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At 01:20 AM 6/29/96 -0400, you wrote:
[...]
>     Regarding kanji and furigana:  In my experience, hiragana by
>itself is almost unreadable when the vocabulary is at all complex.
>There are just too many homophones in Japanese to make easy
>understanding without either the contextual hints from spoken use or
>kanji to give different ways of writing homophones.  However it takes
>time to learn the many "required" kanji and the many more kanji that
>see use without being "officially" recognized.  Kanji + furigana seems
>to me to be a reasonable compromise, particularly if one is shooting
>for readers at a range of ages.

        It would really be a pain to piece together the meaning by just the
hiranaga/katakana, especially when alternative 'spelling' is used to denote
particular emphasis the speaker placed on the word.

>     That A!MS does not use furigana (except for the occassional name)
>that I've seen, would suggest to me that it's aimed at an adult
>readership, particularly since it seems to use a _lot_ of kanji.
>That's just a guess though, on my part.

        Not quite the adult readership, since I think the Japanese students
learn Kanji from relatively early on.  Korea also uses a lot of Chinese
characters and I knew around 100 by the end of the first semester at 7th
grade.  I wouldn't think that the Japanese schools would be dissimilar.

>David L. Burkhead                    "If I had eight hours to cut down

                                                --C h a e

PS: Just got back from Anime Expo '96 and boy, is my wallet tired. ^_^

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                       chaean@hom.net  chaean@best.com
			 http://www.best.com/~chaean
		"I'm strangely attracted to Camille Paglia..."
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