I have been mostly lurking and only really popping into the daily questions thread but I thought considering the “normal people” post, and that perhaps this question might benefit other beginners maybe I should make a post about it.
I have been drilling hiragana pretty hard and can recognize all of it now. I know some people can do that in a day or a week but I guess my brain isn’t wired like that since it definitely took more time for me and I’m very happy to now be able to reliably recall the characters when I see them, and visualize most of them. However this takes time and I am still continuing to work on it. When drilled on individual characters, words or short phrases I can get it much more quickly than trying to read a string of characters in a sentence.
I’ve reached the point though where I could read through material that is all hiragana for practice. I know a little katakana so far but definitely need more work and obviously kanji will take much longer although I know a few common ones.
What I’m wondering is, at this stage is it ok to practice reading not really knowing what I’m reading, to go beyond flash cards and single word vocabulary? For those things I’m fairly quick but with full sentences with multiple particles it really makes my brain work differently. However I don’t want to build bad habits so thought I should ask before spending too much time doing it.
For example, one post today shared about crunchynihongo. I checked out the first story, which starts out むかし、 みやこ の ちかく の むら に たけとり の おきな と よばれて いる おじいさん が いました。 Curious how my reading would be interpreted, I tried speaking into Google translate with me reading it, and then again with me reading the romanji (I have no intention of using romanji for learning this – this was purely for comparison to see how my slower reading would be interpreted vs. normal speed). The romanji translation was spot on but my slow reading had a lot of errors in the translation and ー between characters where I was taking a second trying to recall the next character.
Seeing this result is what made me think to ask this since it my reading was interpreted as being that off by the translator, perhaps I was building bad habits with how I speak. So if you don’t mind, is it ok/a good idea to read through hiragana passages trying to get better at reading when I don’t know the meaning of everything I’m saying/seeing? Or should I keep drilling as I had been on single words, short phrases and only approach longer material when I know what I’m seeing or saying?
3 comments
No harm in reading above your level just don’t smash your head in frustration. If you know zero kanji and have a very limited vocabulary then most native works, even with furigana, are going to be an exercise in stop and start looking up of every other word. Also you won’t know many conjugations and constructs and a dictionary wont help. If that’s enjoyable go for it, but for many it feels bad and there’s nothing wrong with reacting that way. By all means engage with any native material you like as early as you like. Just be judicious with your time and emotional energy in the process.
The problem with this is that speaking *naturally* requires understanding of how the sounds in a word flow together, and how the words fit together in a sentence (what linguists call [prosody](https://misslinguistic.com/linguistics-101-series-why-you-need-to-master-prosody/)). If you just pronounce the characters one at a time without understanding what you’re saying, you’re probably going to sound like a robot. That’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world, but as you said, you’ll be building bad habits that you’ll need to unlearn later.
As long as you can recognize the characters fairly *reliably* (even if slowly), it makes sense to go ahead and start studying the language itself. By doing this, you’ll automatically get practice reading hiragana along the way, but it’ll be in contexts where you actually understand the meaning.
If you care about learning to speak and listen, then make sure you’re not *exclusively* practicing reading. Do whatever listening exercises are available in your course/textbook, and practice repeating or [shadowing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_shadowing) them. (Of course, an actual conversation partner who can correct your mistakes is even better, if you can find one.)
It sounds like you are getting ahead of yourself – trying to run before you’ve mastered walking.
Finish off learning katakana first. Then study some basic grammar and learn a minimum starting vocabulary of about 800 – 1000 common words, words you’ll come across very often when reading. Once you have this then you can start meaningful immersion in reading and listening.
[Here’s some additional detail](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and some resources you may find helpful.