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I was just wondering why TextFugu does this. Now this isn’t a complaint – I’m a total newbie so I trust you guys have a better understanding of Japanese than I do. :)
I’m just wondering what the method to the madness is because now that I got hiragana down, I’m having fun looking up japanese and being able to read stuff. It just seems I’m running into Katakana a lot but I don’t know it yet, so at first blush it would seem more useful to learn first.
So what gives? :)
Katakana is only used for foreign words, one I saw today was タイカレー which with hiragana is たいかれー so as you can see it just translates stuff over to English(mostly). So when looking words up that are written in katakana you most likely already know the word and wouldn’t benefit much from learning it. The words aren’t very common compared to hiragana words, and I think it learns you hiragana first because it is much more common and much more useful.
With Hiragana you can atleast read a little Japanese. With katakana you can read and translate to English. It is like learning letters before numbers in other languages I guess :PKatakana is also used for scientific words – including plant and animal names, even ones that already have associated kanji – emphasis (like italics), stylistic choice, and some words even have some kind of cultural significance when katakanised in certain places, or so I’ve heard. Katakana is reasonably important, and I just went straight onto it after doing hiragana, but it’s not necessary. It’s certainly nowhere near as important as kanji anyway. You’re going to be learning kanji for a while, so no matter which you start first, you’re going to finish katakana first. I think the reason for starting kanji before katakana is that it’s best to start kanji as soon as possible, really, just because it’s so important. But if you choose to get katakana “out of the way” first, it’d be fine.
Basically, it’s your choice which you start first :) It’s been more than a year since I was at that stage with TextFugu, and the lessons are all different now, but I imagine there’s only a very short gap in-between the lesson where you start kanji and the lesson where you start/finish katakana.
AnonymousI’d say that kanji is a lot more important than katakana in terms of learning to read Japanese, since kanji is the dominant writing in the Japanese language. Hiragana is mostly used for particles and the words that aren’t usually written in kanji. Kanji is used most of the time as an understanding of the word: if it was written in hiragana you wouldn’t be able to tell what word was what word, because there are no spaces in Japanese. Now, katakana doesn’t have that problem, because katakana looks different, and it often sounds like its corresponding foreign word.
Personally, I’d think learning katakana first makes more sense, especially considering Koichi’s kanji-by-radicals method – so many of the simpler radicals are identical to katakana characters.
Joel makes a good point, actually.
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