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ArchangelMadzz said:
Norris2k said:
VGPolyglot said:

I also must add that learning the stroke oreder is essential. It makes memorizing easier and teaches the proper way to draw a character.

22 phonemes versus 36 in English, 37 in French, so a massive amount of words sounds like each other. b -  at least 2000 kanji versus 26 caracters. c - no passive vocabulary or basic understanding the way you have from a latin language to another, or from anything to English.

 

Actually we have 52 characters considering the capital letter of each form. So learning it is like learning Hiragana or Katakana. But reading Hiragana and Katakana is much easier than english with it being fully phonetic. Just because someone learns english doesn't mean they can read 'Phone' and know what says, or 'That' 'Pterodactyl' 'Name' etc, we have a million and 1 rules for reading, for natives it's fine but It'd say by the time you can read english fluently you'd know 2000 kanji doing a bit everyday.

It was my overall opinion about the efficiency of learning stroke order for western people, when the real challenge is to learn vocabulary. So the way I put "26 versus 2000" seems like a comparison, but I mean remembering words that are a combination of  2000 kanji is a magnitude harder than to learn another set of rules for the same limited, life long known set of characters.

I learned both English and Japanese, and as a french guy I can tell you learning English spelling was effortless (even if my level is not very high). For example, "pterodactyl". In French, we say "pterodactyle", because dinosaur names are common in most western languages, and anyway there is this greek feeling that make the spelling pretty straight forward. "pterodactil" or "Pterodhactil" would make your eyes bleed.   And what about "Phone" ? The word is learned for free, even if it was not in iPhone, anyone knows it even before learning English, and even it was not the case... french say "telephone" and german say "telefon". Learn 電話, that's a whole new world.

Also, your comparison about reading English/Japanese has a fundamental flow. When you talk about English, in fact you talk about getting the right pronounciation from your reading of words. When you talk about reading Japanese, you don't talk anymore about words nor about their pronounciation... you just talk about understanding the characters (kanji) in themselves. Just understanding the characters in English is free. Only 26 and I already knew them.

And for details,  compared to 26 kanji to learn, learning capital letter is like getting used to another font. I mean... Vv, Xx, Yy, Mm, Tt, Ss... 漢字!