Recently finished learning the hiragana and thought of doing some reading practice in hiragana before moving on to the katakana and was totally confused. How do you recognize when the word is over?
Is it a bad idea to do reading before I finish all the kana or learn the katakana too before trying to read and build vocab?
11 comments
> How do you recognize when the word is over?
By knowing the word and endings it may have (-> grammar). Later kanji will help to find the start of new words.
Skipping katakana is the equivalent of learning half of the roman alphabet I.e a to l and skipping m to z. Typically you ought to learn katana after hiragana.
Before you know the word, it’s going to be just sounds to you.
Knowing all the kana in the beginning won’t be 100% neccessary but you need to learn them at some point. How are you learning kana currently? Can you read ありがとう without trouble?
Youprobablyhavenotroublereadingthis,doyou?Pluskanjihelpalot.
Youknowwhenthewordisoverwhenitisfollowedbyanotherwordyoualsorecogniseandunderstand.
I recommend you to get a textbook or a digital equilavent, as it will tell you what to learn and do in which order.
Howdoyourecognizewhenthewordisover?
There is no word spacing in native Japanese, which makes beginner Japanese (all Kana) really hard to read. (Really for anyone. At some not too distant point, you will understand why native Japanese uses Kanji, because it is just much easier to read.)
Here’s a fun fact: Japanese are not in agreement on word breaks, which really only becomes apparent when they are forced to use all romaji. Thankfully the need for using all romaji is largely nil nowadays.
Learn contractions and conjugation. The former later on but conjugation is vital.
I agree with people saying kanji is very helpful; in addition, when you become familiar with particles, they can be very helpful in breaking down sentences. Differentiating them from other hiragana in a sentence may take some getting used to but I would recommend putting a lot of stress on particles once you feel comfortable with hiragana, so that you have structure context to follow as you start reading more sentences and starting kanji.
Don’t ignore katakana, but I’d say prioritize learning hiragana first! It’s going to be the bulk of native material, whether by itself or in the furigana you are definitely going to need when you first reading things with kanji. [Try this website](https://crunchynihongo.com/hiragana-reading-practice/), they’ve bolded particles, which should help you break up a sentence into words.
You’ll pick it up naturally as you continue studying grammar and learning more words, don’t stress about it too much!
To be fair, speech generally doesn’t have pauses between words (“That. Would. Be. Weird.”), but we can still understand what’s being said. In Japanese writing, a major hint is that all the “grammar words” (think words like “the”, “of”, “but”, “with”, etc.) are always written in hiragana. These “grammar words” are generally called “particles” for Japanese, and there are only so many of them, so they should be easily recognizable. For most sentences, these particles can essentially be thought of as spaces that separate the “content” (non-grammar) words. Furthermore, the content words are often (though not always) written in kanji or katakana, which helps them stand out more from the hiragana grammar stuff.