Could the principles of Hiragana be applied to Western languages to make it easier to learn a foreign language?

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Could the principles of Hiragana be applied to Western languages to make it easier to learn a foreign language?

Postby Language Learner » Sun Feb 28, 2021 11:27 pm

Could the principles behind Hiragana, specifically the idea that each sound has a different symbol, as opposed to each letter, be used to improve learning of Western languages. An incredible lady in America has developed Nardagani which applies these principles to the English language, and it has had incredible results in helping students struggling to develop their reading skills. My question is, does anyone think that similar principles could be applied to western languages to improve the learning of such languages, even if it only improves pronunciation of a letter or word which could provide the learner with more confidence in speaking said language?
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Re: Could the principles of Hiragana be applied to Western languages to make it easier to learn a foreign language?

Postby tastyonions » Mon Mar 01, 2021 2:46 pm

IPA already exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... c_Alphabet

I assume you're talking about learning tools rather than more general spelling reform.
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Re: Could the principles of Hiragana be applied to Western languages to make it easier to learn a foreign language?

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Mar 01, 2021 3:58 pm

Syllabaries like Hiragana or Katakana work best with languages that have a limited set of syllables that can occur. Japanese only has five phonemic vowels and syllables can only end on a vowel or a nasal, so syllables don't get to complicated and every possible syllable (or mora, specifically) can be written using a very small number of symbols.

You could not do the same thing with English. Like most Germanic languages, English has a large number of different vowel sounds, and in addition you can have a lot of different consonant combinations in a syllable. For example, a common pronunciation of the word "strengths" is /streŋkθs/, which packs seven consonants into one syllable. It is impossible to create a syllabary for English due to the crazy number of possible syllables.

I took a quick look at Nardagani and it looks like a small set of annotation symbols to distinguish spelling ambiguities, so maybe it's more like Hebrew and Arabic's diacritic systems. I think it's probably a better idea than earlier attempts such as the Pitman Initial Teaching alphabet, which was a phonemic English alphabet for learners. The problem was that it was easy enough to learn this rational system, but it was not very helpful to help people learn English spelling which is irrational. But I like this idea because it superposes the symbols on top of the traditional English spelling, so the learners will become familiar with the shapes of the words and eventually be able to read without the extra symbols.
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Re: Could the principles of Hiragana be applied to Western languages to make it easier to learn a foreign language?

Postby Steve » Tue Mar 02, 2021 4:05 am

Back in 1967, I was one of the 1st graders experimented on with ITA (initial teaching alphabet). That's been long ago, but I have recollections about being excited about reading and writing. I think one of the best parts of ITA was being able to rapidly start writing without worrying about making spelling mistakes. If you could say it, you could spell it. As I recall, teachers seemed more concerned to get us actively writing as long as they could understand what we meant. We moved March of that school year, and I had mostly transitioned to traditional spelling by then. Perhaps knowing I was moving, they might have been running me through the books quickly to get me transitioned before we moved.

I've had good reading skills my entire life. I'm not sure how much of that was due to a good head start from ITA or just that I came from a family of readers. I read conflicting opinions on such methods.
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Re: Could the principles of Hiragana be applied to Western languages to make it easier to learn a foreign language?

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Mar 02, 2021 11:35 pm

Hiragana is more or less perfectly tailored to a language which is mora-timed and has a low number of possible syllables. This doesn't line up with many European languages, so any reform for spelling for those languages would wind up being pretty dissimilar to Hiragana.

English has an additional problem as a barrier to spelling reform: multiple standard dialects. I guess you could say every country where English is a major language has a different standard. Japanese has 1 standard dialect, and Japanese spelling matches that. However, when it comes to dialects, the spelling system starts to break down, as shown by the extreme example of the "yotsugana"

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Re: Could the principles of Hiragana be applied to Western languages to make it easier to learn a foreign language?

Postby leosmith » Fri Mar 05, 2021 3:15 am

Language Learner wrote:Could the principles behind Hiragana, specifically the idea that each sound has a different symbol, as opposed to each letter, be used to improve learning of Western languages.

Writing systems are designed to be phonetic. None of them are perfectly phonetic, but imo few if any are so bad that it would be worth your time using an interim substitute alphabet. I admit I used one for Thai, but not because it wasn't phonetic, but because it took so long to learn/get used to. I paid a price for that, but I probably would have quit if I hadn't used it (Thai was my first language with a different script).

Using kana (Hiragana and Katakana for reference) to learn Japanese is completely different. It is not a fake system that you won't be able to use in the future, it is composed of two of the three scripts used in written Japanese. It is a required first step, imo.

On the other hand, using phonetic script for pronunciation annotation only, like when you look up a word, can be helpful and is quite common, depending on the L1/L2. Many Asian learners use IPA when studying English, for example. Almost everyone uses something like pinyin, bopomofo, etc. when learning Chinese. But imo you shouldn't use it if it is easily avoided. For example, don't use romaji to learn kana, don't use romanization to learn Cyrillic, etc. Taking such intermediate steps might make things easier in the beginning, but they are often not worth the price you pay to reverse the fossilization of the fake script in your brain.
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