Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.

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vunderba 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.

Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.

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JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Same thing with learning Japanese

Korean, too.

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jwrallie 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Except there are many, many more symbols?

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bugglebeetle 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.

Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).

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yread 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it

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hackshack 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.

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that_ant_laney 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Japanese is partially kanji, while Mandarin is 100% HanZi (kanji).

But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.

	▲	TazeTSchnitzel 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.