It actually does! Sometimes I find the pronunciation really unusual, then I think about it more and yeah, that’s how I recognise it more often after that.
I think furigana is really useful when it comes to kanji in combination (e.g. 今年 is pronounced ことし, not ‘kon-toshi’).
Im just about to start reading manga and I think it will help me learn them at first but I do worry about becoming overreliant on furigana so when i make flashcards of the vocab i learn I will try to make them kanji only with the reading and meaning on the other side
From my own experience, and many of my friends and children learning Japanese that I observe, furigana lead you to read “over” the Kanji. You just naturally follow the hiragana flow and don’t focus much on the Kanji. As soon as I dropped furigana, my Kanji skills skyrocketed. They held me back 100%. (comparable to early on using alphabet under your hiragana. Only when you drop the alphabet do you start to learn the hiragana).
Ymmv offcourse
Where do you get manga in Japanese?
It actually does tho! I started when i do karaoke jp songs with furigana then none furigana. Also in jp manga
Not really. If anything it’s a crutch.
I’d say it does as to a certain extent you kind of need kanji to help distinguish words even if you have the furigana, so you’ll naturally start to pick up on them. I don’t think simply reading furigana text is enough to get you to kanji literacy though, so I would recommend some kind of kanji study on the side.
Personally I’m a really big fan of furigana. A lot of people will call it a crutch, and to be fair it kind of is, but improving your reading comprehension in my experience has a much more meaningful impact on your overall language ability than your kanji literacy does. IMO it comes down to extensive reading, if you’re waiting for kanji literacy to get into extensive reading you’re going to be waiting for a long time, you can get to that point much quicker if you use furigana.
It’s worth keeping in mind that it takes native speakers about 10 years of school to learn the 2136 common use kanji, and they are already fluent speakers well before that, they know around 10,000 words before they even start learning kanji.
No sense in artificially handicapping yourself when furigana texts are a thing. It’s not like furigana only exists in graded readers, manga have them, junior editions of light novels have them, furigana texts are out there albeit it does limit your choices a bit. So yes, you do want to work your way towards kanji literacy so you don’t stay limited in your reading options in the long run, but in the meanwhile, take advantage of furigana.
I think it’s quite helpful, at least at first when you’re still learning to read kanji correctly. Personally I noticed I could recognize/read like at least 10 new (kanji)words after reading just one volume of a manga. I was previously familiar with the words but I hadn’t known the kanji beforehand.
I can already see how it might hinder me in the future, though, as often I find myself looking at the furigana before I’ve properly thought about wether I know the kanji. So I think once you know more kanji, it would be benefical to try to find books/text that only uses furigana with less common kanji
But like don’t feel like you have to give up reading something you enjoy just because it has furigana for every kanji, everything you read doesn’t need to be perfectly optimized for maximum learning!
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but some manga like Spy x Family use furigana in fun ways. Like for the fictional country Westalis the kanji are 西国 and the furigana are ウエスタリス. For the handler (spy supervisor) the kanji are 管理官 and the furigana are ハンドラー. You don’t technically need to furigana but it’s fun to have.
This is actually a source of debate even within Japan, so you’re going to get a lot of different opinions here.
Right now, there are conventions about requiring furigana on anything marketed to a “primary audience” of or below a certain age. Some companies, in particular the big serialized shounen / shoujo manga magazines from Shuueisha and Kodansha, put furigana on everything because the low end of their target market can’t be guaranteed to have learned all of the 1026 kyouiku kanji yet.
You’ll actually find some heated arguments on more insular fan forums in Japan that argue that furigana is unnecessary and/or should be removed from their favorite manga entirely, because the fact it exists implies the “primary” market is very young children, and they don’t like that implication.
Some say furigana is an educational thing, and encourages kids to read more and learn the kanji faster. Others insist it’s a crutch, and actually holding them back. It’s a similar debate to whether to allow kids at a certain age to use keyboards with IME conversion rather than hand-writing stuff in school, because it leads to people recognizing kanji readings but not remembering how to write them.
10 comments
It actually does!
Sometimes I find the pronunciation really unusual, then I think about it more and yeah, that’s how I recognise it more often after that.
I think furigana is really useful when it comes to kanji in combination (e.g. 今年 is pronounced ことし, not ‘kon-toshi’).
Im just about to start reading manga and I think it will help me learn them at first but I do worry about becoming overreliant on furigana so when i make flashcards of the vocab i learn I will try to make them kanji only with the reading and meaning on the other side
From my own experience, and many of my friends and children learning Japanese that I observe, furigana lead you to read “over” the Kanji. You just naturally follow the hiragana flow and don’t focus much on the Kanji. As soon as I dropped furigana, my Kanji skills skyrocketed. They held me back 100%. (comparable to early on using alphabet under your hiragana. Only when you drop the alphabet do you start to learn the hiragana).
Ymmv offcourse
Where do you get manga in Japanese?
It actually does tho! I started when i do karaoke jp songs with furigana then none furigana. Also in jp manga
Not really. If anything it’s a crutch.
I’d say it does as to a certain extent you kind of need kanji to help distinguish words even if you have the furigana, so you’ll naturally start to pick up on them.
I don’t think simply reading furigana text is enough to get you to kanji literacy though, so I would recommend some kind of kanji study on the side.
Personally I’m a really big fan of furigana.
A lot of people will call it a crutch, and to be fair it kind of is, but improving your reading comprehension in my experience has a much more meaningful impact on your overall language ability than your kanji literacy does.
IMO it comes down to extensive reading, if you’re waiting for kanji literacy to get into extensive reading you’re going to be waiting for a long time, you can get to that point much quicker if you use furigana.
It’s worth keeping in mind that it takes native speakers about 10 years of school to learn the 2136 common use kanji, and they are already fluent speakers well before that, they know around 10,000 words before they even start learning kanji.
No sense in artificially handicapping yourself when furigana texts are a thing.
It’s not like furigana only exists in graded readers, manga have them, junior editions of light novels have them, furigana texts are out there albeit it does limit your choices a bit.
So yes, you do want to work your way towards kanji literacy so you don’t stay limited in your reading options in the long run, but in the meanwhile, take advantage of furigana.
I think it’s quite helpful, at least at first when you’re still learning to read kanji correctly. Personally I noticed I could recognize/read like at least 10 new (kanji)words after reading just one volume of a manga. I was previously familiar with the words but I hadn’t known the kanji beforehand.
I can already see how it might hinder me in the future, though, as often I find myself looking at the furigana before I’ve properly thought about wether I know the kanji. So I think once you know more kanji, it would be benefical to try to find books/text that only uses furigana with less common kanji
But like don’t feel like you have to give up reading something you enjoy just because it has furigana for every kanji, everything you read doesn’t need to be perfectly optimized for maximum learning!
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but some manga like Spy x Family use furigana in fun ways. Like for the fictional country Westalis the kanji are 西国 and the furigana are ウエスタリス. For the handler (spy supervisor) the kanji are 管理官 and the furigana are ハンドラー. You don’t technically need to furigana but it’s fun to have.
This is actually a source of debate even within Japan, so you’re going to get a lot of different opinions here.
Right now, there are conventions about requiring furigana on anything marketed to a “primary audience” of or below a certain age. Some companies, in particular the big serialized shounen / shoujo manga magazines from Shuueisha and Kodansha, put furigana on everything because the low end of their target market can’t be guaranteed to have learned all of the 1026 kyouiku kanji yet.
You’ll actually find some heated arguments on more insular fan forums in Japan that argue that furigana is unnecessary and/or should be removed from their favorite manga entirely, because the fact it exists implies the “primary” market is very young children, and they don’t like that implication.
Some say furigana is an educational thing, and encourages kids to read more and learn the kanji faster. Others insist it’s a crutch, and actually holding them back. It’s a similar debate to whether to allow kids at a certain age to use keyboards with IME conversion rather than hand-writing stuff in school, because it leads to people recognizing kanji readings but not remembering how to write them.