Re: Mixed writing systems (WAS: Newbie says hi)

On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 11:57 , Florian Rivoal wrote:

> This truely helps the reader to analyse the text very quickly. I
> personaly consider the japanese writing system to be the most efficient
> and confortable system to the READer, though it is a bit harder to WRITE,
>  and quite awfull to LEARN.
>
Thanks for the detailed analysis!  It was quite insightful and interesting.

I've been finding the same thing as I self-study Japanese via software
(the point being to develop limited reading and conversational competency,
  and some vocabulary).  Very early on, I decided to switch the mode from
romaji or kana to kanji-based.  This made me extremely nervous, since I
knew maybe two kanji/Chinese characters (tree and man, I think--and I have
a good track record for recognizing "horse" under duress).

Now I'm glad I did.  The sheer amount of careful repetition built into the
program means that I'm really starting to be able to recognize the kanji
in my vocabulary.  So I just pick out the important ones and then go back
to look at grammatical detail as necessary; reading has become remarkably
efficient given that I had no prior background, given the limited
vocabulary.  :-)  I'll probably never be able to write it--I'd actually
have to learn stroke order and radicals and *practice* instead of clicking
on things and repeating sentences--but it's an incredible feeling of
empowerment in a language that I had thought would be impossible for me to
get any handle on, visually.

For the curious, the program is Rosetta Stone (http://www.rosettastone.com)
.  I don't know how pedagogically sound it is, or how useful others would
find it, but their "explorer" packs (one of which I have for Turkish) are
reasonably priced and they used to have online one-week trials for the
curious.  And dammit, with the program and a grammar in hand, it's *fun.*
Makes me wish I had a conlang well-developed enough to even *think* of
doing such a self-teaching system.

Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved,
as a rule the majority is wrong.--Eugene V. Debs