From: miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.)
Subject: Re: kanji of the day ?48
Organization: Teknekron Communications Inc.
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 22:17:53 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.

And I'm game, as usual.

>as someone who uses japanese for scholarship....
>.... i think i may have more than an impressionistic
>basis for saying what i am going to say....

...gosh, that lower-case "i" seemed so self-effacing at first....

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

Let me register violent agreement, even though my basis for
agreeing is impressionistic indeed.

>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....

Actually, one learns to read first by speaking and listening,
only then can one gather enough context to make reading both
possible and worthwhile.  But, yes, "Dick and Jane" is where
we go next (at least we did, in America, anyway) rather than
to a dictionary.

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

Probably, but maybe people like to have a little fun once in a while.

>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/*....

I think there is a provision for automating this kind of deletion
(I've never used it.  A "kill file"?  I forget.  Somebody help
me here.)

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

So let's get to my real argument: you have the beginnings of a
constructive criticism here, but I don't know where to go
from this beginning.

Japanese children's books, I find, have few kanji, and are in any case
full of the kinds of idioms that the beginning (English speaking) student
of Japanese is almost pointedly NOT taught.  You can read kana fluently
and still get only a vague idea of what's going on.  And the subject
matter is necessarily of limited interest to an adult.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have a number of books and other
literature in Japanese on subjects of great interest to me (wilderness
photography, rock-climbing, Go, computers, etc.), but all presume
a level of literacy that I'm nowhere near, at the moment.

In between are various popular magazines that supply furigana-decorated
kanji in Japanese texts with (it seems to me) rather doubtful-looking
English translations, on topics that veer suspiciously toward tabloid
journalism.

Should I just press forward on all fronts?  Start with the children's
books and move up?  Start with the adult stuff and just plug on through
it as best I can?

Compounding the difficulty is that most of the beginning Japanese texts
I've seen that use kana use only a little of it, and introduce kanji
at what I think is a fraction of the rate at which they might.  And
who wants to read intensely banal dialogues involving the asking of
directions to the restaurant, the ordering of food, the apologizing
for spilling the sake, etc.?  It's very much the nature of such
interchanges that they are weak on content, and typically spoken
rather than written.  Is there much to be learned from reading these?

I've seriously wondered if there isn't some opportunity here for
computer-aided reading instruction.  A computer program could easily
supply a given piece of text (presumably one of real interest to the
adult reading it) at any of several levels of difficulty, by allowing some
"level setting" of kanjification, if you will.  Adult readers might
first piece together some meaning out of a kana-only presentation, and
then, after semi-memorizing it (much as children do with their favorite
stories) bump up to the first level of kanjification, then a second,
and so on.  Since it's relatively easy to translate kanji to kana, and
relatively easy to grade kanji into levels (say by number of strokes,
or by the year of introduction in the Japanese school system), and
since computer-readable Japanese text of adult interest is now fairly
easy to come by, I think this scheme could be pretty easily
implemented.  It doesn't address all of the problems of learning to
read, but I think it could touch some bases that are now covered
inadequately in most adult-education curricula.

Or would it be yet another reading crutch?  What do other people think?
---
Michael Turner
miket@tcs.com