14-07-2026, 10:55 AM
(14-07-2026, 10:22 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the other hand,it would have been much harder if had chosen to study Chinese instead...This is not the judgement of people I know who learned both! In Japanese you need about 2000 characters, which is fewer than the 3000 it takes to read Standard Chinese, but the reading conventions for Japanese are much, much harder. Multiple readings exists on single characters in Standard, but there usually is a dominant reading that a person need to be practically familiar with. In Japanese the typical situation is there are more than one common reading, and you have to know the etymology and context to select the correct one. Korean mixed script is commensurately easier on the same grounds because there are no native readings of the characters, so there is less to remember and work out from context; my experience was that was a lot easier than Japanese. The kana and hangeul (as the case may be) are nicer on-ramps to the characters, and for that reason romanizations now feature in a lot of Chinese education, including in China, but Japanese is often judged the most intricate to read.
Whether or not that judgement is correct, it occurs to me the principle here might actually clear something up for me as I continue to work on my much longer response about readings. When you were studying Japanese, did you get the impression that kanji, in the context of a sentence, had multiple correct readings?