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by redthrow 2643 days ago
Like Prof Victor Mair says, if someone is a beginner, I don't recommend learning characters at all for the first 2-3 years.

(If you are a Japanese learner, learning kana wouldn't hurt, it takes a few weeks at most anyways vs years for kanji - and it's not like you "master" kanji after those years, as any native speaker would be able to demonstrate).
3 comments
yorwba 2642 days ago
2-3 years is an awfully long time to spend learning a language without being able to read, though. And if you plan to learn it later anyway, you might as well start with it from the beginning.
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redthrow 2642 days ago
Yeah I should've said "I don't recommend learning how to write the characters by hand in the first 2-3 years, or ever".

As gibolt said, it's much easier to just learn to recognize characters, without being able to write them by hand.

If you learn Japanese for, say, 2 years, even without consciously trying to learn the characters (e.g. by using rikai-chan/kun) when reading articles, you'll encounter the same words over and over so you'll be able to recognize them, even if you can't write them by hand. And that's good enough.

Most native Japanese speakers cannot write words like 咀嚼 or 憂鬱 by hand, but many more can pronounce them just fine.

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titanix2 2642 days ago
Pr Mair have his opinion on the matter, I have mine. And while he his famous in his field, given I have formal education in Japanese at the MA level, some self taught Chinese proficiency (mostly reading) and linguistic knowledge (mostly phonology) about both these languages and some of their older varieties, I would not blindly follow his advice that I think is misleading.

That doesn't mean Chinese education is perfect right now, and I also think that traditional characters, while seeming more complex can be better for beginners as the system has a more regular internal consistency. And it's easier to learn simplified when knowing traditional than the reverse.

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gibolt 2642 days ago
You can easily recognize 500 words (~750 characters) within a month. Picking them up after you learn everything else becomes even harder.

As a person who learned and teaches it, don't skip the characters.

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