Every student of Japanese quickly learns that Japanese is written in a combination of three different notations: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Kanji are Chinese characters, imported into Japan from a language that has no linguistic relationship to Japanese. Americans might just as sensibly have decided to write English with Chinese characters. The two Japanese syllabaries were created by simplifying some kanji and represent syllables. Hiragana expresses the grammatical singularities of Japanese: particles, verb conjugations, and adjective declensions. Katakana expresses emphasis, rather like italics, and is used to write foreign words and in advertising.
The hurdle of kanji is one many students never clear and some don't even approach. Not only is the sheer number daunting (1945 for basic high school literacy, 1000 to read at the sixth grade level), but each character has both readings and meanings. How it is pronounced and what it means changes depending on context, especially since Japanese borrowed many Chinese readings and appended them to Japanese.
Imagine that the English words "photo" and "light" were written with the same symbol, X. When you saw "Her smile Xs up her face.", you would read it as "lights" and when you saw "Xgraph" you would read it as "photograph", literally "writing with light".
On a positive note, once you learn a kanji, you really respond to it, much more strongly than to phonetic text. A kanji has the power of a stop sign. If you were driving along and saw a red hexagon with the word "GO" printed on it, you would stop before your mind had a chance to process the text.
This is why it's so difficult to learn numbers in a foreign language. The symbols in which the Western world writes numbers, arabic numerals, are not phonetic. They share meaning across languages, but have different readings. "1" can be read "one", "uno", "un", "eins"...well, you get the idea. If you've studied any foreign language, not just Japanese, you know that you can be reading along and when you hit an arabic numeral, your mind throws up the English reading first.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
September 10, 2002
Comments
Interesting point about the mind pulling up the reading of numbers in one's own native language first, even if reading in a foreign language.
I just encountered that while doing my weekly volunteer reading for Sun Sounds, our radio reading service for the blind. I do a half hour of op-eds from the Spanish language press every Thursday now. Today I came across some figures in the ten-thousands and had to consciously and with some momentary struggle call up the words in Spanish, even though I was tooling along in that language with the rest of the article.
It's rather distressing that no matter how far one advances in a language, this may always be the case. (Which reminds me of a great book I'll have to review sometime, all about the art of learning a foreign language and translation.) Conversely, when reading a number in kanji, would you have trouble saying it spontaneously in English?
Comment by: Jeanne Belisle Lombardo. Posted September 12, 2002 03:55 PM.
Probably. I don't say the English meanings of a kanji if I know an on or kun reading for it. I'm having a hard enough time stuffing all this information in. I don't want to take any chances with such a dangerous experiment. My mind might explode!
Comment by: M Sinclair Stevens. Posted September 12, 2002 04:01 PM.
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Numbers are difficult to master in any foreign language because we write them with symbols.