of the time I can think of a mental image for a kanji. But sometimes when I cant describe it with pictures or words, that’s when I associate it with the english word for example since i cant think of a mental image of the reading, はたらく, i just associate it with the english translation which is “to work”
Another example 犬 is read as いぬ. The mental image i can muster of the reading is 🦮
Another is 親切 is read as しんせつ. I can’t think of a mental image of the word so i associate it with the english translation, “kind/gentle”
Other example
病院 – びょういん – 🏥
上手 – じょうず – “skillful”
船 – ふね – 🚢
I had this same issue. I fixed it by removing all of the English from my flash cards and study materials. My 勉強 card only says べんきょう in the back.
I still had some bad habits to break. Living in Japan, I’d internalized the meanings of things like 入口／出口 long before I knew the actual words, but I just had to make sure I was only working towards associating kanji with the *japanese* meaning, leaving English out of the equation entirely. I also made sure that I only introduced kanji *after* I had the vocab pretty solid.
Heh, I get what you mean, but I seem to have skipped that stage. I do read them properly, though initially I would read it and then translate the meaning in my head.
It goes way with practice and exposure.
I have the same problem, but because I speak Mandarin, and I know the Chinese readings of a lot of the Kanji, I end up doing what you’re doing, but reading the Kanji in Chinese instead.
Your post and the conversation it sparked are really interesting. I can say that I have the same (or very similar) experience: understanding the meaning of kanji in a word or sentence faster than I can remember their correct pronunciation in the given context. For me, though, the circumstances are entirely different from yours. I learned to speak, read, and write Japanese pretty fluently while living in Sapporo in the early 1970s. Later I went through long periods when I’d use spoken Japanese fairly regularly in my work, but rarely needed to read or write it. Now, in retirement, I see that I usually recall the meanings of kanji pretty well, but have to pause sometimes to dredge up their pronunciation in my head.
So I guess the challenge we share for very different reasons just speaks to how effectively kanji can convey meaning, even if the simplest of them sometimes have half a dozen pronunciations, depending on context. Lol Good luck, and I’m sure you’ll keep getting better with practice! (And I hope I will, too!)
This is just a thought but maybe you’re not listening enough and only focusing on reading. Listening and getting a natural hunch of the language might help you in this case.
you wont find it annoying when youll take a N1 exam and youll be able to parse the text quickly without actually reading, and even though you dont remember the reading of a word youll know what it means 🙂
I run into this same problem in Chinese. I remember a lot of the core words and can context clue my way through stuff but there’s no indication of the pronunciation of a word by the written form. (Some root characters sometimes share pronunciation but not tone, etc. It’s inconsistent)
This will go away with more immersion. Your brain needs to literally “rewire” itself to associate Japanese symbols/concepts with Japanese words, and it only does that through repetition. You may find that the Japanese word/pronunciatioin comes to mind quickly for some kanji to which you’ve been exposed a lot, and that will work its way through other symbols. For me, 車 and 勉強 immediately bring to mind the concept, but also the Japanese word, without having to translate from English in my mind. But others haven’t reached that level for me yet, for example cardinal directions 北、東、南、西 I know immediately what direction they’re talking about, and my mind immediately goes to “what’s the word for ‘east’…” rather than ”ひがし”. This is also the case with some kanji with multiple common readings, where I know the meaning but have to consider the correct reading to use. But yeah, totally understand where you’re coming from. Like most things with language acquisition, repetition is the only cure.
Like everyone else has said, a lot of this is because you are still translating in your head instead of natively reading, but really, doesn’t this also occur in English? Most people can read in their heads faster than they can out loud. And if you “narrate” a book in your head, even in English, it’s going to slow you down compared to just “reading”. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re focusing on pronunciation, your reading is going to slow down, regardless of language.
> Logographic writing systems are great, it’s what out minds are predisposed to. After all, even alphabets were logographic once.
That most of them eventually more and more progressed to phonemic writing systems and the inverse never happens suggests that the latter is more convenient.
Easiest to come up with does not mean easiest to use.