Most posts I notice in general say that reading is easier than listening but I find the opposite to be true in Japanese. Over time i find im reading less and just listening. Even with LingQ i often dont recognize the word unless i hear it then I know it. Shoud I worry about it and focus more on reading or go with it (ie) is this a bad habit?
2 Likes
I do both at the same time and I can say my listening is progressing quicker than my reading. I suppose for phonetic scripts you kind of learn both at the same time (as long as you know the script), but for kanji it should be normal to learn how to read it after knowing the word. And I can’t see how that would be bad, every native language is acquired first through listening.
3 Likes
I find the reading of Japanese on LingQ a bit unreliable because often the wrong reading is there in the kana above the kanji and we have no option to change it. So most of the time I’ll listen to content like CIJ and read on Sakura reader. Both seem to be developing (slowly!).
4 Likes
But this is only true if reading implies that you know how the word is pronounced. For reading and understanding a text, this isn’t neccessary, though, and personally I find remembering the meaning of the kanji easier then remembering the pronounciation.
So maybe the different perceptions as noticed by the op comes from different interpretations of what reading means. Those who interpret reading as understanding the text find reading easier, those who interpret reading as understanding the text and knowing how to pronounce it (aka reading it aloud) find listening easier.
That sounds right but in my study of Kanji on Wankani I have a much higher score for meaning than I do the reading. So even though I understand meaning better visually im tending to want ot just listen. Hmmmmm.
1 Like
That may be the case, but the fact that furigana is regarded as a reading aid leads me to believe that listening is generally understood as preceding even the grasping of the meaning of an ideogram.
2 Likes
Well, for a native speaker this makes totally sense, as children speak the language for a long period before they even try reading. And creating a different approach for foreigners isn’t of much use probably as most will want to learn the spoken language, too anyways, and those who don’t need it can just ignore the furigana (or pay less attention).
I haven’t studied a tremendous amount of Japanese, to be honest, but I disabled the furigana pretty early on as they are wrong most of the time anyways, but I never had the impression that not knowing how to pronounce a word makes understanding the sentence harder or knowing the pronounciation makes it easier. It is motivating when I can remember both, though. 
1 Like
Words composed by kanji are not necessarily related to their meaning. Some words that come to mind that might be recognizable by beginners through their sound are 天ぷら and 沢山. There are also proper names. For people’s names it’s more complicated, but if you see 長野, 広島 or 新宿, even if their names correspond to the meaning of the kanji in a sort of way, it’s from the sound that they are more readily apprehended.
1 Like
I completely forgot to respond.
I see where you are coming from and it raises one question: If you can apprehend the sound from context or whatever, why shouldn’t you be able to apprehend the semantic, or why should it be harder?
You can’t read the sound, so to speak. You just see the symbols and may have some additional information (the aforementioned context or the grammatical function, for example) and have to link this to the other information, may it be phonetics or meaning. I would argue that which one is more accessible to you depends on what you focus more on.
If a person starts to learn Japanese because he is a big anime fan, for example - and I am aware that this is a cliché - but such a person would probably have already spend some time watching those series in Japanese before learning the language and will do so once started. So it is pretty natural that he might find it easier to associate the symbols with the phonetics.
I personally started to spend some time studying Japanese because Japanese texts contain chinese characters, so I can study them in context, as I want to get to know them better in order to boost my vocabulary aqcuisition in Korean. So for me, the Japanese pronounciation of those words is less relevant. It’s the meaning I am interested in. So I find it easier to remember that aspect.
So it depends on ones reason to learn the language and the focus imho.