28 Jan 2020
If you didn’t know, I have been learning Japanese ever since I met my wife, Ayana, in 2014 (and yes, my Japanese still sucks even in 2020). One of the most difficult aspects of learning Japanese is reading (and writing). This led me to a question: how can I make Japanese reading practice more fun?
Ideally, I could just read the things I usually read, but in Japanese (sci-fi, news, historical fiction, etc.). However, I’m still not even close to being able to read novels. I can barely read Japanese news articles. I’m sure one day, my Japanese will get good enough to read these more difficult media, but for now, I want something that is more exciting than what I usually practice with (looking at you, Japanese childrens’ books and manga).
The reason reading and writing are so difficult is that Japanese uses three unique character sets. Two of them are quite easy to learn but one is notoriously difficult, even for native speakers.
The two “easy” character sets are collectively known as the kana, which are relatively simple to write and only contain 46 characters each. Hiragana is the more common of the two kana. It is used in many words, is the sole character set for indicating grammar, and is the first set that kids in Japan learn to read. For example, here is “hi-ra-ga-na” written in hiragana: ひらがな. Each character is a single syllable (such as “hi”=ひ, pronounced “hee”).
The second “easy” character set is katakana. It is a bit more sharp-looking than hiragana, but it is quite easy to learn as well, mainly because every katakana character has a hiragana character with the same pronunciation, sort of analogous to UPPER and lowercase letters in English. Its primary use is for emphasis and for converting foreign words into Japanese. For example, “America” is written in katakana as “a-me-ri-ka” (アメリカ) since it is not a native Japanese word. If this were written in hiragana, it would look like あめりか. Note how similar these characters look compared with their respective katakana characters, above, but also notice how katakana is more angular and sharp than hiragana.
The final character set, kanji, takes years to learn, even for native speakers. This is because there are thousands of kanji. Kanji are the more complicated-looking characters that were imported from China when the Japanese writing system was developed thousands of years ago. Here are some examples of Japanese words using kanji: 車輪 (“sha-rin”, wheel); 車 (“kuruma”, car); 確認 (“kaku-nin”, confirm). Note that the kanji for the word for car (車) is the same kanji that appears in the compound kanji word for wheel (車輪). However, the reading is different (“kuruma” vs. “sha”).
So not only are there thousands of kanji to learn the meanings and readings of, but each can take on multiple readings depending on what word it is being used in! This same phenomenon also occurs (although to a lesser degree) in English. For example, in “cough” and “through”, the -ough is pronounced differently, although it looks the same in writing. Just as it is important to learn these different English pronunciations, it is important to learn the different readings of Japanese kanji characters. However, this takes years of study and practice.
While there are many tools out there to help people learn each kanji’s various readings, there are far fewer that focus on practicing reading kanji in the context of Japanese words. And even less that strive to do this in a fun, relaxing, and motivating (e.g. gamified) way. While reading native content is by far the best way to practice reading Japanese, sometimes it is not so fun, especially in the early stages when piecing together entire sentences is still quite difficult. Sometimes, instead of reading native content, you just want to sit back, relax, and do a nice, enjoyable… crossword?