The challenge of learning an alphabet

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

English is my first language. Soon I will be vacationing in Japan, and in preparation, I am memorizing Hiragana and Katakana so I can at least phonetically read some street/business signs and not have to constantly bug my (Japanese) wife. (Kanji? Sorry, ain’t happening.)

So far I’ve got about 2/3 of Hiragana memorized. I made flash cards, with the phonetic spelling of each character (ro, shi, ka, etc.) on the back. At this point, if I see the character I can speak the sound from memory. However, if you speak the sound to me, I cannot see the character in my mind’s eye, nor can I draw it. This an interesting difference from my conception of the English alphabet: speak the letter, and I see it clearly in my mind’s eye, and have no trouble putting it to paper.

At 40, my own childhood experience of learning the English alphabet is a lost memory, but this has made me think about it. My Hiragana learning experience has been facilitated by associating Hiragana symbols with the English-alphabet symbols I’ve known for decades (and the sounds that go with them), but a kid who’s learning his first alphabet has no written symbols in his mind to associate new symbols with. No flash cards for him, he’s just got to do some brute memorization. Musta been a lot harder.

I know a few words of Japanese, but I have no hope any time soon of learning enough of the language to hold a conversation or extract any useful concepts from a paragraph of Japanese text. Planning for our trip has put a lot of the burden on my wife: many of the websites we visit for information are in Japanese, and so I can’t help dig for info. Despite having a Ph.D., I am, for the purposes of planning and executing this trip, embarrassingly illiterate. Makes me think of how hard it is to be a true full-time illiterate person. Being able to speak a language makes it slightly easier to get by, but when I think of how much I read during a day on the job, and how many important signs I come across during a day (in and out of work), it’s gotta be ridiculously tough to go through life not being able to read/write.

Interesting.

2

In my opinion, Japanese has the hardest writing system of any major language, so I don’t think it’s surprising that you are slow at learning it. I’ve been trying to learn it on and off for many years, and I still only know a few hiragana and katakana – I suspect that I know more kanji. That’s partly because I started off knowing a few Chinese characters, and they are basically the same in Japanese (though pronounced differently), and partly because some are really common, e.g., 日本 – Nihon, Japan, which you’ll see a lot, contains two characters that are very common in other contexts. 日 means “day” as well as “Sun”, and is used in writing dates; 本 “hon” also means “book”, so if you see that at the start of a sign, suspect that the building is a bookstore (本屋)!

3

I think your experience with it is pretty normal. I remember when I was still learning it and having trouble telling the difference between ones like (shi) シ and (tsu)ツ, as well as remembering the sounds. Honestly, it just takes a lot of practice. It helps to create little devices to help you memorize them.
From experience, I can tell you that if you practice long enough, you will get to a point where you can differentiate between them and see them in your head after hearing the sound.
To be honest, the tough part about vacationing in Japan is that the majority of streets, signs, names, etc. will be in kanji.

4

I was told that it’s fairly common for signs in Kanji to also have the same words written right next to them in Katakana, so that little kids who know Katakana (but haven’t yet memorized very many Kanji characters) can read the signs. Is that not the case?

In other words, am I screwed unless I start bonin’ up on Kanji?

5

If a kanji character has small characters next to it to indicate the pronunciation, they will be in hiragana, not katakana. (And the reason for this is that a kanji word is almost always native Japanese, and you use hiragana for native Japanese words.*)

These smaller characters – called furigana – are used for kanji being read by younger children, and for words such as personal names where there could be several different readings or the word is very uncommon.

  • One exception is the name of the manga/aime character Light Yagamo (夜神月), where the reading for his given name 月 is in katakana (ライト “Raito”), because Light is an English word written with the kanji 月.
6

When I was in college, I took a course at a local Adult Education School. At the end of the year there was a party and they gave prizes; a woman from the Literacy course read her final class essay. This was a just-retired woman who nine months prior hadn’t even known the alphabet; she could “do numbers” (±*/) but not write her own name or recognize it in writing. When she’d retired, her children had pushed her to achieve her lifelong dream of learning to read; she was now a fluent reader, a more than decent writer, and going through that phase of trying to read every single book in the world, trying to believe everything which was not clearly labeled as “fiction” and being utterly confused when sources contradicted each other. Her children, all of whom had either vocational or college degrees, were in the process of teaching her about genres and things like “well, yeah, he really did mean what he wrote, but he wrote it a long time ago and we know better now”.

The people from that course were the ones who got more applause by very, very far. The rest of us were there becoming fluent in a language we knew but hadn’t previously used (my own class), or learning more kitchen techniques, or how to prepare a formal home budget. These people were learning skills that the rest of us had been taking for granted for decades. It’s as if they were learning how to breathe while the rest of us worked on prettier breathing, what they were working on was so much more fundamental.

7

One alphabet I found easy to learn is the han-kul alphabet for the Korean language. It really has no more letters than the English alphabet, or only a couple more, and it’s completely phonetic, with some rare exceptions.

I’ve forgotten most of the Korean I learned in the military, but I call still pronounce it if I see it printed. But after thirty years my accent is probably atrocious.

I’d like to learn Korean again.

8

If anything, the furigana would be in hiragana, not katakana.
Not all signs have that, especially ones with basic elementary kanji (such as signs proclaiming “No Smoking” “No Parking” “Bike Parking” “Under Construction”, etc.) To be honest, I can’t recall many signs that even had furigana. Sometimes food packaging and comics/books do, but that’s all I can remember.
Street and highway signs will will have romaji (Roman alphabet) underneath, which can be helpful when you need to find a place or street.

9

For a while I knew hiragana and katakana well enough to be able to sound things out. I may have had no idea what the word was, but I could generally figure out what parts of a sentence it was. I also knew about 50 kanji or so. I keep meaning to start studying again, especially since I’m planning on going to Japan, but I haven’t had much of a chance.

10

I have never studied Japanese, but I can read and write three alphabets besides Latin. I found them to be of varying degrees of difficulty. Cyrillic was by far the easiest, because so many of its letters also exist in the Latin alphabet, although some of them have different sounds. Even the letters that don’t exist in the Latin alphabet are often similar to those that do, like Ж, Л (okay, maybe it’s not obvious in print, but when you handwrite it, it looks like an upside-down V), and Я.

Hebrew was harder than Cyrillic, but easier than Arabic, which has a LOT of letters, a lot of letters that are identical to each other other than some diacritical marks, and has three ways to write each letter (depending on whether or not they’re at the beginning, middle, or end of the word).

I think it’s much easier if you actually know the language. (Is that totally obvious? I’m not sure.) My Hebrew reading got much better after I’d spent some time in Israel and became more familiar with the rhythm of the language. The diacritical marks indicating vowels aren’t usually included in written Hebrew and at first it was total guesswork for me on how to read a word, but eventually I got better just from knowing how the language sounds in general. I think my literacy of the Arabic alphabet still sucks because I’ve never been around a lot of people speaking Persian for long periods of time. So I wouldn’t be surprised that simply knowing the Katakana doesn’t make reading Japanese easy.

11

Katakana will work in your favor if you’re a native English speaker. It’s one of the breaks we get with the language. :slight_smile: About 90% of loan words are from English. So slowly sound out the katakana word and be flexible with your brain when trying to think of the English word. A lot of kids in my class had trouble with it but I actually liked it quite a bit.
For example, トマト is tomato. However, when you sound it out, it sounds like toh-mah-toh, so not exactly like the word in American English, but if you’re flexible you’ll be able to figure it out. Some are a bit easier like チーズ for cheese, chee-zu.
A few are a bit tougher because the loanwords come from other languages such as パン, pan for bread (coming from Portuguese) and アルバイト/バイト ah-roo-bai-to/bai-to meaning “Part time job”, coming from German.
It’s a lot of fun, and honestly, my favorite part of the language. Have fun! :slight_smile:

12

And some are hard because the phonemes are different. For example, ラブ (rabu) looks like it could come from the English “rub”, but it comes from “love”!

13

When I was ten I learned the Hebrew alphabet without breaking a sweat (none of the language, though). As a math student I absorbed all the Greek alphabet without knowing it and can thereby work out nearly all the Cyrillic, since nearly all the letter are like Roman or Greek. (Of course, you have to learn that P is the R-sound, but I already knew that for Greek.) Then at age 60, I spent two months in Japan and tried to learn the Hiragana, but it was hopeless. I would painfully learn a couple characters one day and then forget them by the next. There were a few Kanji I came to recognize actually.

The stops on the Tokyo subway were labeled in Kanji, Hiragana, and Romaji. The street signs in the town I was staying in were in Kanji and Romaji, but the town was always host to many foreign visitors (Tsukuba, Science City, whose official name was in Hiragana).

A couple other observations. In official documents, I often noticed that a number of Kanji had tiny Hiragana characters printed above them. When I asked my host about it, he said that the administrators loved to use unusual words that people would recognize if they heard, but wouldn’t know the Kanji. And my host’s daughter’s name was officially in Hiragana. There was a Kanji for it, but it was an uncommon name and many people wouldn’t recognize it. The name was Idzumi which he insisted on spelling Idumi in Romanji for reasons he couldn’t explain to me, not with any explanation that made sense, at least.

He also told me that he can write English much faster than Japanese; even though each Kanji stands for a word (but then gets a Hiragana inflection added), he can still write out the English faster.

14

Philadelphia, the city of brotherly rub.

15

I learned to read hiragana and katakana in college, as part of an immersion experience in Japan. I knew no Japanese before that time, and in addition to learning the very basics, the instructors pushed us to learn the kana at the beginning of the semester, so we could use those instead of romaji for further learning. I’m very glad they did, as it is a huge step up (and, indeed, hugely helpful for traveling) to know how to sound things out.

The system they used, which was really, really good, involved memorizing a little picture for each kana, that mimicked or alluded to the sound. That way, the character, picture and sound go together and it becomes easy to go from character to picture to sound (sounding it out) or from sound to picture to character (remembering the picture the sound is paired with).

I don’t remember all of the pictures that were used, because it’s been so long and I’ve gotten past the point where I need them, but here are some examples:

い *i *- looks like the final two "i"s in “Hawaii”, and sounds exactly the same
む *mu *- sounds like a cow, and looks like one too! (See the round muzzle on the left, and the tail on the right?)
ふ *hu/fu *- looks like Mt. Fuji
き *ki *- looks like a key (top right) and a keyhole (lower left)

Obviously, some are more of a stretch than others, and there’s a whole new set for the katakana, which makes it an interesting experience to keep the two separated mentally (I still am not as good at katakana as hiragana, oddly enough), and YMMV because of learning styles…but it really, really worked for me. I’m not sure if there’s a book on this, or if we used a home-brew system, so sadly, I can’t give recommendations, but it’s something to keep your eyes open for.

16

Missed the edit window, but I just googled it and these flashcardscame up. I have no personal experience with these exact ones, but the system seems very similar to what I remember, and they come highly recommended.

17

Best way to learn an alphabet!

18

With all due respect, if you’re just heading over for a vacation, and don’t speak Japanese otherwise, hiragana will be largely useless for you. You’ll be able to read words written in hiragana, but have no idea as to their meaning, necessitating that you bug your wife, as you put it. If you were to pursue a study of Japanese, hiragana would be a necessity, but as it stands, the katakana will serve you much better, because the loanwords are largely from English, as was mentioned upthread. I don’t know when you’ll leave for your trip, but if you only have time for one, katakana’s the way to go. You’ll still be illiterate, but at least you’ll recognize something from time to time.

In fact, I’d put learning some basic kanji over learning hiragana. For example, a toilet in a restaurant might be written in katakana (トイレ), or kanji (お手洗-- ok, so there’s a hiragana thrown in there, but it’s unnecessary to the meaning), but I’ve never seen it written in hiragana. When you go to the toilet, it’s much more important to know which is male (男) and female (女), and which is the big (大) and little (小) flushes, but if you only know hiragana it’s not going to do you any good. Oh, and on the toilet topic, if you’re sitting on one with a bidet, DON’T push the one marked bidet (ビデ) in katakana! The bidet that we know in English is marked with the hiragana for butt (おしり). The bidet in katakana is the vagina washer.

Get a book on basic kanji. Good luck!

19

Plenty of time yet. I’m almost done with hiragana; can probably start on katakana next week.

Per your advice, I will ask my wife to suggest a few of the more important kanji symbols for me to learn.

20

Most of the languages I work in use the Roman alphabet. I read a lot of Greek, whose alphabet is very easy. I also read Sanskrit, whose modern script (devanagari) is more difficult but not the end of the world. I have to learn three or four more ancient Sanskrit scripts to be able to read the texts I need, though.

Some of my colleagues read Akkadian and Sumerian. Devanagari is a bit of a headache, but cuneiform is a bitch and a half.