From: harkcom@spinach.pa.yokogawa.co.jp (Alton Harkcom)
Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan
Subject: Re: kanji of the day ?48
Date: 12 Oct 92 05:39:00 GMT
	<jwb.718354466@capek.rdt.monash.edu.au>
	<1b51bjINN69r@agate.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Yokogawa Electric Corporation, Tokyo, Japan
In-reply-to: ucbked@athena's message of 9 Oct 92 22:33:23 GMT

In article <1b51bjINN69r@agate.berkeley.edu> ucbked@athena (Earl H. Kinmonth)
   writes:

 =}i imagine that what i am going to say next will start a flame
 =}war, but so be it.

   You couldn't imagine that it might start some intelligent rebuttal?

 =}as someone who uses japanese for scholarship

   Your credentials show that you have taught Japanese, but they do not
show that you have tried to see if your belief is merely a bias or shows
some phenomena which you have observed.  Would you mind sharing with us
why you believe the following:

 =}anyone who gets off on individual kanji will NOT learn to READ
 =}japanese well, perhaps not even learn to read it all.

   In my experience with Japanese, those who did not enjoy playing around
with individual kanzi were very poor readers while those who did "get off"
on it did rather well...  This applies to both my experience as a student
of Japanese, and a teacher of Japanese.  My experiences as an author of
technical papers in Japanese has shown me that even the Japanese demonstrate
this phenomena.

 =}words have meaning only in context, and context is not just
 =}grammatical context, but historical, social, etc. context.  one
 =}learns to read by reading.  banal but true.  you could memorize
 =}n-number of entries from the OED, and share your joy of
 =}memorization with thousands of others by electronic means, but
 =}you will not be one-tenth as literate as somone who has actually
 =}worked through a couple of texts, possibly knowing very few
 =}individual words out of context, but knowing many words in
 =}context.  the same goes for japanese.

   But if one works through a couple of texts and "gets off" on a few
kanzi then he will do better than either of the people in your example.
And since your claim is that those who "get off" on individual kanzi
are in some way handicapped then using a time limit to compare the two
extremes isn't logical support...

 =}the time spent typing in ascii characters to produce crude
 =}renderings of kanji would pay more dividends if devoted to reading....

   You get off on reading and others get off on writing small programs
which write ascii character renditions of Japanese characters from fonts.
So a minimum of time wasted gives a fun new learning aid.  So while
you might be slopping through your Japanese dictionary, I might be
plugging away with my online dictionary, all the time saving a little
time which I might later use to examine a particular kanzi in detail.

   In other words, the methods may be different in a time-consumption
respect also.  So your argument that spending time in one area while
avoiding spending time in another makes one a better reader, may be a
worthless argument depending on the circumstances.

 =}it would also save me (and i suspect others too polite to say
 =}so), the time it takes to kill every "kanji of the day" that adds
 =}to the electronic junk mail in /usr/spool/mail/*....

   But think of the time it could save someone who "gets off" on the
individual kanzi.  Since the net is here for the benefit of all then
your inconvenience is not a factor when considering something which
is appropriate to a forum...

 =}if you want to read japanese, read it!  and, do not spend your
 =}time telling other people about your efforts!

   If you want to teach others that studying the kanzi is fruitless
than do so.  (You haven't done so yet as you have not supported the
claim)  Do not waste your time (and ours) whining about what you
consider to be the wasted efforts of others...

Al
Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan