a letter to Michael Lavers
Уже пару лет слушаю подкаст
https://www.levelupenglish.school/podcast/ Автор время от времени призывает оставить отзыв, написать ему, предложить идею для эпизода. Также он много раз говорил, что изучает японский, и уже имеет довольно приличный уровень (он считает что B2). Т.к. я тоже неравнодушен к японскому (хотя мой уровень нулевой), и я потратил (и довольно успешно) некоторые усилия чтобы освоить одну из азбук, решил ему написать, поделиться своим представлением, вдруг ему покажется это подходящей темой для эпизода. А заодно поделиться простенькой программкой, помогающей закрепить знание カタカナ
Писомо пытался отправить несколько раз, и на почту, на разные адреса, и пытался связаться через форму обратной связи. Как в пустоту. Даже пытался связаться с автором подкаста через другой известный подкаст, который ведет Olly Richards.
Т.к. на написание письма потратил некоторые усилия и время, хочется все-таки чтобы кто-то прочитал. Поэтому решил выложить тут. Сразу скажу, письмо свое внимательно не перечитывал, т.е. как получилось с первого раза, так пусть и будет. Вот только очепятки исправил.
Собственно письмо:
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Hello, Michael.
My name is Dmitry. I've been listening to your podcast for a long time. When I found it, there had been quite a few episodes already. I started listening from the very beginning and it took me some time to catch up.
I'm writing to you now because I'd like to suggest a topic for your podcast episode, this is one (out of two) reason, and I'll write about the other reason later.
From many episodes I know that you learn Japanese. That's what I'd like to discuss. I'd like to share my opinion about Japanese alphabets and how to study them. First, in Soviet Union there were very few books on Japanese, and by far the most popular was textbook by Golovin (Головин in Russian). We didn't have access to foreign books then. According to our books, it was common to think that there are TWO Japanese alphabets (katakana and hiragana) plus kanji. We didn't call kanjii an alphabet and the reason was: alphabet is a set of symbols which represent sounds, such as Latin letters, Russian letters, katakana and hiragana. Symbols that have meanings without any connection to sound we didn't call alphabet. Most common are 1, 2, 7, 9 Those symbols represent some quantity (meaning) without any connection to how to pronounce them. Actually, people who speak different languages will pronounce them completly different, but the meaning will be the same. Learning Japanese by Soviet textbooks we were taught to look at kanji this way.
Now, the two Japanese alphabets is what I'd like to talk about. It is almost obvious that you should start learning Japanese with alphabet(s) and you should put off learning kanji till you know few hundreds words and simplest grammar rules so you can make simple sentences. But which of the two alphabets you should start with? In most books you are supposed to learn hiragana first because it is by far more commonly used. But if you look at the Soviet textbook by Golovin, you'll see that you are supposed to study katakana first, then, after you know around 500 words and some grammar rules, you start learning kanji, and after you know 100-150 kanji, and more important you know how to look up a kanji in a dictionary, only then you start learning hiragana.
So the question is: which of the two alphabets to learn first? I'll try to prove that learning katakana first is a good idea.
You have two options - learn katakana first or learn hiragana first, and there are to two possible results - you study Japanese for long enough or you give up (unfortunately this happens too often). So altogether there are for cases. Let's look at each of them.
1. Suppose you start with katakana and eventually learn Japanese. In this case you will know katakana and you will know hiragana anyway, it's impossible not to learn it.
2. Suppose you start with hiragana and learn Japanese long enough. Surprisingly I know a woman (my former colleague) who had studied Japanese for three years and could speak well enough to communicate with natives. But she had difficulties reading anything written in katakana. She could read it but ve-e-ery slowly, like first year schoolkid who just learned alphabet.
3. You start with hiragana and eventually give up. You have NOTHING you will not be able to use hiragana and very soon you will forget it.
4. You start with katakana and give up. Even if you don't know Japanese, you can use katakana. Even here in Russia I come across something written in katakana quite often, and in most cases those are English words which I can understand. If you ever visit Japan, you can read menu in a restaurant, signs in shop windows, you can read and write your name, name of your country and so on.
I think this might be an interesting topic for one episode. You may ask "why somebody would be interested in this if they don't learn Japanese?" Even if you don't learn (and are not planning to learn) Japanese, knowing about Japanese alphabets is good for general erudition. Everybody must know Latin letters, whatever is your first and second languages are. Everybody must know Greek letters even if they are not interested in Greek language. Greek letters are used in science (in astronomy you call stars like "alpha-centauri", in math you write "delta" for difference, in physics you use Greek letters for some values, you use Greek letters in biology, medicine, I could find many dozens of examples).
I think, whatever is your native language and whatever foreign language(s) you learn, everybody should know 1.Latin alphabet 2. Greek alphabet and on the third place I would put katakana.
And now, I said earlier that there is one more reason for writing this letter. Now the second reason. How to learn katakana? It takes some effort to memorize the letters, but after this you will read very slowly, with lots of mistakes and eventually you may forget. To remember well you need some practice, you need to read something written in katakana regularly and for some time. But what can you read if the textbook you use makes you read mostly hiragana? And more, what you can do if you forget some rare letter of mix up some letters? To solve this problem, I wrote a simple program (in HTML and JavaScript). I found many words written in katakana here
https://docoja.com/kata/katatxtgA-1.html and I made a page where you can read words in random order or you can choose letters which you want to practice more and read words with these letters.
The page is here:
http://dkirusfe.bget.ru/katakana-reading-practice.html You can use it on the internet or you can store the HTML file on you computer and use it offline. You can share this link with anybody who is interested in learning katakana. There are some mistakes in words, those were on the site where I took the words, if I see any, I'll correct them.
That's all I wanted to write in this letter. I hope you will read it, it took me almost three hours to write it because my English is not good enough to write quickly
Best wishes,
Dmirty