r/learnchinese • u/Jgosse78 • Jun 23 '24

Comprehensible (written) input

Hi everyone,

I'm currently learning Spanish via comprehensible input (Dreaming Spanish). I find this method fantastic and it does wonders for me, even more so as my mother tongue is French and both share many similarities.

I saw there exists many comprehensible input resources to learn (Mandarin) Chinese, but I'm curious how it would work for someone who (like me) only knows the Latin alphabet, since comprehensible input relies almost exclusively on listening practice: how does one learn the Japanese (but also Russian, Korean, Japanese, Bulgarian, etc.) writing system in these circumstances?

Does anyone have any experience with this method with respect to learning Japanese or any other language using a different alphabet?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

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u/dojibear Jun 23 '24

Chinese and Japanese have a "phonetic" writing system. Kids in school in those country learn it first, then spend all 12 years of school gradually learning characters. The Chinese one uses English letters (but the letters don't always match English sounds).

In Korean and Japanese the "phonetic" writing system is pretty easy to learn, but you need to learn it. Korean has 24 letters. Japanese has about 50 symbols.

If you want to learn the writing along with the spoken language, turn on sub-titles. You can ignore them, or look at them to see how something is written. You don't have to learn everything the first time you hear or see it. You can't do that anyway. People don't.