- 15 Mar 2002
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My point wasn't so much about the lack of kanji as it was about the other reasons I listed. In fact, I don't think I mentioned kanji at all in my list of reasons why children's books such as beginner's learning materials.
Lack of spaces between words conspires with other elements such as, but not necessarily limited to:
1. Stopping at the end of a known word and not recognizing that what comes after is part of an unlearned compound with the previous word (@thesuker 's しょうじき＋もの＋の instead of しょうじきもの＋の being a perfect example).
2. Inability to de-conjugate unlearned conjugations back to dictionary form for lookup
3. Difficulty telling particle は/へ from non-particle usage.
4-100.....add your own
As I said in my initial objecting (and apparently objectionable) post, the idea of using children's books when beginning is universal....practically everybody thinks of it. The odd thing is that practically everybody seems to think they are the first person ever to think of it. Believing there is some sort of linear correlation between the language skills of a native speaking child and one's own degree of progress as a foreign learner and that children's books will therefore just naturally be more amenable to them is where the problem arises. (How many times have you heard Ernest Lerner proclaim "My Japanese is about the same as an X year old Japanese child."?)
We need graded readers that take into account the grammatical points, vocabulary items, and kanji we have learned while the sky is the limit regarding thematic content or complexity. The native speaking child needs no special consideration whatsoever regarding grammatical points, lack of kanji/spaces is a nonissue, and vocabulary need be constrained only by the thematic content and complexity which of necessity will be limited by their being small children.