しあわせ

Is kana sufficient to write Japanese?

ロバート — Tue, 24 May 2011 12:49:44 +0000

There is a recurring theme on a lot of blogs and forums that Japanese can only be written intelligibly using kanji. They have the idea that Japanese written only in kana (or romaji) cannot hold enough information and becomes difficult to read if not unintelligible. These ideas are mistaken. Kana is perfectly suitable to represent the sounds of Japanese, and that is all writing is, a representation of spoken language.

There are two examples of kana usage in Japan that demonstrate this; braille and morse code.

It can’t be claimed that blind people are unable to comprehend what they read in braille. It is the same Japanese. It is sound represented through kana encoded as braille.¹ Nor has this been lost on Japanese educators.

The blind man can be better educated than his more fortunate brethern who are endowed with good sight; for the former by acquiring the forty-seven letters of the I-ro-ha syllabary, through the Braille system, can read history, geography or anything written in that system; whereas he who has eyesight cannot read the daily paper unless he has mastered at least 2000 characters.

Nitobe Inazo, quoted in Ideogram J Marshall Unger. ²

Entire fleet movements and diplomatic negotiations were driven through kana, enciphered then encoded to a variation of the morse code, wabun code. Not only was this sufficient for the Japanese to understand but also for the British and Americans who had cracked their ciphers. (Although Toland seems to argue that the Americans’ poor translations hindered the negotiations to avoid war. p180 Rising Sun)

Another example, this time of romaji use, is in multipart carbonless forms on postal deliveries. These have to be made with a typewriter and romaji is the most efficient way to do this. And yet no-one would suggest that the Japanese post office can’t read these addresses and deliver them, extremely quickly.

The Myth that bloggers are perpetuating is number five on DeFrancis’ list of six myths about Chinese characters. The Indispensability Myth. More than anything else, the continued use of kanji in Japan is cultural rather than pragmatic. Perhaps bloggers want to have extra reasons to spend a large amount of time on learning kanji. Kanji are indispensable to being literate in Japanese, given that that is what is used in Japan, but you cannot rightly claim that kanji are the only way to properly represent spoken Japanese (nor the most functional).

Unfortunately we have to deal with what is. While it would be pragmatic to use kana or romaji alone, “real” Japanese is written using kanji. Japanese would find kana alone easier in the long run as they have complete command of their spoken language, but for JSL learners oddly kanji when augmented with a computer can make things easier. It is easier to do a dictionary search. It is also possible to extract some meaning without fully understanding the kanji or the word. ³

I doubt very much there will be any language reform to eliminate kanji. They are too much a part of the culture at this point. Language reform would need a revolution to carry it, such as when kanzi were simplified under the communists in China, or abandoned in favour of a roman alphabet in Vietnam. Or be imposed by a totalitarian regime such as happened with hangul. At any rate, reform if it comes will come from the Japanese themselves rather than from any outside forces. Japan’s last opportunity was immediately after World War II, while they did simplify some things they didn’t bite the bullet and introduce more far reaching script reforms.

For JSL learners, the trend now seems to be hiragana, then a limited amount of kanji in Adult education at least where once whole courses would only use romaji. The emphasis is on spoken Japanese and communication. ⁴ Romaji is often used in the earlier stages. I suspect university degree courses have a greater emphasis on written Japanese and kanji (but have yet to satisfactorily address how to teach these). For self-taught, well it’s up to the individual. But I’m sad to see an emerging elitism around the use of kana and kanji (and specific methods) rather than an excitement in exploring Japanese to whatever level is desired.

Further reading.
J Marshall Unger is very interesting on the area of script reform, romaji and literacy. While I’m sure many would dispute with him, his credentials as a researcher and scholar of Japanese are impeccable. Unlike me, say, he’s not just a random blogger.

Here are excerpts from
The Fifth Generation Fallacy
This is an interesting book. The computing aspects are completely outdated now, but they do give an insight into problems that have only relatively recently been overcome. I’d like to see an essay from Ungar on what he thinks of the current situation in computing in regards to the Japanese language now. Whereas in 1987 he was writing about the complexity and cost of pen input and OCR, yet I now have good pen input on a Nintendo DS and OCR that costs under $200 (compared to $50,000 plus for roman only when he was writing). However what he has to say about Japanese literacy and the efficiency of roman touch-typed input compared to any other method still remains true today.

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan
Research from the late 1940′s suggest that romaji is a much better way for Japanese children to learn. Research also suggests that Japan might not have been as literate a society as was imagined. Kanji were for the elite, who had the time to master them.

Ideogram

Notes

1. There are systems for representing kanji in braille but understandably they don’t seem to have much traction. Ungar points out in Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan that it was developed for social reasons as the blind were discriminated against for their inability to talk about and deal with kanji (p26, p126).

2. Nitobe probably wrote this in English, rather than this being a translation. However I can’t access the original source.

Many non-Japanese believe that because they can guess the meaning of a word like uwayaku if they know the meanings of other words written with the same kanji, “knowing a kanji” in this ad hoc sense is sufficient for written communication. For them, the correct reading is a mere detail of little consequence. While it is easy to see why they should think this way, they are mistaken—as are Chinese college students who think they can coast through Japanese texts by looking only at the kanji.

J Marshall Unger Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan p20

4. It’s hard to find studies about teaching Japanese or literacy in JSL learners. Maybe this discourse only happens in Japanese, maybe it just doesn’t happen. My only resource is the Internet really, where sometimes I find tantalising references or abstracts but without access to a university library or login (and 4 years of not getting paid and circa £70k to spare to pursue a language degree) my amateur (dilettantish) efforts are stymied. I wish bloggers would either keep to opinion (“this is how it works for me”) rather than absolute statements not backed up by citations or research (“romaji is bad”) or even just stop making stuff up.

Japanese Courses in Sheffield

ロバート — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 19:34:02 +0000

I read some comments made by Amelia Cook of Chocochip Languages on a (ill concieved) campaign against romaji web site today. Based solely on the level-headedness of her comments, she comes across as an enthusiastic, thoughtful and caring teacher who can convey her enthusiasm. Following her links to Facebook, I found a page about her courses in Sheffield. If you are in the Sheffield area and want to learn Japanese I suggest you check it out.
Chocochip Languages Japanese courses in Sheffield
They seem to have many options for courses and an interesting approach. While you can learn a lot by yourself if you are disciplined, a class; classmates; a teacher and a regular time for Japanese can be incredibly useful.

(unfortunately since it seemed to insist on a Facebook account I couldn’t comment on the no-romaji site. But in the spirit of fixing the Internet I’m working on a post in rebuttal.)

頑張ろう • ニッポン – Muslin Square Project

ロバート — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 10:50:04 +0000

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Touhoku people are slowly rebuilding their lives. However with so much wiped out I can only guess at the difficulties facing many people. Having a small child in an evacuation centre must be especially difficult. A Japanese friend of mine sent me the following information about a project addressing a specific need in the disaster area.

I can certainly vouch for my friend and the sincerity of this project. Please consider supporting them.

In some areas, people didn’t just lose their family, friends, pets, houses and jobs, but also the assurance of feeling part of the universe. Just to see cloths from the other end of the world will remind them they haven’t been forgotten.

Send Cotton-Muslin Squares to Japan Tsunami Areas
We are sending Muslin Squares to help young mothers and mothers-to-be in the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear affected areas in Japan.
Muslin Squares are large cloths used to wipe babies’ mouths, for breastfeeding or as burp cloths. They are not traditionally used in Japan, but we know they will be extremely useful for mothers who are struggling to wash and dry clothes in the evacuation centres. We have been contacted by NPOs, supporting organizations and maternity centres that are in desperate need of supplies for clean cloths for mothers.
We have already sent more than 1,500 Muslin Squares to help, but they need many, many more. We pack two large muslin squares per bag, and send them with instructions.

Please help us to help young mothers during a very difficult time. Your donation will be used to buy Muslin Squares and to ship them to Japan.
To donate, please go to the Muslin Square Project webpage　(Japanese)

For bank transfer and cheque payment, please contact msayaka@gmail.com.

London Mothers’ Praying for Japan, Muslin Squares Project | Contact: londonmothers@gmail.com (Sayaka)

You can read about the Project in Japanese (or just look at pictures) at Sayaka-san’s blog

cross-posted on microblog

July JLPT in London

ロバート — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:58:30 +0000

The Japan Foundation has announced for the first time that the JLPT will be held on Sunday July 3rd at SOAS in London. The deadline for applications is April 4th.

The SOAS web site hasn’t updated for this information as yet, but the contact details are there to request information and/or an application pack.

This is fantastic news. Unfortunately I doubt I am ready to sit a test in 4 months time. I think it’ll be December for me. I have a month to ponder spending £70 on a trial run… Maybe if I work really hard.

Flashcards Deluxe 2.7

ロバート — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 13:23:15 +0000

Flashcards Deluxe is a standalone app for the iPhone, iPod or iPad. I’ve been using it to learn Japanese vocabulary and kanji since I first got my iPod Touch. I thoroughly recommend it.

Today sees an update to version 2.7

The most noticeable change is there is now some eyecandy in the form of themes for your cards. This makes it a bit more pleasant but isn’t really earth shattering. Although I’m very fond of the Deep Blue theme that is a graded background from Black to Dark Blue, which is more pleasant than the solid black I was using. More notable changes have been quietly made to the interface. The icons used are now more consistent with the iOS look and feel. There are extra options as to what information is displayed with a card and although I no longer have the previous version to compare it with I feel the preferences panes have been more consolidated. Also welcome are two modes in preferences so the advanced preferences are initially hidden from basic users.

The major change is the help files which have been vastly improved and are now also searchable. The help and documentation were some of the weaker points of this app previously. This is no longer the case, the contextual help is now quite comprehensive. I like that it is in the application itself and doesn’t require the user to go to a web site.
All my favourites are still in the app.

Spaced Repetition.
The ability to make and edit decks and cards on the iPod itself.
Editing and making decks on a desktop only requires a text editor or for slightly more convenience a spreadsheet.
A drawing area that is very useful when learning kanji.
 Although drawing with your figure ( or thumb if using it one handed) is not ideal it reinforces the kanji and also makes sure you are actually remembering all the strokes correctly.
Multiple sides to cards. Each having their own statistics.
Export of decks including statistics via a txt file.
Relatively simple and uncomplicated.
No computer needed.

The remaining weak point in the app is importing decks from your PC or Mac. At the moment it’s done through a server the developer keeps for this purpose or through connecting to a shared folder on your computer via Wi-Fi. I think it would be more straightforward if import and export via iTunes could be implemented. According to the developer he is working on Dropbox and GoogleDocs support which should probably go a long way to bridging this gap.

The developer, Ernie, seems very approachable, helpful and willing to listen to what users say about his app and how they use it. The overhaul of the help system and inclusion of a demo deck is testament to this. I’ve never seen a RTFM reply from him on the support forums. He keeps a forum for support and suggestions and the one time I emailed him a got a very prompt reply. He’s just one guy developing a tool based on his own needs. I hope he is making more than beer money from it on the App Store. (I’ve been put off by the apparent elitism of Anki. It’s ethos seems to be that it’s only for the truly dedicated, with the implication that if you don’t use it you’re not dedicated and only good enough for inferior simpler apps. Simplicity in application design is actually hard to achieve. If many users are reporting problems it’s time for some usability testing and interface design. No-one really reads manuals, and no-one wants to spend time learning a program to achieve a simple task.)

I’m toying with the idea of putting together a FileMaker solution to make deck creation and editing a bit easier. I already have the option to export wordlists from Kanji Sieve to Flashcards Deluxe via the developer’s servers.

Check out Flashcards Deluxe at the very reasonable price of $3.99 (£2.39) . If you want to try before you buy there is also a light version limited to 4 decks of 4 cards.

I’m looking forward to version 2.8 already.

さよなら Smart.fm

ロバート — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 11:07:49 +0000

Smart.fm, formally know as iKnow, is going back to its original name and going behind a paywall. Quite a steep paywall as well at 1000円 or $12 a month. And in the process finally abandoning the last of the community/social aspect of their business.
They have a lot of disgruntled users. (also complaints at koohii and tofugu) But I expect them to disappear as their user base shrinks by about 95% if newspaper paywalls are anything to go by.The (ex)users may well delete their vocab lists before they go which will lead to patchy results in the community lists search feature of iKnow. I’ve had a look at the new site. It feels very much a cut down version of the free community based site. Any subscription money you have would be better spent on a couple of good textbooks.I can understand the anger of users. Smart / iKnow set itself up as a free collaborative social space, with the hint of possible future premium features. It’s to become a subscription based online srs program. (with the possibility of mobile apps, not sure how this will work but based on their prior efforts not so good would be my guess). A very different proposition. They have also taken the user compiled lists and locked the compiler out. At the very least it’s very poor etiquette on Cerego’s behalf not to credit people. From a users perspective the inability to search for a compilers work makes for a poorer experience.

They’ve squandered a lot of goodwill and are now engaged in some damage limitation. (They have since deleted their blog, not that they read many comments judging by the spam they allowed to accrue.) Despite what Cerego say a substantial amount of content on the site was user generated, according to their own statistics yesterday over 1000 items were created and 120 lists (goals) compiled, and this during the swan song. Individuals have added thousands of words, sentences and translations, and hundreds of lists. Quality aside, just going by the index generated on custom lists I would guess there are circa 674,000 custom goals compared to under 100 of Cerego’s official goals.
I’m tempted to delete the lists I made but it’d be a bit churlish perhaps. I more or less knew I was providing free labour for Cerego, but saw it as part of the give and take of a sharing community. I certainly won’t be making any transition to the paid site.

Smart was good for a while. Eventually though, I became fed up with how laborious it was to create lists and how difficult it was to extract your content from the site. When I got an iPod touch I no longer wanted to study online and moved to using a flashcard application. I think that’s where the majority of iKnow / Smart’s users will go. I reckon under $30 would buy a desktop app of equal power or about $6 on an iPod.
I understand their need to charge fees. It can’t be cheap to run a site like that and as yet there wasn’t much evidence of a revenue stream from the site itself although they have raised $23million plus in funding to date. I wonder if the investors will be seeking a return. That’s about 160,000 user years of subscriptions. Unfortunately for Cerego the dominant pricing on the Internet is free. The pricing of apps on the Apple App Store is under $5 (as a one off payment) They are facing an uphill battle. I would have thought a freemium model would have worked better. Although maybe they hope the core market in japan is less likely to complain and more likely to pay. I’m not so sure. The Japanese I’ve met expect top quality service and products.

If you want an alternative to smart.fm online try wordchamp.com. It may not be as graphically stylish but it has some more features. It’s free but also has a premium rate at a very reasonable $10 a year. Or there’s quizlet. On the iPod I recommend flashcards deluxe ($4) Or for a dedicated (but less customisable) program with multiple tests and games and high quality material to study including audio by native speakers and example sentences I highly recommend Japanese Sensei ($16)
Actually I recommend an iPod over any online system or desktop system mainly because it’s so portable; you can find many spare moments to go through your flashcards.
Anki seems very popular. It’s free for pc and mac but relatively expensive on the iPod (mainly the developers idea is for the iPhone app to subsidise the work on the free desktop app). I don’t really like it. It requires a lot of initial effort to learn the program and it always seemed windows clunky in it’s interface and documentation.

(This is a cross-post from my microblog, I wonder what that does to my google juice)

Kanji Clinic

ロバート — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 09:45:14 +0000

Kanji Clinic 漢字クリニック is a bi-monthly column in the Japan Times. It covers (as the name might suggest) Kanji. All previous columns are archived at the site as well as articles on kanji learning and links to kanji related sites. If you are interested in kanji you are sure to find something of interest here.
At the moment you can request a pdf reprint of a very interesting series of articles, Kanji Breakthrough by Mary Sisk Noguchi, from the now sadly defunct Nihongo Journal.

microblog

ロバート — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:21:58 +0000

I’ve started a microblog on posterous for briefer posts and interesting pages that don’t seem to be appropriate for this site. There will probably be posts about FileMaker as I continue with the Kanji Sieve project. Eventually I’ll sort out the RSS feed display and there will be a listing in the sidebar.

しあわせ microblog

Kanji Sieve 0.5 released

ロバート — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:17:10 +0000

Now with added Kanji Notebook.

New features in this iteration

option to turn off tooltips
click to display kanji information in statistics view
shift-click for options on some buttons
October 2010 standard Jyouyou kanji
User defined keywords
preferred language preference
Spanish keywords
French keywords
Spanish, French and German automatic lookup on wwwjdic
added Hispadic and Wadoku to list of online dictionaries
Chuta.jp queried for English and preferred language
sieve for custom list of kanji
searched word in waeijiten is highlighted (verbs and adjectives decline)
minor interface improvements
improved character count for more accurate overall statistics
Kanji Notebook (2010 Jyouyou, KKLD kanji, Kanji Oddysey)
phonetic data (work in progress – 75 groups at present)
Import images
Images and Audio copied to media folder
Image Editor from pixlr.com

The kanji in the statistics panes can be clicked to get basic information about the kanji, its keyword and the KKLD index. there is also a checkbox to mark it as known.
Kanji Notebook contains more data on 2537 kanji, covering the 2010 Jyouyou, KKLD kanji, and Kanji Odyssey lists. My motivation to build Kanji Notebook was to get a sort of dictionary that showed the data I wanted, and allowed me to add my own notes and importantly change the keyword. The dataset from EDRDG originally started with keywords from Heisig. These are still there as the first word and were driving me crazy. Jim Breen said he was going to clear up these entries way back in 1995 but I still want to scream when I see “old boy” for 君. The keywords from KKLD are better, or sometimes my own keyword. I haven’t included KKLD keywords but there is the option to add them yourself. The KKLD index from EDRDG‘s data is included to help with a look-up. (If you managed to get the iPhone app before it disappeared putting a ~ before the index number allows you to search for it)
The example words are from vocabulary extracted from records in Kanji Sieve. Therefore all vocabulary should be relevant to your interests.

There is automated look-up of Internet dictionaries for a kanji. I find it interesting to search google images to see if I can guess a clear meaning or see how it is being used. You can explore kanji using the browse tab, to get lists by grade, radical, phonetic, kakitorikun screen, or Kanji Odyssey group.
Kakitorikun is a great piece of software for the Nintendo DS. It’s main drawback is it’s completely in Japanese. With Kanji Notebook I can at least easily put an English keyword to kanji on a given screen.
Kanji Odyssey from Coscom is an excellent e-book based on the frequency of use of kanji. It has many examples and recordings of native speech. I recommend it. An added bonus is their completely free update program. Recently I got a new CD from them when they updated for the 2010 Jyouyou. Absolutely free, not even postage costs. That’s a rare service these days.

There is the beginnings of language support for languages other than English. Spanish and French keywords are included. They will be displayed in preference to English when the preferred language is set in preferences. This also controls what language is used to query chuta.jp. However I found that the returns are very short so English is also submitted. wwwjdic will use the preferred language when searching for vocabulary.
Complete translations of the interface are unlikely at the moment however.

That’s it for now. Next potential release will be January. I really need to spend some more time on documentation! …

Downloads

More about Kanji Sieve

Kanji Sieve v0.4 released

ロバート — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 13:10:07 +0000

Another month another set of improvements to Kanji Sieve.
In this release I concentrated on getting data in and out of the program.

It is possible to import records from a previous version.
As I strongly believe that the data belongs to the user it can all be exported in a variety of formats to be used elsewhere.
You can use a built-in mini browser to search for texts at your favourite sites.
Plain text and audio can be imported.
Chuta can now be viewed online on PCs and Macs
There is a choice of 7 online dictionaries to search for word meanings
Individual dictionary lookups are automated
The layout is now more flexible
There is a full screen mode for reading
There is an online help system (in progress)
The interface colour has been toned down
Interface and navigation improvements

I was hesitant about using Chuta online display. It was the only way at the moment to implement it for the PC. Chuta only stores a search for a limited time and while chuta is fast it does take a while to compile the custom page. I would prefer to work with cached data. What I do in the online display is check to see if the remote cache has expired and if it has fetch it again. It’s not ideal when loading the Chuta pane in the program but it is the best for now. I also had to sacrifice some screen real estate to get feedback that the program hadn’t frozen. After the first time your own cache should speed loading. Mac users can still work with the cached data by setting a preference.

There are now several dictionary urls to chose from. I think jisho.org (denshi jisho) in a mobile phone version or risukun are the fastest and cleanest. Jim Breen’s wwwjdic is comprehensive but you need to pare down the interface via the preferences to avoid information overload and clutter. The Japanese dictionaries from Wordbank, Yahoo, Goo and ALC all have ads to a varying degree. ALC is the worst, which makes for a very cluttered window without expanding it.
As I like to automate where I can you can submit a search just by clicking a button in the wordlist. You don’t have to type or copy and paste if you don’t want to. Owing to the imprecision of looking up words automatically you have to chose the correct version from the results and paste that into your wordlist yourself.

There is a mini-browser to help with getting text into the program. I dislike jumping from program to program so I wanted something “right there”. However it’s not as capable as a proper browser like Safari or Firefox (and on the PC you’re stuck with the dreadful Internet Explorer engine). And there is no ad filtering. One way around this is to use Evernote and your usual browser to collect interesting text then access your Evernote account from with Kanji Sieve. ( note: Kanji Sieve does not store or access any passwords, history etc. This is all handled by your computers browser software and stored elsewhere on your system. (Safari on the Mac, IE on Windows) Apart from accessing the help files through a browser, the software does not in any way call home. The only data going out are submissions to chuta.jp and dictionary sites for word lookups.)

I am happier with the PC version this time around. Overall I really think this is becoming a usable and useful tool.

The online help is a work in progress. I will be writing it over the next month or so. After that it will be on to version 0.5 to release sometime in November.

The downloads are here.

––update 04Oct10––
bug release v0.4.1 released 3 Oct