I'm well aware that the standard advice is to learn vocabulary with the pronunciation, rather than individual kanji since the reading of a word may not be the "sum" of its individual readings (e.g. 七夕 for an egregious example). I've even followed it myself.
However, when it comes to unknown words, especially when reading books, I basically lose my flow when I have to stop because I can't read a word — even if its meaning is understandable from the kanji. I can't "skip" over the word if I'm reading silently; even if I can understand the meaning of the sentence. It gets worse if there's multiple words that I don't know, or can't recall at the moment.
This question was prompted by seeing research about how a shift away from phonics in English caused students to become impaired in reading, by relying too much on context:
- https://heartland.org/opinion/decline-in-phonics-has-led-to-downfall-of-public-education/
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https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
- Haven't finished going through the entire article but this is one notable excerpt:
But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.
There's probably more resources out there, and I may or may not be mistaken about thinking that this can apply to Japanese as well. But, by using the examples of words' readings being different for the same kanji (e.g. だい、おお and たい for 大体、大幅 and 大使館) as a reason for not learning the readings seems like we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater by making one unable to read a word they haven't come across because they haven't learnt the reading beforehand.
It's easy for kanji you already know all possible readings of through previous words (common kanji like 大 and 前 are learned pretty quickly due to their presence in common words) but for those you don't come across often, it's a crapshoot as to whether you'll actually remember the reading of the kanji since you're actively advised against doing so, and instead to just "learn the differences between their appearance".
What do you think?
by GimmickNG