Japanese Language Acquisition: The Writing System

Why is the Japanese writing system difficult to learn?

The first problem, of course, is that Japanese uses a very large number of characters:

• hiragana, a set of phonetic characters consisting of about 50-100 characters (depending on what you count as distinct characters)
• katakana, a correponding set of phonetic characters, used mainly for writing foreign words and a few other niche purposes
• kanji, the ideographic characters adapted from Chinese, of which there are about 3000+ commonly known by most Japanese speakers

The second problem is that, unlike in Mandarin, Cantonese, and the other Chinese languages, most of the Japanese kanji have multiple pronunciations. Which pronunciations are used in which words mostly just has to be memorized per word.

Third, many words have alternate spellings with different mixes of kana and kanji or different kanji entirely. In particular, many of the most common verbs can be spelt with two or three different kanji.

Fourth, Japanese does not put spaces between its words, so just distinguishing where one word ends and the next begins is its own challenge. Ultimately, discerning individual words in Japanese text relies upon solid knowledge of the written vocabulary and an internalized feel for the grammar and language patterns.

In some cases, the lack of spaces can create ambiguities. For example, 今日本 could be read as the two words 今 (now) and 日本 (Japan), but it could also be read as the two words 今日 (today) and 本 (book). Which is the intended reading can only be discerned from context.

Fifth, certain details of pronunciations are not indicated in the text, including “pitch accent” (which is somewhat analogous to “stress accent” in English) and blending (e.g. whether to ellide the “u” in “su”, as is done in some words). So like English, Japanese writing doesn’t tell the reader exactly how to pronounce the words. Instead, the reader just has to already know the words.

Do I really need to read Japanese?

If your primary interest in Japanese is speaking, you might question, first, whether learning to read Japanese is strictly essential at all, or second, whether learning to read can’t wait until after acquiring the spoken language.

Even if you don’t care about reading for its own sake, never learning to read is a bad idea because reading is a key vector for acquiring many, many vocabulary words that otherwise don’t come up in most day-to-day speech. In a modern literate society, a large chunk of vocabulary is only acquired and maintainted through reading. Although listening and speaking practice can make you conversationally functional in the language, without reading, you’ll probably lack the vocabulary for many conversations and situations.

As for waiting to learn to read until after learning the spoken language, this too is usually a bad idea because reading is an extremely useful tool while learning a language. Unlike spoken language, written language allows you to go at your own pace and scan back and forth through the words. Most importantly, you can much more easily and conveniently look up unknown written words than you can look up unknown spoken words.

Downsides and limitations of reading

As valuable as reading can be, understand that reading alone is not sufficient for learning a language:

• Text lacks the inflectional and emotive cues of speech. Such cues are not only important parts of communication, they can serve as training wheels that greatly assist in comprehension.
• Proper pronunciation is only fully conveyed through speech. Too much reading without listening might instil bad pronunciation habits.
• The human language faculty is wired for listening, not reading. Unlike listening, reading is in a sense an “unnatural” mental activity that requires special practice and incurs significant mental overhead.
• The natural language processing that occurs when listening is sequential and keeps moving, unlike reading, which can be processed out of order and at your own pace. On the upside, even slow and hesitant reading is a good way to engage with vocabulary, but such kind of reading doesn’t necessarily properly engage and exercise your natural language faculty. So until you can read with reasonable fluency, you’ll need to focus on listening practice to develop your core comprehension skills.
• According to the best research, fluent reading is mapped in the brain through phonemes, meaning it relies upon triggering phonetic memories of words. Surprisingly, this applies even in Japanese even though its writing is not fully phonetic. The implication is that you will not be able to fluently read until you already have advanced listening skills. Until then, your reading will remain halting and labored no matter how well you know the characters.

Do I really need to write Japanese by hand?

In theory, writing kana and kanji by hand can help you memorize the characters, but how much this actually helps is questionable, and handwriting practice is extremely slow and tedious.

Besides, most people today rarely write their own native language by hand, so learning to write Japanese by hand is probably not worth the effort unless you have a great interest in calligraphy.

What about stylized text?

Being able to recognize kana and kanji in calligraphy and other stylized forms is a skill that requires its own practice, but until you reach the stage where you can fludily consume native content, trying to read calligraphy will just slow you down.

Likewise, reading vertical text can induce mental overhead, so it’s best avoided while you’re still in beginner and intermediate stages.

How should I learn kana?

Rather than rely upon the crutch of romaji, you’re best off learning kana from the start. In just a few weeks, you should be able to have the kana mostly memorized through drilling (see here and here). However, it’s normal to confuse certain less-commonly used and similar looking characters with each other for a long time after, even for multiple years. For example, learners may take years before they can fluently read the katakana characters フ, ブ, プ, ラ, ワ, and ウ without sometimes having to consciously remind themselves which is which.

Once you have the kana reasonably well memorized, you should practice reading whole words, starting first with very short words and working your way up to longer ones.

Note that katakana often gives learners considerable more trouble than hiragana, for a few reasons:

• Katakana is used considerably less frequently than hiragana, so you naturally get less practice.
• Several pairs and groups of katakana characters are hard to distinguish because they look very similar.
• The Western-derived words spelt in katakana on average have more syllables (and therefore more characters) than the native Japanese or Chinese-derived words spelt in hiragana.
• The Western-derived words spelt in katakana often contain sequences of sounds that occur infrequently or not at all in native Japanese or Chinese-derived words.
• The sounds of English-derived words are often distorted in surprising, inconsistent ways, making them strangely difficult for English speakers to say and read. For example “McDonald’s” is three syllables in English, but adapted into Japanese, it has six syllables and extra vowels: マクドナルド (MA-KU-DO-NA-RU-DO)

So you’ll likely find that your katakana reading lags behind your hiragana reading for a long time. To address this, you might want to put special effort into katakana word drills. On the other hand, once you reach the tipping point where you can read native content, you’ll get plenty more practice with katakana anyway, so maybe special practice isn’t really needed.

How should I learn kanji?

There are tens of thousands of kanji that have been used throughout Japanese history, but only ~6000 kanji are used in modern Japanese with any frequency, and most native Japanese do not know all of these 6000. A typical educated native speaker can reliably read perhaps 3000-4000 kanji in the context of words and names, but the number of kanji they can recognize and define as isolated characters is somewhat smaller, and the number of kanji they can write by hand from memory is even smaller (say, perhaps, 2500 on the high end).

The most frequently used 1500-2000 kanji account for 99%+ of the kanji characters in typical modern Japanese writing. An additional 1000-1500 kanji cover most of the remaining 1%.

From personal experience, I can say that attempting to memorize all of the kanji up front through drills is a terrible idea. At most, you should learn your first 200 or 300 kanji through drills, but thereafter you should simply focus on the kanji that come up in your reading and listening material.

Understand that reading a word does not require fully ‘knowing’ its kanji! In practice, most words spelt with kanji are recognized as a whole, not by their individual kanji. So instead of trying to memorize individual kanji on their own, you should focus on learning kanji in the context of the words you learn. When looking up a word, note the relevant meanings and pronunciations of the individual kanji, but otherwise don’t study or drill the kanji on their own.

Kanji in Japanese names are particularly troublesome:

• Many kanji have “nanori” readings, pronunciations that are only used in Japanese names.
• The jinmeiyou kanji are several hundred kanji that are used only in Japanese names, not in vocabulary words.
• Many Japanese names have multiple different kanji spellings.
• Even native Japanese speakers don’t know all kanji spellings of Japanese names, and they often don’t know how to spell a name from the pronunciation or how to pronounce a name from the kanji spelling.

So attempting to brute force memorize the kanji spellings of Japanese names is particularly foolish. Instead, you should simply deal with individual names as they come up in your reading. Eventually, through extensive reading, you will learn many of the more common names and spellings.

Summarized advice

• Drill hiragana and katakana to learn the characters, but keep in mind that fluid reading of kana will only develop through reading lots of real words and sentences.
• Don’t drill kanji: instead, absorb kanji from words.
• Don’t worry much about memorizing kanji spellings of Japanese names. Note them when they come up, but don’t feel bad about instantly forgetting them.
• Stick to plain, horizontal, non-caligraphy text. The ability to read fancy text can be much more easily acquired once you can already fluidly read plain text.
• Don’t expect to be able to read Japanese fluidly until you have a quite lage vocabulary and advanced listening comprehension skills.