Best way to stop relying on Furigana

20 comments

1. You should have had furigana entirely disabled 500 words ago. Other than that read without furigana

2. Just remove them

3. To improve your reading skills, you should eliminate the use of furigana and expose yourself to various types of written materials. These may include books, light novels, visual novels, or manga without furigana. Additionally, watching shows without furigana may also be beneficial, but reading is the most important factor.

4. Those who say “just remove them” are advocating a cold turkey approach that may well work for them, but may or may not work for you.

   So do this instead: when you encounter furigana, ignore it first. Look at the kanji, and try to pronounce it without the help of the furigana. Only then, look at it to see if you were correct.

   I’d also suggest adding reading material that is written to a low enough grade level. Light novels are written to a pretty common standard and you will find much success there. You can always keep a dictionary handy in case you don’t know the pronunciation of a kanji compound.

   All the best to you!

5. Start with media light in kanji and work your way up. This would be youth friendly content that doesn’t use furigana. I’ve been playing 牧場物語 ようこそ　wonderful life (I’m too tired to try and the the katakana here) and it’s pretty manageable. It only uses kanji just enough to break up sentences and aid readability most of the time.

6. Fwiw if it allows you in the anki deck, at least try to allow the more common kanji as they will be very useful to learn (n5 and n4). I also type it out on my flashcards which really helped me cement the word.

   Or alternatively maybe try jumping on wanikani. 2 srs probably isn’t great, but the mnemonics helped me honestly and I learned quite a bit on how the kanji work.

   Or else maybe try a kanji run through after your done the furigana (if the deck isn’t a bit one). As you’ll probably blaze through it since you know the words already. Fwiw I add an extra field in my anki where I make my own menmoics of the kanji

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   Edited due to my misread of OP

7. Flashcards! You can do them on your phone if you don’t like making paper ones. You need to learn the kanji. Flashcards help becuse you look at the kanji on the front, try to remember the sounds it can make, and you can check the answers on the back. In a way you need to learn kanji in the same way you learn the words themselves. Repetition. Flash cards are great for that as you can pull them out, try your best, check to see how you did, then try again. Over time this might help you. Also if you add the kanjis base meaning and learn those, it might help you to remember them in words. As most of them make sense as to why they used those particular kanji.

   I personally find it easier to just remove the furigana, but we all learn differently. The flash cards worked well for a friend of mine, so I figured I would mention it.

8. There’s a good alternative, too, to only read things with furigana until you’ve learned a lot of words and have a good understanding of the language, and then beginning to study the kanji with more focus.

   Lots of people don’t like this idea, and it has the downside of limiting what you can read and interact with, but it has the upside of not needing to worry about kanji until you know many of the words already. It’d be more effort overall, but less at any given point because at first, you’ll only have to learn the word, and at last you’ll only have to associate kanji with words you already know.

   There are more than enough manga with furigana and green-border books that all have furigana that you could take this route for a while and not have issues.

9. The Anki decks I downloaded have the furigana only on the answer side of the card, and I do my review muted, so remembering how each word is pronounced in addition to its meaning is part of the exercise. I’ve come up with some funny mnemonics doing that!

10. You’re still really early in your studies, it’s fine to focus mostly on vocab and grammar now and leave more in-depth kanji to later.

11. Depending on the Anki decks you’re using, you might be able to add some styling to show furigana only on hover, so you can use it if you need but have it off by default.

    For example, I’m doing the 2k/6k deck alongside the Tango decks. I added the hover furigana to the front on my 2k/6k cards, and removed the furigana from my completed decks (n5 & n4 at this point) so I can try to not rely on them so much on words I’m reviewing.

12. Speaking as someone with ~2200 known words in jpdb, you get better at recognizing kanji without furigana with time and practice. I use the method Refold recommends for their JP1K deck for absolute beginners: look at the word without furigana and try to remember the reading and meaning, then look at the word with furigana and try to remember the meaning; only grade yourself on whether you remembered the meaning, not the reading. It works well for me, and as I’ve progressed I remember the reading and meaning for more words more easily.

    Also, there’s *lots* of media out there that has furigana, lots of media that has subtitles for its dialogue, and lots of tools to let you easily look up words no matter how you’re consuming your media. If you intend to primarily just consume Japanese media, not knowing the pronunciations of kanji off the top of your head isn’t all that bad in my experience

13. Back a long time ago I got the same advice to just ignore furigana…. that it was bad for you and bad for your reading ability.

    Now that I consume a lot of Japanese I find that it’s EVERYWHERE, and regardless of whether or not I can read the kanji alone my eyes tend to jump to the furigana anyway. XD So I’ve given up.

    It’s fine. It’s everywhere. Still practice your kanji. Look at the kanji if you catch yourself reading furigana. Know you’ll read furigana fairly often regardless. But don’t beat yourself up about it.

14. What Anki deck are you using? How does your Anki deck work? You seem to have a deck that ALWAYS shows you furigana, and this is only going to hinder your development.

    I am also very early in the process, but I took my vocab learning method directly from people who are fluent. When I learn a new kanji, it is just the kanji on the front of the card. I have no clue what it means or how it sounds, and can only guess based on other kanji I’ve already learned that use the same characters in this kanji. Once I flip the card, it reveals both the definition AND the furigana. I learn the meaning and pronunciation simultaneously.

    I understand not everyone learns the same way. But I have learned over 1000 kanji in 3 months with this method, 600 of which are “mature words” (I almost never miss them anymore), so I’m sure it’s effective.

    Games and kids books will often have furigana above kanji, which helps them because they already know the sound and meaning through speaking it as a native. But as someone who doesn’t know the sound or meaning, it probably will only slow you down. It might be okay to use it when first learning a word but you should really stop after the first few times seeing it, trying to recognize it without furigana. That is the only way you will recognize it in normal Japanese writing, I think. If you really can’t learn without it, I would recommend just trying your best to ignore it as much as you can, using it as a guideline instead of immediately reading it.

15. Semi-furigana novels (Novels geared for children, normally hardbacks, that have furigana on the first occurrence of a kanji, and then no furigana on the second apperance. Novels that I know that do this on the top of my head, Natume Yuujinchou, The Magic Thief, Septimious Heap, The hardback versions of Percy Jackson, The hardback Versions of Harry Potter)

    Tap for furigana on anki.

16. No furigana, and using yomichan when needed.

17. Everyone else mentioned the child-friendly media approach, but what I’ve seen in a couple of textbooks that helped me a lot is have furigana in red text, and placing a red plastic sheet over the page. This makes the furigana invisible, but still accessible.

    Of course, this only helps if you’re using printed materials that can be color-coded in that way….

    I also really like the rikaikun extension for chrome/firefox, it only works for basic text but it helps immensely. Try following some Japanese accounts on Twitter, or reading Japanese Wikipedia articles with it! It will have the reading available, but since it requires that extra step to get to it, you still get the opportunity to try and read without it.

    Finally, I know a lot of people don’t find it necessary to learn to hand-write kanji, but I can say that it helped me learn most of my kanji much better than reading only ever did.

    Good luck!

18. For my anki deck, I have furigana disabled unless I highlight it. If I remember the readings, great! If not, I highlight over to remind myself, and eventually that reading will stick with me, but I’m practicing that word’s meaning regardless. Memorizing the readings will come with time.

19. Thanks for all the options guys. Maybe miswritten in my post but my emphasis was always on getting better at reading without completely tanking all my listening ability and having to re-learn all those words entirely from scratch.

    I think I’m keeping with my original idea of:

    – Keep my current furigana deck active but with no new cards, just reviewing it so I keep my listening ability for those words. This *should* mean learning the kanji readings of the words should be quicker since I already know the meanings.

    -Duplicate that deck, disable all furigana and start from scratch. Eventually this deck will overtake the original and then I’ll just be using this.

    It will take some additional effort until my new deck catches up, but it should be a smooth transition hopefully!

20. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. At these early stages, you’ll see it often enough that it won’t really hurt you, and even then, a not-insignificant amount of media uses it in text.