So I’ve been feeling bad about my reliance on pop-up dictionaries. I use it sparingly to look up word definitions (only for words that are key to understand a certain section, or ones that show up often to bug me enough to do it), but I use it for 読み方 *all the time*. I even recently started digitizing my physical books so I can use it on them.
I felt bad because I’ve previously learned English without needing to do this. I don’t recall ever referring to phonetic annotations for any unfamiliar word I encountered, and yet I became fluent anyway, and so I found it to be jarring to suddenly be so dependent on something other than the pattern-recognition device that’s in my brain to be able to read in Japanese.
But then lately I realized, that **the simple fact is that Japanese is just a different language than English**. There’s just no comparing an alphabetic language with a logographic one. In my humble opinion, I think Japanese is just a hard language to do pure reading in, and it’s probably the only one where you can’t just read native texts without a reading aid at first.
Sure, English phonics are hard and inconsistent, but even without having an extensive knowledge on that, I can still somewhat fluidly go through a text, even if I’m subvocalizing some words the wrong way (common suspects being “colonel”, “pint”, “facade”, “indicted”, and so on). There are some *sound* associated with those words that I can input to my brain, and at the very least I’ll be able to use those words in writing after I’ve acquired them.
That is not the case with Japanese. With up to a dozen of readings a single kanji can have, **you can only at best** ***guess*** **how an unknown word is read**, and that’s assuming you already know all the kanji used in it. If you’re not, then at worst you’d just be staring at a bunch of random squiggles that mean nothing to you, and at best you can only recognize a combination of radicals or components that have a vague association when combined, that you *still* have no sure idea how to read nor write.
That’s why this language has furigana, and the mere fact that it exists *at all* is enough prove that the Japanese writing system isn’t meant to be tackled without a reading aid. Contents aimed at kids and young teen have full furigana in them, and only for high school level contents and above do they start to display less of it. **In other words, native speakers are provided with reading assistance for over a** ***decade*** **before you’re expected to be able to read independently**. And even after that, full-blown adults still stumble on word readings from time to time, and they either look it up or just move on when they can afford to.
And so I think it’s naive to assume that we can just read adult level, native contents like novels or news articles on our own (as in, with no reading aid whatsoever) and assume that we’ll gain literacy from it. Assuming you’re consuming Japanese content only (or a vast majority of it) in the form of text, you might grasp a word’s *meaning* from context, but there’s no escaping looking its *reading* up if you want to use it either in writing or speech.
So yeah, in the end I just embraced the struggle, and accept the fact that ultimately I just have to put in extra effort in order to learn this difficult, but beautiful language. Would love to hear your thoughts on this!