So recently I’ve been reading about the science teaching children to read. Apparently there’s an ongoing war between Phonics vs Whole Language approach, where basically in the former you teach sounds and how they correspond to the letters, and in the latter you just learn the word as a whole, essentially recognizing them by their shape.
I won’t get into too much details on the whole debate, Wikipedia has a couple articles that summarizes it nicely[^(1)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics#The_Reading_Wars_%E2%80%93_phonics_vs._whole_language)^(,) [^(2)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading#Teaching_reading), but I’m curious about what your thoughts are on applying the phonics approach to learning kanji in isolation.
Basically, the same way you learned that:
>The letter **a** is read **ɛ** in “said”, **æ** in “ask”, **ə** in “about”,
>
>The letter **c** is read **kʰ** in “come”, **ʃ** in “social”,
>
>etc.,
you learn that:
>**明** is read **あ** in「夜明け」, **みょう** in「光明」, **めい** in 「説明」,
>
>**行** is read **こう** in 「旅行」, **ぎょう** in 「行列」, **おこな** in 「行う」,
>
>and so on.
Basically, you learn **kanji in isolation, but only for their common reading**. The same way that you should just accept that there are exceptions in the phonics rules, you should accept that some kanji will have some uncommon readings even in common words.
Now this is obviously different from RTK, Wanikani, and other kanji isolation study methods that focuses on memorizing kanji *meaning* instead. The potential that I see here is that, in my humble opinion, it’s easier to remember kanji meaning just by reading and figuring it out from context, whereas for the reading you have to “manually” attach them, and that usually involves simply memorizing them.
So basically, my proposition is this:
>**Instead of using isolated kanji study to memorize meaning**, which you can get by just encountering them in context, **we can instead use it to learn their readings**, the same way native English speakers did with phonics instruction.
What do you think? This is not at all a suggestion or a tips of some sort, I myself have never done an isolated kanji study, and have just been looking up words as I go, but I just thought that it could be an interesting approach to learning to read in Japanese, and I’m genuinely curious if you guys have some research or just insight in general about it.
3 comments
Interesting, I’m also still torn about this. I learned English to a high proficiency without ever getting a formal phonics instruction in school, yet the literature seems to say that it can quite boost your reading proficiency as long as you compliment it with “real” reading, as in, not just for the sake of decoding the text.
The consensus that I’ve found is that, sure, phonics won’t suddenly grant you more reading comprehension, but it sure helps you be more independent in your reading journey, allowing you to at least be able to recognize how a word would sound even if you’ve never seen it before, and making it easier for you to recognize it in your listening activities.
Ultimately you need to learn both reading and meaning. It’s easier to get primed well for both through memorization, but you can only develop speed of recall in context through practice in context. Therefore cramming some vocab meaning and readings, then practicing / encountering said vocab a lot is the most efficient way to learn vocab. And grammar for that matter. Grammar usually needs more explanation than a flash card to be effective though.
I’m just going by the title. Kanji readings and meaning is context dependant. If you ‘learn’ kanji in isolation your ability to real world read and understand it will be trash. The whole method of doing this basically came about from the difficulty of looking up Kanji you don’t know when you’re unfamiliar with them which is no longer an issue with today’s tools. Waste your time if you want or learn real Japanese.