Norris2k said:
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, 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 itself. 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... I mean... 漢字! |
I was more thinking of the perspective of a 日本語の人 learning english. Not a person with a roman/german native tongue :)
There's only 2 races: White and 'Political Agenda'
2 Genders: Male and 'Political Agenda'
2 Hairstyles for female characters: Long and 'Political Agenda'
2 Sexualities: Straight and 'Political Agenda'