My favorite is the name 小鳥遊, read as Takanashi. What's odd about it? Well, the characters are "Little bird plays". If read as normal Japanese, it would be read as something like "Kotori asobu". Where does Takanashi come from, then? Well, when does a little bird play? When it feels safe. When does it feel safe? When there's no predators around. What's a predator to a little bird? A hawk. How do you say "No hawks" in Japanese? Takanashi.
Wow, that's pretty bad. In Mandarin Chinese it literally reads "little bird tour" and is 99% going to be pronounced "little bird tour" (Xiǎoniǎo yóu). However, if I were to read this, it could be a place name (China has a lot of weird place names, like "Treasure Chicken" near Xi'an, 宝鸡, my favorite Chinese place name), or part of an obscure aphorism that the Chinese know but would leave me mystified, or the proper name for a tourist company. It all depends on the context, of course, of the sentence in which this would be found.
KarlMarxTheTalkingParrot Doesn'tKnowWhatHeIsSaying Often, you get a compound kanji by combining words that are similar in meaning, but not pronunciation. Because of this, something can mean multiple things when written down but not when spoken. You sometimes see this as tl notes explaining kanji-based humor. So you can read the kanji in one of several ways, and sometimes the particular reading does some weird stuff with meaning while still being grammatically correct when read out loud. And it's actually really hard to do, so being able to do word play in Japanese is typically a respected skill.
漢 being pronounced "Han" in Chinese but "Kan" in Japanese is not by mistake. In fact, all /h/consonants in middle Chinese systematically correspond to /k/ in Japanese (海hai/kai，喜hi/ki，湖ho/ko，混hon/kon). It is because the Japanese language in the 7th century did not have the /h/ consonant so that /k/ was already the closest approximation. The consonant of はひふへほ evolved to /h/ in a much later time (pretty much one millennium later) and they were still pronounced pa pi pu pe po in the 7th century.
One more point needs to be made: when Japanese schoolchildren are taught to read and write, they already know how to speak; so it's just a question of matching up the words with the characters. All the various readings come in words and combinations that the Japanese child already knows. The foreign student comes in completely cold: he knows neither the words nor the characters (nor the combinations). Much more complicated.
@@ren7220 Unless you live there like Tom Cruise in the last samurai, being taught like a child, even so its faster to learn reading. It's not faster to learn to read because you already know the words. You still need to learn the 2146(i think) kanjis, and hiragana and katanana, that japanese students takes 9 years to learn in school, but you can learn in 3-4 years, some people less, some more, depending on the time you spend.
I have to keep reminding myself while learning Japanese. Sometimes I can remember a word but not the writing, but I have to assure myself that it’s just part of the process
Why is the Japanese language starting to sound to me like a pair of pants that has been patched so many times that the "pants" no longer exist and merely a collection of patches in the form of pants remains?
matchesburn well if you studied the root words for basically everything in English, it just ends up being a group project with no direction or order ;)
@@thatoneherbdude and patches of the english cloth have been sewn on the japanese pants these days too... so now you have the chaotic group project as part of the pants
@@καλαμ Cept, you know, not. That's Chinese stroke order. Japanese order can start basically anywhere on the top and work its way to the bottom... mostly
@@benjiusofficial don’t know what you’re talking about 95% of kanji follow that simple rule. I’ve memorized about 450 kanji from Remembering the Kanji and it’s rare to see an unusual stroke order. When using mother (母) as a radical for example when writing (貫) or how you write vertical then horizontal in rice field (田) but the opposite in speciality (専)
My opinion on Japanese (after having learnt it for 3 years now) is that it's really a pretty easy language. It's the kind of thing where like, if you spend too much time analysing everything like in this video, it will seem ridiculously complex, but when you're actually in the position of being a student learning the language, it all makes sense after a while. With Japanese (and even Chinese which I've learnt for 6 years), you really just have to "do it". Don't think about what everything means as such, just learn what words to use and when, and how to say them in those different contexts, and how to write them each way. Honestly it is so easy to know when to use Kanji vs Hiragana vs Katakana in a sentence when you already know which words you need to know. Kanji are easy enough to learn if you just practice, I may have had a bit of an advantage going into Japanese classes after I'd already spent years learning Chinese and Chinese characters, but still, they are quite logical. If you were to try to learn Japanese in a way similar to how this video describes the language, like by trying to find patterns and sequential whatevers (my brain is failing me atm coz it's like 1am lmao), you'll struggle. If you just learn the general way that things work, in context of different sentences etc, it will just fall into place and it will become second nature. You'll always know that "go" is "iku" which is written 行く, and that "bank" is "ginkou" (銀行), and you will always automatically know to write the "行" character probably forgetting that it can be pronounced a different way if it were a different word that you were writing. It's like how if you analyse English, it's ridiculous. "Cough" = "koff" but "though" = "thow". If you think about it too much, you'll have an extremely hard time, but if you just learn each word as it is, you'll be fine and be able to bullshit your way through most of the language, for lack of a better word :P
911toothache thanks for the clarification! I hope I can learnn Japanese in future and won't stuck with this theories 😂 totally agree with u, if u learn the language for write and speak I think its better just follow the rules. Dont questions where, what and why it happens. Unless u take linguistic and literature then u probably have to know the background history
In your "bank" / "go" example, I note it's the same as in mandarin where 行 has two pronunciations and meanings : xing (go) or hang, and 银行 is a bank, with 银 meaning silver. Therefore would you say that a good foundation in mandarin was a big help when learning Japanese?
911toothache again, like you I might have an unfair advantage having already learnt Mandarin Chinese, but Japanese really is not that difficult. When you put it all together and just do it, it works and make sense. If you try to over analyse it, you lose the trees for the leafs. I have found that I naturally over time developed an intuitive understanding of characters and how their radicals, pronunciation... etc simply by just going into chat rooms with people and using the language to talk. This guy seems to treat learning a language like a linguistic exercise and not a form of communication, so no wonder it felt hard. It is like taking your computer apart and then putting it back together again, and then complaining that you still cannot understand how to use excel.
ryehaaan learning the how and why behind a language can be very rewarding and helpful. I.e. Understanding why Japanese uses 私 (private) to refer to one's self goes a long way to understand Japanese culture. However, the guy in the video got things backward. He tried to learn all the extremely complex advanced linguistic theory before he had a solid understanding of the language as a tool for everyday communication. He therefore lack the knowledge to really appreciate how each of these complex parts fitted into the wider whole. It is like trying to learn the mathematics behind infinity before you have learnt your basic times tables. That is actually why I take issue with this video; it makes out Japanese is some unmanageable beast which risks putting people off learning what is a truly rewarding and interesting language to learn.
911toothache He’s definitely overthinking all the kanji origins, handwriting shortcuts, etc. I’m able to read most books with good comprehension and I definitely don’t know all 2000+ joyo kanji yet. Like any language, you get a feel for it with practice. And even though Japanese takes a long time to say some things that are short in English, there are many times the Japanese is much shorter and more elegant than English. Having to translate both ways every day made me realize both have their strengths and weaknesses depending on what you’re trying to say.
Only Japanese uses kanji ;) Koreans used Chinese characters long ago, but this one dude realised it was too crazy to use signs form a language that has no morphology in a language that has crazy morphology. So he changed it, wish the Japanese did the same thing.
"wish the Japanese did the same thing". I'm not so sure about it, Rosita. Japanese has too few sounds and would be EXTREMELY ambiguous without a kanji to differentiate things in written language. Maybe it's feasible, but words would have to increase in size. Korean has several hundred sound combinations, while Japanese has about 60.
I'm Japanese. In real life, the Japanese language is not so difficult, but if I want to know more about it, I need a huge amount of memory. Japanese is difficult even for Japanese people.
How do people in your society even become fully-literate, seriously? I'm sure the language itself is not that bad, via 'Romanji,' but with the three alphabet systems (especially if Kanji are as bad as he says) it would become way over-complicated. It's hard enough in Mandarin where there is order to it, but he makes it sounds like any hyper-complex order system from Chinese gets scrambled in Japanese! I'd love to learn Japanese because I have a Japanese friend, but woah... too tough!
@@Awakeningspirit20 As some people have already said, don't overthink too much about it. Just like how babies learned, constantly exposing yourself to sentences (or conversation) makes you able to understand the context of different character uses. Otherwise, simply knowing the vocabulary can make it for you and not the constant analysis of whether to use onyomi or kunyomi in Kanji characters.
@@Awakeningspirit20 The answer is: without a modern public educational system, they don't. Without a rigorous modern public educational system, neither Japanese, Chinese, or any Sinosphere country had mastered the Kanji in the majority of their populace. At best their literate rate was about 5%-20% (depending on standards defining "literate"), compared to early modern England where about half of the population easily mastered the alphabets while abandoning non-native Latin language as their standard for being "literate", even with the outlying examples such as Andrew Jackson. Some may argue that medieval Europe's literacy rate is just the same as pre-modern Sinosphere countries, but back then the primary written language was Latin, and being literate simply means mastering a completely different language of their own for most medieval Europeans.
@@Schinshikss Bible was translated to Slavic language by Saints Cyril and Methody and approved by Pope Hadrian II (792-872). Latin was used as lingua franca... and still is used for science (medicine, biology, etc.). And in XXI century some blue colors employee for a Fortune 500 company in Des Moines, IA don't understand "post meridiem" (PM) and "ante meridiem" (AM)... is that literacy or idiocracy?
Both hiragana and katagana are actually just severly reduced forms of kanji that have the same pronunciation as the kana. あ came from 安 etc. They are borrowed from a specific style of writing kanji called grass style.
@@ethan2163 Pinyin is used mostly by natives of Latin script languages to know the pronunciation of words. And because many have issues with a language that don't use spaces to mark where one word ends and another starts they put the spaces into Pinyin so it's more familiar. For example: Chinese: 他是高文中 Pinyin (without spaces): tashigaowenzhong pinyin (with spaces): Ta shi gaowenzhong In that sentence a non-native reader may have issues figuring out if the character 高 (Gao) is a part of the person's name or not, so spaces help them know. It also breaks the text up into more pieces, so its easier to have your eyes follow along, kinda like the difference between walking on ice and dirt.
@@pixiepandaplush Most children's books and easy-to-read video games like Pokémon are written in kana with spaces. The trouble comes when you use more technical terms, like in academic or scientific texts. In English, we make technical terms with Latin and Greek roots fit together: "geo" for "earth" and "graphy" for "picturing", or "trans" for "across", "port" for "carry", and "tion" for making it a noun. In Japanese, they use Chinese roots (kanji), like "kou" for "mingle" and "tsuu" for "go through" to make "koutsuu" for "traffic". Some of these roots sound the same, so you have words like "kanshou", which has several meanings that you use kanji or context to differentiate, but many of kanshou's meanings seem fairly uncommon. This kind of problem has a few solutions, like using terms that don't require kanji to be understood (Yoshimoto Banana is a popular author who uses comparatively fewer kanji in her novels), or to stop using kanji when they aren't needed to distinguish a word ("oishii" has kanji, but many people write it in only kana).
As a native-Japanese speaker I do recommend to learn the meanings and origins of kanjis. I see a lot of comments that are saying that you should just memorize it and not go too deep in it. In elementary school they teach us the meanings and the origins of each kanji we learn (we don’t go too deep though). If you are only going to learn how to order food or greet then you don’t need to, but if you really want speak the language, please understand that only memorizing words won’t help you much. You have to know why you use the phrase or you could use it incorrectly. It is tough to learn Japanese. The Japanese language is like history. According to some research Japanese is considered one of the most hard languages to learn for an English speaker. Of course it depends on people. And I think it is not as hard as the video says but this is an analysis of the language and not a lesson to learn it.
@@poulomi__hari because it is their culture. people are always like this when they find something hard in another language. they always want to change it.....
Of course it is, Japan is on the opposite side of the world and of a supercontinent from England! Both have similar historical backgrounds of piecing together multiple languages and influences though. The difference is England got conquered by multiple people and a Creole language that stretches across most European language groups was created, while Japan was impenetrable and got to pick and choose what it liked from its neighbors. Honestly, learning the roots of English in the same way you learned Kanji is a historical process that truly helps you understand not just your language, but those around you as well. Like I can now tell which English words or particles of words are Romance vs. Germanic in origin, or even Greek. Japanese is probably even more rich, because it's not just root WORDS it's root PICTOGRAMS.
wow this guy only has like 20k subs and he's putting more work into these videos than people that have like 1 million plus subscriber's. keep up the good work
I noticed that immediately as well. This is quality content but it has to be said that language history is not as gripping as a cartoon where sailors and astronauts accidentally do each other's jobs.
Yah the thing about TH-cam is that good content doesn't equal popularity like it should. People can get millions of view buy doing pretty lazy shit. People get more view by doing a 3 minute webcam video, recording themselves playing games,making videos of things you can already get else where example releasing anime episodes on youtube. And don't get me started on click bait whores. I guess what im trying to say is people on youtube get tons of views for rather lazy things, so when channels come along that actually put work into their videos. When they don't get attention that is equal to their work. It really grinds your gears
I think the main reason why the +NativeLang channel doesn't have many more subscribers is because people tend to subscribe to channels they expect will give them frequent content that they will want to watch, and when it comes to languages most people have an interest in very few or even none of them. Those with an interest in few specific languages are not likely to expect much content of interest to them from a channel that is about languages in general and not specifically one or more of those few, whichever they might be. Most people who would subscribe to a language channel are more likely to want one that teaches a language they're trying to learn and doesn't do much else. This channel is great for linguists and polyglots with a deeper or more general interest in languages, but that is a rather small segment of the population. I would say in that context, the subscriber count of this channel is exceptionally high... and well deserved.
Having studied Japanese for over a decade, I can say that Kanji, like a lot of complex systems, are impossible to make logical sense of except retroactively. The mind will absorb them and all their endless idiosyncrasies if you already have a couple years of Japanese study in your mind and you just start reading. Read children's books and furigana subtitles will be there to help you associate each moon rune to each word you already know. Quickly you'll find you're reading the kanji instead of the furigana and you'll also notice you're reading faster. For kanji you know, faster than English. You'll notice kanji now knitting together formerly distinct words in your mind and you'll start seeing webs form to connect what was once an endless list of formless shapeless words. There's only about 3000 popular kanji but hundreds of thousands of words in Japanese and any other language. Trying to figure out which 10-200 words align to each kanji and how each pronounces differently and how the shades of meaning are all cleverly worked in first is the backwards way. The mind doesn't absorb information like a traditional computer, it absorbs it through association like an AI. The association is subconscious. Just like an AI, the more raw data you feed it, the better it'll get. Keep feeding yourself books and you can learn kanji way faster than with vocabulary lists and memorizing stats as though kanji were Pokemon or something.
Kanji is manageable when reading or memorizing. But writing is on a totally different level. In the age of smartphones and computers, you can compose Kanji characters in quick succession. So, writing practice could be somewhat hard to indulge into nowadays. That is, when you are self-studying... Taking Japanese classes, of course, is much effective.
It’s way easier for Chinese to learn Japanese than learning English. Though there’re differences between Japanese’s characters with Chinese characters. For example 邪魔 means “hindrance” in Japanese but in Chinese it means “demon” I love Japanese x. 大好き💕
1) Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, not Vedic Sanskrit 2) The untranslated (transliterated) part is mantras, plus some names and certain hard terms like prajña paramita or nirvana, much less than ‘semi’ would suggest.
@Varmaji While Vedic Sanskrit is a natural language, spoken by Aryan tribes in Ancient India and very close to eastern dialects of Persian of the time, Classical Sanskrit is a constructed language codified by the grammarian Pāṇini.
One tip to many japanese kanji learners is that don't learn it based on jlpt n5 to n1. This will take hella time and you will forget half of the kanjis. The better way is to learn it like english. 1) learn hiragana and katakana 2) learn very basic kanjis with their proper stroke order(seriously it makes it so much easier) Example-日火弓言手足子力行来etc 3) then learn nouns,pronouns, grammar structure(note- japanese follows SOV format example 'I eat apple' becomes 'I apple eat') 4) then learn various types of objects example 1) various items in house,school,office 2) body parts 3) food items 4) means of transportation 5) directions,public places, countries 6) various greetings such as gm,gn,hello, how are u 7) verbs,tenses 8) animals 9) clothes This way u will learn the useful items and discard useless kanjis which are rarely used. U can also very easily learn,read and communicate in this process of learning
For those wanting to learn Japanese, don't worry yourselves, you can learn only the meaning of the Kanji and memorize how words are pronounced(as we do in every language we try to learn). Nothing bad will come of it, there's no point in memorizing pronunciation when you can just learn a word with a specific Kanji and how he's pronounced THERE. You can't learn how native talk through a book. Amazing video, but this point needed to be made.
Ferinoification Eu uso 'Anki' e "Japanese Kanji & Kana A Complete Guide to the Japanese Writing System" Eu vejo o Kanji no Anki e procuro ele no livro pra saber a ordem dos traços e se não tem um significado muito diferente do que ta escrito no Anki(ja que é o método RTK), só isso mesmo.
Já tinha ouvido falar do Anki. Vou começar em breve a estudar japonês . Mas pretendo começar escrevendo apenas em hiragana e katakana e após começar a aprender os kanjis. Valew pelas dicas.
Probably gonna not have Chữ Nôm right? The Vietnamese system for Chinese characters, before they were changed into Roman letters, like Korea's Hanja, and Japan's Kanji (into hangul, and hiragana+katakana+kanji).
Just a few pointers 弓 does have reading たらし, however it's archaic and not used today. kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BC%93-145366#E5.A4.A7.E8.BE.9E.E6.9E.97.20.E7.AC.AC.E4.B8.89.E7.89.88 屶 is used for names according to kanken level 1 list. It's very obscure and probably not the best example for kokuji. Probably something like 榊(sakaki) that's bit more difficult than the simplier kokuji but not too obscure. On kun readings aren't that simple as there are quite a few exceptions. While most of multiple character compounds are in on reading there are lot of 湯桶 and 重箱 such as 係員（くん--おん）and 旧型 (おん--くん） I agree with you with about usefulness of kyuujitai and ateji, which are only useful if you are a language nerd. But hey the video poster is one. I also quite happen to like learning some obscure stuff. I mean you do need to learn this if you want to achieve the highest level mastery in kanji knowledge exam.
It's true that these kanji are very obscure and not needed. I did mention that the 屶 was what I found from 漢字検定1級 list which is pretty telling. As for the readings we can look at these words: 見本（みほん） which is kun on despite both having on and kun readings. Or 梅酒（うめしゅ）which also proves the case. They simply have to be learned by heart.
Im mandarine, but im gonna say japanese kanji is nothing like chinese hanji, maybe some words have same meaning and similar sound but many of the kanji is totally out of our understanding
My explanation was insufficient about that.I agree that kanji is not so difficult. What I want to say is that foreigners don't understand the efficiency of kanji so much.
Ah I see, fair enough I guess! Me personally, I am a foreigner but I feel like I fully understand Kanji's value - besides being visually appealing, it adds a lot of depth to the language and makes sentences so much more readable and to be honest, less confusing to me. It can help differentiate a lot between different homophones too. Maybe I'm an exception but that's just me.
I see you are subscribed to this channel to improve on your English. Good, because I can also see your skill for locating humour and satire is lacking.
But if you fold a piece of paper so many times... It just gets 'furry'... keep on doing that and it's liable to disintegrate (go away) altogether... :o/
Coming back to this after studying some n4. Turns out it’s so much easier to read Japanese with the Kanji, since you almost can’t read the kana meanings without them.
Ah yes, this reminds me of my own JLPT N4 experience. The vocabulary section has no kanji (for obvious reason), and it was actually really hard to read everything, even with spaces separating parts of the sentence. Incidentally, I took the N4 exam with nothing but a year of watching (or rather, attempt to watch) Japanese anime without subtitle; no formal study whatsoever. In hindsight, the exam highlighted just how woefully unprepared I was. I literally picked up new vocabulary WHILE IN EXAM, and I didn't really understand a single thing in the listening portion. Still passed with pretty good mark somehow.
ikr? light novels and games never being translated and the Japanese with absolute zero intention on translating it someday. Most painful and annoying language to learn ever, but worth it
They still mess with pronunciations to get things to fit in. In one of my first classes at university, when we were learning katakana, we had to read this: ハーレーダビッドソン and explain what it said. Since none of us were very good at reading katakana at the time (I can still barely read it), we went at it a syllable at a time: 'haa-ree-da-bid-do-so-n'. We had no clue what it meant, until the teacher finally told us what it said, and then it fell into place: Harley Davidson.
Aren't kanji in Japanese kind of like Sumerograms? They're logographs taken from another unrelated language to stand for meanings, while additional grammatical particles are represented by a syllabary (which was also derived from that parent script).
Exactly, the kanji themselves are used as meanings, while man'yogana (and its daughters hiragana and katakana) are used as sounds. Like how Sumerograms are used as meanings, while other Assyrian cuneiform are used as sounds.
You are correct in that Kanji has meaning behind it. For Example, from the Chinese point of view: 子 -> Child, 老 -> Elder, 文 -> Culture, Child supporting Elder -> 孝 means Filial (good to parents) Elder talking to Child about Culture -> 教 means Teach 木 -> tree, 爫 -> represents a hand above so 采 means pick up (pluck vegetables) But some Chinese words use sounds to represent the word. For example 采 is called Cai. Vegetables is also called Cai so we add 艹 which means grass to form 菜 . In Kanji, vegetables also uses 菜 but is pronouced Sai instead as in Yasai. In short, some Kanji have meanings behind them while others are based on Chinese pronunciations. It depends on how the word originated.
It is funny because everything you say is accurate, but when you actually are in the process of learning the language, you don't necessarily realise it, you just assimilate it pretty naturally (although it probably depends on your/the teacher's method). Don't give up!
I'm a native Japanese and I tutored many students from around the world when I was in Canadian and the US. Speaking from my experience, I really think Japanese is one of the easiest to become semi-fluent but the hardest to master. It doesn't matter unless you are planning to become a scholar or something, so please don't be scared! Speaking is easy especially for Koreans, South East Asians, Italians, and Spanish. Even if you are English, it'd take only a couple years to become somewhat fluent if you are actually willing to learn.
I‘m a college student from China, studying Japanese as my 2nd foreign language.It is really easy for Chinese student to pass Japanese test. Sometimes there is a super long sentence that is hard to understand, but I can understand it just dependent on the kanji in it.lol 漢字萬歲！
The funny thing is, spoken Japanese is very simple, at least phonetically, but even the grammar isn't that hard for speakers of Altaic and Uraic languages, for example.
what someone said abt Chinese words(hanzi, kanji)in mandarin & Japanese, it provides eloquence and precision of meaning on paper. for verbal communication where speed is a major factor, those intricacies can be tucked away
MingJian Yap The Japanese language is not well suited for kanji, that's why kana had to be devised, as well as using kanji for phonetic reading at times. The Koreans (whose language is similar in grammar, structure, syntax and phonology to Japaese) realized this in the 15th century, and switched to a completely phonetic, original script. It's much like how Indo-European languages like Persian and Urdu are not well suited for the Arabic script, and a lot of guess work has to be done based on context.
The reading and writing isn't that hard for me, but the grammar is what throws me off. Sometimes I understand every word in the sentence, but still don't know what the hell is being said! Gotta keep studying!
I ain't dropping the language I will continue v':! Update : These series of videos came back to haunt me three years later, and here I am. I know how to read japanese to an almost N3 level and can communicate to a N4 level (I still make mistakes tho) I know 1200 out of the 2200 jojo kanji, I can also write them, I'm using heiseg so, some of them I cannot pronounce them but I know what they mean and how they are written. I will evaluate if I want to learn the other 800 which are for writing names. 静 is my favorite name tho. I got angry at this video, because it discouraged me from learning japanese, I almost drop the language, but since I'm stubborn I didn't gave up. I could learn this language outside of Japan, you can do the same. What the guy says it's true but it only complicates everything. I'm still angry at this video, but you can accomplish what I've accomplished in less than a year. You can do this. 信じてください。 日本語が多分むずかしいでも楽しいです。 がんばって皆さん。
Keep at it. Most of these Kanji's arent used that much outside of artistic reasons. And even then there are usually helpfull guides to how to read it. Cause even Japanese people cant read this.
As a Japanese student, if you completely master this writing system, you can read the sentence very fast. Because kanji represents the meanings and Hiragana and Katakana represent only the sound. So it is able to understand rapidly than other languages. However, it uses a lot of energy.
As someone who’s lived in Japan and studied the language I can say that is untrue. Even when we read other languages such as English we don’t go word by word, we have subliminally memorized the words and are just as fast in reading. Its just a misnomer that you can read Japanese faster, as someone who’s fairly competent in both I can say that much. 日本語の勉強頑張って下さい。
It isn't true: study showed that Chinese people (even more succinct than Japanese) read between 3 and 4 characters per second on average This is about the same speed they'd have when reading in English Although now the limit is only the brain and not the eyes
It’s less about reading speed and more about clarity. I’ve had this exact discussion with Korean speakers when they tout how user friendly its writing system is (which it indeed is, I learned to read hangeul almost by accident), but unless you know what words those phonetic blocks translate to then it fails to communicate the language’s meaning (i.e. it only works if you speak Korean). The opposite is true of languages that use Chinese characters, I have had personal experience seeing a group of kanji with not even the first clue how to pronounce it verbally, but could still generally make out what was being communicated.
God Almighty, I'm glad I didn't see this before I started learning kanji (43 years ago). I just learned them and took them as they came. End of story. Why tell beginners every single teeny tiny detail about the Japanese kanji system at the beginning? Kind of like telling a six-year old all about calculus when he is learning how to add single-digit numbers, or a four-year-old when he is just learning to WRITE numbers. There's an order to learning, and videos like this just make things more confusing than they need to be. But you do sound like you're having fun...
Yeah, but what about people who don’t want to go back to school to learn a language? I wouldn’t want to spend 12 years of my life learning another language, no matter what. Many other languages don’t require another school’s worth of learning to complete, making Japanese much harder.
As someone with a math degree It takes a full school education to build up your math skills to be adequate at entry level calculus. If your writing system takes a comparable amount of effort to learn I'd say somethings gone wrong.
Weaver Games Eh, I’d argue that you don’t need Euclidean geometry or precalc for calculus, and 6th and 7th grade math shouldn’t exist. Precalculus imo is just stuff that makes more sense to learn in the context of calculus (weierstrass identities, parametrization, etc.) and is just kiddie analysis. Euclidean geometry is only really necessary for the trig involved, and not really needed otherwise. Plus, Algebra 1 and 2 can be learned in a year, and 6th and 7th grade don’t really teach you anything. You can totally learn calc 1-2 by the age of 13, get real and complex analysis with linear algebra by 14, and topology, calc 3, and abstract algebra by 15, if you study over the summer.
As someone studying Chinese, it's interesting to see the similarities between Chinese and Japanese. Many of the Japanese kanji words are written the exact same in Chinese and have the same meaning, but the pronunciation is completely different. 圖書館 is library in both languages, and 車 means car in both languages. However, at least Japanese learners don't need to worry about tones, which in Chinese completely change the meaning of the word.
In another way Japanese is harder though. You should acknowledge how while in Chinese once you learn the pronunciation of a character that often doesn't change no matter how it is used(or it changes minimally). With Japanese you have to memorize many different pronunciations depending on context.
Kanji is Chinese characters. The ancient Japanese learned wrong Chinese characters and produced some pieces (wrong Chinese text). They did not learn well. So "Japanese Kanji" means the meaning of wrong understanding and writing the wrong Chinese text. Some special KANJI combinations are used in ancient Chinese documents (many people think this is different from Chinese characters). It is also used in southern China today.
+Andrew Strom yeah... i don't want to be that weeaboo that only speaks two words japanese and says he speaks it fluently. but its so hard to find good (and cheap) lessons on the internet. i tried lingualift,yuta,japanesepod101 and i'm now trying wanikani.
Kanji itself actually isn't too hard to learn if you just learn it slowly! If you just try to memorize all the different pronunciations, it'll be near impossible, but I think most classes and textbooks just introduce one pronunciation at a time with each kanji and shows it to you in context with hiragana that you already know. Definitely not easy, but worth it, especially if you don't want to be those types of weebs who don't speak Japanese; they speak anime and are content with that/are convinced that they know Japanese :P
Actually having a mandarin background backed by knowledge of two Chinese dialects at an intermediate level helps. Some of those kanji are used in Chinese dialects but not in Mandarin. And those dialects originated from the ancient times. Wu or Go in onyomi makes it easier for a Shanghainese but not for other dialects while Tang or Kan in onyomi makes it easier for those who speak the Southern dialects. To complicate things further, Japan kept archaic Chinese characters while the meaning of some words are long forgotten in mandarin but not the dialects. 屶 was not created but borrowed from archaic Chinese (meaning lofty) and rebadged with a new meaning. Not exactly Kokuji but Kokkun. Shinjitai is essentially a slight variant of simplified Chinese characters.
You omitted a very important Kanji reading, jukujikun(熟字訓), or a single kunyomi that is spread across multiple characters acting as a single morpheme. For example, きょう is a single native Japanese morpheme that would normally be assigned to a single Kanji as its kunyomi, but since no appropriate character exists to host this morpheme, two characters must share the burden: 今日. This is one of the most difficult aspects of Kanji, although they are thankfully limited in number, yet many are common. These jukujikun can't even be listed among an individual character's readings because the pronunciation is indivisible in reference to the characters hosting it; in other words, you can't say that きょ is one of 今's readings, nor that う is one of 日's readings.
I actually furiously debated once with a Japanese calligrapher because he insisted that my stroke order for a word I wrote (which is eminently important in calligraphy) was wrong, while I KNEW I was right. We both got slightly insulted, and decided to look it up (hurray for Google!) and realised: Very, very occasionally the stroke order is different in Chinese and Japanese for the same word (Check out the one for '馬' for example!). On the other hand, stroke order is vastly intuitive. Those for recurring side radicals are easily remembered after writing them enough, and for most other words, just imagine you are writing with a brush: start from the top left, then go down and right. Done! And if you think Japanese has a lot of set multi-word phrases, in Chinese they are expected everywhere, even for writing as quotidian as newspapers and the back of shampoo bottles and television advertisements. I admit that they gave me no end of grief while I was in school, but now that I'm no longer being tested on them, they really make a piece of writing very enjoyable to read. Fragments of Classical Chinese in a dense phrase of poetry scattered in otherwise plain prose, like chocolate sprinkles on vanilla ice-cream~
Fun fact, before I started learning Japanese, I searched up “hard things about learning Japanese” to save myself from that “oh wait there’s more” moment
Wait wait, you spent the whole video talking about why Japanese is a mess, just to end it stating the easiest (and maybe most logical) part about kanji is the maddening one? Stroke order is rather easy, if you know the general rules for it. Nevertheless, nice video! I have some kanji headache to share, too: The verb 行く (to go) can be read as both yuku and iku, depending on context. But both readings bear the SAME meaning, so there is no telling. The verb "au" (to meet) can be writen in several different forms 会う 逢う 遭う depending on what/how you are meeting. Same for "miru" (to see) 視る 観る 見る 診る 看る. The word kami (hair 髪) and sori (shaving 剃り) are combined to form the word "kamisori", or razor. But it is written like 剃刀 (shaving blade). The bullshit lies in how the 剃, which should be the sori part of the word, actually becomes the KAMI in this compound. I have lots of fun learning kanji, but this is definitely a chaotic, broken system. It's almost as if they did it on purpose to give Japanese a wab-sabi touch. :)
I should clarify there. I don't find stroke order to be the most complex thing about Chinese characters. For me, it was like the cherry on top, the "but wait there's more" that really made me stop and laugh. The video will be more about the process of coming to the kind of stroke order intuitions you have, and why even then there are still many quirks. Thanks for sharing examples! Wow, 髪 + 剃 > 剃刀 has quite the character etymology. Painfully exquisite.
Ah, I see! Maybe it has to do with how I structured my studies, but since I knew about stroke order from the beginning, it always seemed like a fundamental part of it, while all the readings and weird combinations are the "there is more!" aspect of it. It probably depends on which end of this messy tangle one starts to learn from! :D
FiveADay Kanji Unused? Saw 観る twice recently in regular written media, and I'm not even an active reader myself, since I have only 7 months of Japanese under my belt and am focusing on vocabulary hoarding first (with an average of 6,14 kanjis a day, ha!). Besides, the things you've pointed out don't invalidate the existence or irregularity of the terms I've mentioned, you are just throwing facts under the rug, which is exactly how people lose touch with etymology and get languages into this puzzling state.
I don't feel like following your advice when "never going to see" has actually translated into "saw twice within a month while not even looking for it". I won't recall where exactly I saw it since I do a lot of zapping, but the construction was something around 映画を観た on both, that's when I learned this usage even existed. At the end of the day, though, knowing these kanji is important anyway since they are jouyou, and the compounds they appear in all have to do with their basic meaning (something I wish I knew BEFORE cramming the vocabulary version!), so even if it looks like trivia, I figure it can be useful to know this stuff for connecting some dots, and it doesn't cost much brain space.
5 years studying japanese person here, 観る 診る 看る 視る 遭う 逢う some of these are non Jouyou Kanji. that means that they won't appear in newspapers, or any other government things with out furigana on them. so there technically isn't a need to remember them as they usually have the reading on them and it's like "oh it says みる so it must be look". However none of them are archaic, 観る means to watch something in a way you are watching a movie or a youtube video and not just looking at anything. 診るmeans to inspect as a doctor inspects a patient看るmeans to look after someone(like how it's used in 看病) 視る means to see, but not by conventional means, like i saw it used in a visual novel as the person saw the future. 逢う means to meet some one, but it implies that it is a fated meeting like you just had your first encounter with your soulmate or rival. 遭う is to be brought in to something bad like (事故に遭う got into an accident) or (なんで僕がこんな目に遭わなくちゃいけないの？Why do I have to be put though this?) These are nice to memorize if you are a kanji enthusiast, but not totally necessary. One crucial thing to consider is how much fiction do you plan on reading, as many authors will intentionally use hard to read kanji(usually with the reading though) especially if it is aimed at adults(some of the more "literary " ones don't even put the reading on them)
Only some katakana words are hard to understand as an english speaker. But others like: Guide (Gaido), Piano (Piano), and many more are easy to understand. Also arent you dead Pitou?
I want to learn Japanese ^^ *after watching this WTF???!!!!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME, JAPAN? GOD, MIND=BLOWN Nah just kidding. I still want to learn Japanese though
Don't give up, it's easier if you study it in a fun way! \(^o^)_ I started making 1 minute kanji lesson videos with mnemonics so they become unforgettable
It's like that with any study subject, especially languages. It starts to look really complex once you try to list every aspect. But in reality, you just learn things one by one at your own pace. Think about any RTS, MOBA or MMORPG videogame. It's really fucking complicated when you think about how much there is to know just to enjoy playing. But you just find out about things one by one slowly and then you realize that you know quite a bunch. You did learn your first language as a child and it's not like it was easier back then. You did literally spent 3 years just to get to the child's vocabulary level. And this youtuber just makes things look even more complicated. He didn't mention that "the right way to write kanji" isn't that hard to grasp. Complicated kanji simply consist of simplier once and you write them down the same way. Every simplier kanji from top to bottom left to right. That's it, learn 30 of them and you'll be able to intuitively write the other couple of thousands. And the second you encounter a brand new word in text, if you know every kanji it consists of, you can guess it's reading and meaning right at the spot and the word will be set in stone in your head forever. Every system has it's advantages and disadvantages. If it was only worse than the alternatives, Japan would just switch at one moment and live happier.
As a Chinese reading Japanese. It's relatively easy to read and learn. It's a weird feeling that you don't know these words, but somehow you know these words.
Your videos fascinate me and make me want to cry at the same time. You crush my optimism but I love you still. I think I'll forget about this video and chosse to go crazy slowly and bit-by-bit than all at one time lol
These readings are pretty numerous. It's easier if you learn an example word for each reading. For example, learning 行, I would look at something like this: 行列 - ぎょうれつ 行動 - こうどう 行火 - あんか 行く - いく 行う - おこなう 東京行き - とうきょうゆき
Yeah, it's a mistake to even focus on readings when trying to learn kanji. Just learn vocab and you'll get to know the readings as you go. This video seems like it was made to scare people out of learning or by someone who doesn't really know the language.
Chinese character: 1 syllable 1 pronunciation 100% of the time (well, almost) Japanese character: 2+ pronunciations 1-3 syllables Consistency too low to imagine
@@BichaelStevens Japanese kanji (not kana) actually has more strokes than simplified Chinese. That being said, Chinese does have more nightmare characters.
After attempting to learn Japanese and Chinese, I was surprised at how easy it was to learn Korean. Or at least I learned to read it, which in large parts of South Korea was enough to read most signs, since most were actually borrowed English words written in Korean. I had a hard time telling taxi drivers where to go, but I was actually able to read the signs on buses and trains to figure out which ones took me nearest to where I was trying to get to.
I’m Japanese. I'm not good at English, so I'm sorry if you find it hard to read. I think Japanese is very difficult. Most people in Japan can’t use japanese well. But,we can communicate with many Japanese, because we don’t have to make a perfect sentence! For example, 「ヤバい-yabai」and「まじ卍-majimannji」don’t have means but, they are used young people.
Your English is much better than my Japanese, much better. If you don't mind me correcting you but you said, "don't have means" when it should be "don't have any meaning" or "doesn't have a meaning" Thanks for your insight
I have studied and re-studied Kanji over the years. I would start each time with high hopes and high motivation, but after a couple of months (on average), I would burn out. Since about one year before COVID, I started a different strategy, and it seemed to work. Instead of using Kanji textbooks (made by foreigners) or JLPT kanji lists, I went ahead and just started using the OFFICIAL Kanji lists given to elementary kids. As of today, I'm 20+ Kanji away from finishing the Grade 4 Kanjis. Instead of trying to be Superman and studying 14 new Kanji a week, I instead only do 4 new ones. Slow pace, but consistent. I have only 6 months of time staying in Japan, past 10 years I have been over here in Thailand. So, as I said before, I recommend using the Kanji lists that the Japanese kids/teens use and another useful thing is to try to master the list of 214 Kanji radicals. I was amused to bring up some of the radicals with RANDOM Japanese adults, and sometimes they had no idea how it was pronounced
日本の文字遊ぶも文化の一つがある 例えば：うらにわにはにわ にわにはにわにわとりがいる おやおや やおやのおやがいもやのおやか 裏庭には２羽、庭には二羽鶏が居る おやおや八百屋の親が芋屋の親か 中国人として、日本文化にも漢字の深さを感じる。一つ一つ漢字は意味があるその意味を組み込んだらwordになる。he meaning of a sentence can be fully expressed without using punctuation.四字熟语谚语文言文，每一段文字的背後都有一段故事。
The writing system is ridiculous if you can't speak the language. All language is spoken first and then written. It's a lot easier to if you speak a language to learn to write it than vice versa. Of course, languages like Arabic have a MUCH easier system of writing than languages like Urdu, English, or Japanese, which are mishmashes of a gazillion different languages and dialects, but the point still holds.
AdmiralPrice for Japanese, if you don't learn the writing system at the same time you limit your self-learning, if you don't have a native Japanese speaker by your side 24/7, you would have to study by books to learn new vocabularies. Nany English speakers think they know Japanese but only using katakana to write is irritating.
Dude Arabic script lacks vowels which makes it horribly difficult for foreigners to learn to read in the language or even learn words from reading. It's not one of the easier languages
For the people, who don‘t know when to use the on (Chinese) or kun (Japanese) reading: On reading: used when there are more than one Kanji after another Kun reading: used when the Kanji is alone or after the Kanji follows a Hiragana letter. For example: 水-water On reading: sui Kun reading: mizu 水を飲む。- To drink water. pronounciation: mizu wo nomu (It’s pronounced mizu because it stands alone, Kun reading) 今日は水曜日です。-Today is Wednesday. pronunciation: Kyo wa suiyobi desu. (It’s pronounced sui, because after the Kanji follows another Kanji, On reading)
@@hendrikbarboritsch7003. That's what sushi is now days. But it all started with people trying to preserve fish for longer. The old way was burying the fish in layers of rice in a wooden box. And you need to remember that the words formed a long ago. They don't necessarily are going to fit into what the things became even though caring the same writing or pronunciation
Kanji's use is very important and I really like it's function, but the system itself is very impractical with how many there are and how lil sense the combinations make most of the time. I hope they come up with something to fix this problem.
Enough ranting! The reading and writing of 漢字 in Japanese ain't as messy as you claimed. Just check out some English words: iSland, iSle, aiSle, sight vs site, write vs right, survey vs supervise, abridge vs abbreviate, voice vs vocal, siGn vs signal, point vs puncture, lisTen, comB, Psycho, Mnemonic, corPS, cow vs beef vs bovine, left vs gauche vs sinister... If you can get them in English, you can get them in Japanese as well, no big deal!
Keep in mind that he's kind of playing up the difficulty for drama.... Kanji is one of the harder parts of learning Japanese, but it's perfectly tractable, and what seems confusing when you start makes a lot more sense with time. It's like learning _any_ language, really: there's a lot of vocabulary, and basically, well, you have to memorize it all...at first, the sheer quantity can seem overwhelming, but one step at a time...
DO keep in mind that this vid' is a "comic rant". That means he's playing up the complexity for dramatic effect to carry on his "running gag". It's somewhere between a farce and an outright joke. Yes, the Japanese do have one of the most complicated writing systems in the world. And yes, most of the details being shown in this vid' are relatively true. That's where the honesty starts to crumple. In practical daily life, worries about specific stroke order (for instance) aren't going to get anywhere. AND a system that can't provide a consistent appearance for a conventional meaning is useless. In your class-work (like at a school with assignments) these technical aspects of language might be glossed over so you're focused on the details you're supposed to be memorizing for the curriculum case at school... ON your own, however, seeking out the most conventional interpretation(s) in both sound and meaning will greatly simplify your personal quest toward conquering the linguistics. You'll likely find the most helpful instructions to come with lots of phrases like, "99% of the time..." or "The general rule is..." or even "The conventional reading works like..." with a few exceptions. Furthermore, learning to speak the language is probably the most important. Continue writing in a mix of romanji and kanas as long as you can stand it, picking up kanjis when it's convenient. If (or when) you get to Japan, you always have the option of "asking questions" and impressing the locals that you actually bothered to learn that much and that well. "The sage knows when not to speak, while the fool is quick to display his folly." :o)
I started learning Hanyu this semester and seeing this just makes me think, that learning to write Hanzi is even easier than I thought ^^' (and to clarify I know that it's not as easy as learning English [btw. non- native writer here] but it's definitely not as hard to learn as many seem to fear) I love writing Chinese, especially those signs in which you can still see the pictogram they were using like with 馬 or 龍 :)
Little known fact, the word "Kanji" isn't actually an on'yomi reading of the Chinese characters "漢字" (meaning Han script) despite what most people will tell you. That's just a coincidence, people think "Kanji" is a Japanese mispronunciation of "Hanzi" when in actual fact it is a kun'yomi reading which when translated, roughly means "fuck the gaijins".
i love kanji. sure, they're hard, but once you make a mental mnemonic for a character and it sinks in, you can guess the meanings of new words you read 90% of the time, even if you don't know the pronunciation.
It's really cool that you can look at Kanji and you're actually looking at the moment people learned a language from centuries ago.I never knew there exists a writing in this world that chronicles it's own history/creation by itself. Woah
Another example would be the Tibetan writing system, or Thai to some extent (though not much) Another example would be any Chinese, as it pretty much only changed in pronunciation
For the average person wanting to learn Japanese, it's relatively easy. For someone like this guy or me, with a propensity to wonder where words come from, it's maddening!
It is, in an intricately beautiful way. Languages preserve layers of history in their etymologies, but I'm intrigued how kanji have done that with characters.
Learn Chinese and you'll know where they come from. As a Chinese starting to learn Japanese the only thing confusing is the different readings. The meanings of most kanji are close enough their Chinese counterparts and it's easy to memorize both hiragana and katakana since both are based on Chinese characters as well.
To me as a native chinese who is learning japanese, kanji is both the easiest and hardest part. For we know what those kanji mean from our mother language but have no idea which japanese pronunciation should be used.
It's easier than you think... 今 = now = いま 今日 = today = きょう 毎日 = every day = まいにち Usually if you know the meaning, just pull the word. Sometimes I don't know the word, but I know the meaning. So the sentence makes sense even though I can't say it... LOL!
*Kokuji, Shinjitai* and *Ryakuji* are the ones quite interesting to Chinese people, because many of them don't exist in our language. If a Chinese masters these it's like knowing every Chinese character ever created
How the Japanese writing system never collapsed into hiragana over the centuries is truly beyond me. I've been studying the language, and I can just about get my head around spoken Japanese, but the writing systems are a baffling enigma.
Vietnamese is the Romanization of Chinese. Sounds shifts and change. Glyphs do not. Without the glyphs, the meanings will not be anchored. Example: Ebonics: poontang, pootytang (to f***, whore) from the French: putain = prostitute.
Maybe in the first place why Chinese writing system doesn’t collapse into alphabetical. My short answer is writing system has shaped the speaking system too. After thousands of years pure alphabetical writing just not working for these languages any more.
@@priciliar.s.simarmata2373 exactly, plus since the same pronunciation can have multiple meanings it makes it difficult to figure out what is actually being said. Tried playing Pokemon in Japanese a few years ago since it was all in hiragana, but gave up when I kept running into sentences I couldn’t figure out cause a word would have multiple meanings that make sense in context. Might make more sense to a Japanese person who’s familiar with how people tend to use the language to express things. And personally I find kanji easier than katakana
5:55 thats kinda far fetched, especially since more complex kanji are usually just the stroke order of the radicals and then you go left to right line by line and put them next to each other in order. but then there are also some harder combinations that don't seem to make sense at first. but most of them seem to follow intuitive patterns. i feel remembering the kanji in general connnected to a meaning and sound way harder than anything about the stroke order
Well there are two things fundamentally different between alphabetical letters and kanji radicals. First is the fact that people can recognize letters regardless of whether or not they are properly drawn. Go to America or Britain or any other country that uses the Latin Alphabet and nobody cares how the hell you draw your letters as long as they fall within the margins of what the letter should look like. If there's any uncertainty, such as between an l and i, the reader just asks or, more often, guesses. Second is just how much more complex kanji are than alphabetical words. Cramming all that information into a smaller space makes a word harder to read. Letters are only written in one direction whereas Kanji radicals are written in two directions within the kanji.
+Shoes The fact that the kanji is crammed into a smaller space makes stroke order even more important. There is literally no room for mistakes when you are writing a complex kanji in a small space. If you follow the stroke order correctly then you will minimize any wrong stroke that may or may not mess up the whole word. These stroke orders have been refined by scholars and calligraphers for a long time to their present order.
+ A TH-camr Umm... that doesn't make any sense. I would be more inclined to accept that explanation if not for the presence of modern sans fonts for kanji and other Sinnitic logographies. If the line thickness doesn't matter and important markings are easy enough to add, then how exactly does stroke order affect meaning?
Okay, lets assume line thickness doesn't matter while writing. Let's write 田 for rice field. If we write 十 first then 口, there are a number of things that could go wrong. Your 十 may not form a square, or one of the edges could protrude and you may end up with 由 or 甲. The correct order should be ㄇ then 十 then finally __ Then it is less likely for the inner lines to protrude. Even starting and ending points are important. For example, compare the first stroke of 千 (thousand) and 干 (dry) . 千 first stroke is from right to left (slight tilt) and 干 first stroke is from left to right (horizontal). Similar characters include 天 and 夭, 壬 and 王 and so on. Ancient Chinese is written using brushes, so scholars can observe the starting point and ending point of the brush stroke (thicker at start point, thinner at end point). If you take into account line thickness, then even simple words like 女 (woman) can look like 大 (big). But if you follow the stroke order, you can determine which character it is. Sorry for using Chinese not Kanji but I'm sure there are Kanji examples as well.
I like the history lesson. Hopefully students don't watch this and think it makes Japanese an unapproachable written language. First, how a language came about should be irrelevant to a student learning to read the language. Unless you intend to teach etymology or such, one should care how the language is used now and not how it originated. Second, there's quite a bit of structure that helps learn Japanese and Kanji. Third, do not be afraid to use tricks and techniques to speed up learning and retention. Here's one such trick: DO NOT LEARN PRONUNCIATION FOR KANJI FIRST!!!! As pointed out in the video, due to context there will be a different pronunciation. As such, learn how a kanji is used in a word and later if you want learn that that kanji's "onyomi" because you know two or three words where that kanji's onyomi has appeared. There's a lot more to say, but goes beyond a TH-cam comment. Hope this series continues. It was quite fun to watch.
Agreed... it's fun, but I think that it's mostly for academic purposes. IMO learning the basic kanji is a lot less ambiguous. After learning ~1000 kanji I've left Japan and forgotten all of the kanji (aside from simple stuff, which I probably can't write properly). However, I think it can be quite enjoyable learning those first 1000 characters if you're in the right mindset.
To the beginning of the video, my reaction would be: You have seen every language having just one script. So seeing Japanese using 3 scripts feels weird. That weirdness is what I think brings out the beauty of the language. Seriously? Hiragana and Katakana actually make Japanese reading easier.
I’m learning Japanese. All of this is true but at the same time as a student you don’t feel the overwhelming difficulty of Japanese. Once you actually start learning Japanese, things just make sense. You learn how to write a word just in the same way you’d learn how to write a word in any language. Sure, knowing every single onyomi and kunyomi is important but I mostly just like to remember how to write entire words as I expand my vocabulary rather than getting wrapped up in individual characters and their history.
外国の方がここまで詳細に日本の漢字事情に関して説明なさるなんて…！非常に感動しました！ そして、とても面白うございました。 I was so impressed because non-Japanese man explains the complexity of Japanese Kanji in detail. And this movie is interesting.
Hey, I'm going to add to the comments already saying this, but from a relatively new student's perspective- don't worry about the writing system! Kana was really easy to grasp and only took me about three or four days to learn, and kanji writing got way easier once I learned radicals and stroke order. Kanji readings also become more natural the more you immerse yourself in the language- it's all about practice. While learning three different types of writing for one language seems like a lot, it becomes much easier through immersion. Also, learning grammar helps you make sense of things much better, all the way down to the writing. So, please don't be discouraged by this video! Learn at your own pace and do your best.
But the strength of kanji is that it makes Japanese much easier and quicker to read (for an experienced reader). Since Japanese does not use spaces to differentiate the words, it would be a nightmare to read with only hiragana. The kanji give away the structure and most important parts of a sentence, while also giving a quick clue to the meaning. Words with very similar hiragana can be easily mixed, but since kanji are much more complex, the chance of two words looking very similar is unlikely.
@@LucaRocha2012 how so? I can agree that using only romaji is not a very good idea, but at least compared to hiragana ONLY, romaji looks more clear-cut and neat.
@@anhpham1461 it's just not right, romaji is not uniform, can't accurately represent some japanese syllables and in some cases it's not clear whether the n is the end of syllable or.the beginning of another one (for example れない/れんあい would both be written as renai in romaji, even though they are different sounds/moras). Also romaji doesn't solve the problem of the ridiculous amount of homophones and fast readability that actual japanese can provide, but neither does a hiragana only option, so i digress.
I love this. Oh my goodness, I could not have subscribed any sooner lol. Japanese is difficult, but so fun it doesn't really seem difficult to me at all. They're like math or puzzles... both of which I happen to enjoy thoroughly c':
My favorite is the name 小鳥遊, read as Takanashi. What's odd about it? Well, the characters are "Little bird plays". If read as normal Japanese, it would be read as something like "Kotori asobu". Where does Takanashi come from, then? Well, when does a little bird play? When it feels safe. When does it feel safe? When there's no predators around. What's a predator to a little bird? A hawk. How do you say "No hawks" in Japanese? Takanashi.
*brain explodes*
Then there are names like 鳥山 which is read exactly like you think with no twists.
I don't think the "bu" in asobu is included in the kanji.
Wow
Wow, that's pretty bad. In Mandarin Chinese it literally reads "little bird tour" and is 99% going to be pronounced "little bird tour" (Xiǎoniǎo yóu). However, if I were to read this, it could be a place name (China has a lot of weird place names, like "Treasure Chicken" near Xi'an, 宝鸡, my favorite Chinese place name), or part of an obscure aphorism that the Chinese know but would leave me mystified, or the proper name for a tourist company. It all depends on the context, of course, of the sentence in which this would be found.
So this is why manga has so many puns; it's almost impossible not to make them.
kokofan50 I don't get it.
KarlMarxTheTalkingParrot Doesn'tKnowWhatHeIsSaying Often, you get a compound kanji by combining words that are similar in meaning, but not pronunciation. Because of this, something can mean multiple things when written down but not when spoken. You sometimes see this as tl notes explaining kanji-based humor.
So you can read the kanji in one of several ways, and sometimes the particular reading does some weird stuff with meaning while still being grammatically correct when read out loud. And it's actually really hard to do, so being able to do word play in Japanese is typically a respected skill.
@@anyaforger8409 cf. Monogatari series
@@totally_not_a_bot Ah okay I get it. Sorry for extremely late reply.
japan love theyr puns just look at splatoon or mha for the basic ones
漢 being pronounced "Han" in Chinese but "Kan" in Japanese is not by mistake. In fact, all /h/consonants in middle Chinese systematically correspond to /k/ in Japanese (海hai/kai，喜hi/ki，湖ho/ko，混hon/kon). It is because the Japanese language in the 7th century did not have the /h/ consonant so that /k/ was already the closest approximation. The consonant of はひふへほ evolved to /h/ in a much later time (pretty much one millennium later) and they were still pronounced pa pi pu pe po in the 7th century.
@M. J. H. This bakka is Lmao
@M. J. H. that's right. Chinese "h" is /x/, the velar fricative
@M. J. H. That's new thing or is it? Same with Gogh Vincent van Gogh as gohho, hmm
I think voiced genination are rare in japanese
for reference, in modern chinese some 'h' sound is being pronounced 'x' like '现',喜' and in korean the h sound still exist
One more point needs to be made: when Japanese schoolchildren are taught to read and write, they already know how to speak; so it's just a question of matching up the words with the characters. All the various readings come in words and combinations that the Japanese child already knows.
The foreign student comes in completely cold: he knows neither the words nor the characters (nor the combinations). Much more complicated.
Exactly
Why it's better to learn speaking THEN the writing system, imo it saves lives it's just so much easier
@@ren7220 how exactly do we do that?
@@ren7220 Unless you live there like Tom Cruise in the last samurai, being taught like a child, even so its faster to learn reading. It's not faster to learn to read because you already know the words. You still need to learn the 2146(i think) kanjis, and hiragana and katanana, that japanese students takes 9 years to learn in school, but you can learn in 3-4 years, some people less, some more, depending on the time you spend.
I have to keep reminding myself while learning Japanese. Sometimes I can remember a word but not the writing, but I have to assure myself that it’s just part of the process
Why is the Japanese language starting to sound to me like a pair of pants that has been patched so many times that the "pants" no longer exist and merely a collection of patches in the form of pants remains?
matchesburn well if you studied the root words for basically everything in English, it just ends up being a group project with no direction or order ;)
@@thatoneherbdude and patches of the english cloth have been sewn on the japanese pants these days too... so now you have the chaotic group project as part of the pants
That is the best way to discribe...
Alex Young so the whole world is just a sisterhood of traveling pants as far as language goes
@@MiuXiu Everybody gangstar till the pants form coherent speech
the order of strokes make the characters easier to remember once u write them once.
They also have a common pattern. You always write top-to-bottom and left-to-right :)
@@καλαμ Cept, you know, not. That's Chinese stroke order. Japanese order can start basically anywhere on the top and work its way to the bottom... mostly
@@καλαμ And, you also have the RADICALS, that can make it easier to write, even if you didn't learn the Kanji's stroke order
@@benjiusofficial don’t know what you’re talking about 95% of kanji follow that simple rule. I’ve memorized about 450 kanji from Remembering the Kanji and it’s rare to see an unusual stroke order. When using mother (母) as a radical for example when writing (貫) or how you write vertical then horizontal in rice field (田) but the opposite in speciality (専)
relatable
My opinion on Japanese (after having learnt it for 3 years now) is that it's really a pretty easy language. It's the kind of thing where like, if you spend too much time analysing everything like in this video, it will seem ridiculously complex, but when you're actually in the position of being a student learning the language, it all makes sense after a while. With Japanese (and even Chinese which I've learnt for 6 years), you really just have to "do it". Don't think about what everything means as such, just learn what words to use and when, and how to say them in those different contexts, and how to write them each way. Honestly it is so easy to know when to use Kanji vs Hiragana vs Katakana in a sentence when you already know which words you need to know. Kanji are easy enough to learn if you just practice, I may have had a bit of an advantage going into Japanese classes after I'd already spent years learning Chinese and Chinese characters, but still, they are quite logical. If you were to try to learn Japanese in a way similar to how this video describes the language, like by trying to find patterns and sequential whatevers (my brain is failing me atm coz it's like 1am lmao), you'll struggle. If you just learn the general way that things work, in context of different sentences etc, it will just fall into place and it will become second nature. You'll always know that "go" is "iku" which is written 行く, and that "bank" is "ginkou" (銀行), and you will always automatically know to write the "行" character probably forgetting that it can be pronounced a different way if it were a different word that you were writing.
It's like how if you analyse English, it's ridiculous. "Cough" = "koff" but "though" = "thow". If you think about it too much, you'll have an extremely hard time, but if you just learn each word as it is, you'll be fine and be able to bullshit your way through most of the language, for lack of a better word :P
911toothache thanks for the clarification! I hope I can learnn Japanese in future and won't stuck with this theories 😂 totally agree with u, if u learn the language for write and speak I think its better just follow the rules. Dont questions where, what and why it happens. Unless u take linguistic and literature then u probably have to know the background history
In your "bank" / "go" example, I note it's the same as in mandarin where 行 has two pronunciations and meanings : xing (go) or hang, and 银行 is a bank, with 银 meaning silver. Therefore would you say that a good foundation in mandarin was a big help when learning Japanese?
911toothache again, like you I might have an unfair advantage having already learnt Mandarin Chinese, but Japanese really is not that difficult. When you put it all together and just do it, it works and make sense. If you try to over analyse it, you lose the trees for the leafs.
I have found that I naturally over time developed an intuitive understanding of characters and how their radicals, pronunciation... etc simply by just going into chat rooms with people and using the language to talk.
This guy seems to treat learning a language like a linguistic exercise and not a form of communication, so no wonder it felt hard. It is like taking your computer apart and then putting it back together again, and then complaining that you still cannot understand how to use excel.
ryehaaan learning the how and why behind a language can be very rewarding and helpful. I.e. Understanding why Japanese uses 私 (private) to refer to one's self goes a long way to understand Japanese culture. However, the guy in the video got things backward. He tried to learn all the extremely complex advanced linguistic theory before he had a solid understanding of the language as a tool for everyday communication. He therefore lack the knowledge to really appreciate how each of these complex parts fitted into the wider whole. It is like trying to learn the mathematics behind infinity before you have learnt your basic times tables.
That is actually why I take issue with this video; it makes out Japanese is some unmanageable beast which risks putting people off learning what is a truly rewarding and interesting language to learn.
911toothache He’s definitely overthinking all the kanji origins, handwriting shortcuts, etc. I’m able to read most books with good comprehension and I definitely don’t know all 2000+ joyo kanji yet. Like any language, you get a feel for it with practice. And even though Japanese takes a long time to say some things that are short in English, there are many times the Japanese is much shorter and more elegant than English. Having to translate both ways every day made me realize both have their strengths and weaknesses depending on what you’re trying to say.
This is why Koreans made their own writing system
korean uses kanji?
Only Japanese uses kanji ;)
Koreans used Chinese characters long ago, but this one dude realised it was too crazy to use signs form a language that has no morphology in a language that has crazy morphology. So he changed it, wish the Japanese did the same thing.
Rosita Renoult oh, thanks for clarifying, although i do like Japanese with kanji, it'd feel weird if it didn't have it.
They were gonna get rid of kanji about hundred years ago, but they decided to keep it because it'd be damn near impossible to understand just kana.
"wish the Japanese did the same thing". I'm not so sure about it, Rosita. Japanese has too few sounds and would be EXTREMELY ambiguous without a kanji to differentiate things in written language. Maybe it's feasible, but words would have to increase in size. Korean has several hundred sound combinations, while Japanese has about 60.
I'm Japanese.
In real life, the Japanese language is not so difficult, but if I want to know more about it, I need a huge amount of memory.
Japanese is difficult even for Japanese people.
ive Japanese course in my school this sem:D
How do people in your society even become fully-literate, seriously? I'm sure the language itself is not that bad, via 'Romanji,' but with the three alphabet systems (especially if Kanji are as bad as he says) it would become way over-complicated. It's hard enough in Mandarin where there is order to it, but he makes it sounds like any hyper-complex order system from Chinese gets scrambled in Japanese! I'd love to learn Japanese because I have a Japanese friend, but woah... too tough!
@@Awakeningspirit20 As some people have already said, don't overthink too much about it. Just like how babies learned, constantly exposing yourself to sentences (or conversation) makes you able to understand the context of different character uses. Otherwise, simply knowing the vocabulary can make it for you and not the constant analysis of whether to use onyomi or kunyomi in Kanji characters.
@@Awakeningspirit20 The answer is: without a modern public educational system, they don't.
Without a rigorous modern public educational system, neither Japanese, Chinese, or any Sinosphere country had mastered the Kanji in the majority of their populace. At best their literate rate was about 5%-20% (depending on standards defining "literate"), compared to early modern England where about half of the population easily mastered the alphabets while abandoning non-native Latin language as their standard for being "literate", even with the outlying examples such as Andrew Jackson.
Some may argue that medieval Europe's literacy rate is just the same as pre-modern Sinosphere countries, but back then the primary written language was Latin, and being literate simply means mastering a completely different language of their own for most medieval Europeans.
@@Schinshikss Bible was translated to Slavic language by Saints Cyril and Methody and approved by Pope Hadrian II (792-872). Latin was used as lingua franca... and still is used for science (medicine, biology, etc.). And in XXI century some blue colors employee for a Fortune 500 company in Des Moines, IA don't understand "post meridiem" (PM) and "ante meridiem" (AM)... is that literacy or idiocracy?
Hiragana and katakana are easy to learn. Then we got kanji to mess me up
hiragana deprived from kanji i heard
Both hiragana and katagana are actually just severly reduced forms of kanji that have the same pronunciation as the kana. あ came from 安 etc. They are borrowed from a specific style of writing kanji called grass style.
草字？
草書，yes.
do you like to 操曹操？
Japanese without Kanji is like Chinese pin yin without space, it will still be readable but definitely HELL lol
Jerry2011b Without space?
*BLACK* *SCREEN* Yes. Chinese pinyin has spaces and tone marker.
@@ethan2163 Pinyin is used mostly by natives of Latin script languages to know the pronunciation of words. And because many have issues with a language that don't use spaces to mark where one word ends and another starts they put the spaces into Pinyin so it's more familiar.
For example:
Chinese: 他是高文中
Pinyin (without spaces): tashigaowenzhong
pinyin (with spaces): Ta shi gaowenzhong
In that sentence a non-native reader may have issues figuring out if the character 高 (Gao) is a part of the person's name or not, so spaces help them know. It also breaks the text up into more pieces, so its easier to have your eyes follow along, kinda like the difference between walking on ice and dirt.
@@PixelBytesPixelArtist Oh, I didn't realise what he meant by "space". Thanks for explaining.
@@pixiepandaplush Most children's books and easy-to-read video games like Pokémon are written in kana with spaces. The trouble comes when you use more technical terms, like in academic or scientific texts.
In English, we make technical terms with Latin and Greek roots fit together: "geo" for "earth" and "graphy" for "picturing", or "trans" for "across", "port" for "carry", and "tion" for making it a noun. In Japanese, they use Chinese roots (kanji), like "kou" for "mingle" and "tsuu" for "go through" to make "koutsuu" for "traffic".
Some of these roots sound the same, so you have words like "kanshou", which has several meanings that you use kanji or context to differentiate, but many of kanshou's meanings seem fairly uncommon. This kind of problem has a few solutions, like using terms that don't require kanji to be understood (Yoshimoto Banana is a popular author who uses comparatively fewer kanji in her novels), or to stop using kanji when they aren't needed to distinguish a word ("oishii" has kanji, but many people write it in only kana).
As a native-Japanese speaker I do recommend to learn the meanings and origins of kanjis. I see a lot of comments that are saying that you should just memorize it and not go too deep in it. In elementary school they teach us the meanings and the origins of each kanji we learn (we don’t go too deep though). If you are only going to learn how to order food or greet then you don’t need to, but if you really want speak the language, please understand that only memorizing words won’t help you much. You have to know why you use the phrase or you could use it incorrectly. It is tough to learn Japanese.
The Japanese language is like history. According to some research Japanese is considered one of the most hard languages to learn for an English speaker. Of course it depends on people. And I think it is not as hard as the video says but this is an analysis of the language and not a lesson to learn it.
Why dont u guys just adopt an Abugida to sort this mess?
If you don't like finding the meanings in kanji, you might as well not learn Japanese at all.
What if I'm just listening? Shouldn't matter right? Also lucky me to not be English.
@@poulomi__hari because it is their culture. people are always like this when they find something hard in another language. they always want to change it.....
Of course it is, Japan is on the opposite side of the world and of a supercontinent from England! Both have similar historical backgrounds of piecing together multiple languages and influences though. The difference is England got conquered by multiple people and a Creole language that stretches across most European language groups was created, while Japan was impenetrable and got to pick and choose what it liked from its neighbors. Honestly, learning the roots of English in the same way you learned Kanji is a historical process that truly helps you understand not just your language, but those around you as well. Like I can now tell which English words or particles of words are Romance vs. Germanic in origin, or even Greek. Japanese is probably even more rich, because it's not just root WORDS it's root PICTOGRAMS.
ah. im starting to see the full span of why japanese wordplays are on a celestial level
LOL.
😂
Good thing I like Puns.
In Japanese, the Hero Academia character Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu's name is spelled with four different kanji, each of which is pronounced tetsu.
@@Punaparta i like how they managed to get a jojo out josuke despite his family name, i just appreciate that
wow this guy only has like 20k subs and he's putting more work into these videos than people that have like 1 million plus subscriber's. keep up the good work
I noticed that immediately as well. This is quality content but it has to be said that language history is not as gripping as a cartoon where sailors and astronauts accidentally do each other's jobs.
Yep it's a thing with the hive mind... most popular doesn't always mean the 'best' or most education.
Yah the thing about TH-cam is that good content doesn't equal popularity like it should. People can get millions of view buy doing pretty lazy shit. People get more view by doing a 3 minute webcam video, recording themselves playing games,making videos of things you can already get else where example releasing anime episodes on youtube. And don't get me started on click bait whores. I guess what im trying to say is people on youtube get tons of views for rather lazy things, so when channels come along that actually put work into their videos. When they don't get attention that is equal to their work. It really grinds your gears
you dont say ... Since this world doesn't runs base on logic. Do excuse my engrish
I think the main reason why the +NativeLang channel doesn't have many more subscribers is because people tend to subscribe to channels they expect will give them frequent content that they will want to watch, and when it comes to languages most people have an interest in very few or even none of them. Those with an interest in few specific languages are not likely to expect much content of interest to them from a channel that is about languages in general and not specifically one or more of those few, whichever they might be. Most people who would subscribe to a language channel are more likely to want one that teaches a language they're trying to learn and doesn't do much else. This channel is great for linguists and polyglots with a deeper or more general interest in languages, but that is a rather small segment of the population. I would say in that context, the subscriber count of this channel is exceptionally high... and well deserved.
Now I understand how manga characters are always having misunderstandings lol
Having studied Japanese for over a decade, I can say that Kanji, like a lot of complex systems, are impossible to make logical sense of except retroactively. The mind will absorb them and all their endless idiosyncrasies if you already have a couple years of Japanese study in your mind and you just start reading. Read children's books and furigana subtitles will be there to help you associate each moon rune to each word you already know. Quickly you'll find you're reading the kanji instead of the furigana and you'll also notice you're reading faster. For kanji you know, faster than English. You'll notice kanji now knitting together formerly distinct words in your mind and you'll start seeing webs form to connect what was once an endless list of formless shapeless words. There's only about 3000 popular kanji but hundreds of thousands of words in Japanese and any other language. Trying to figure out which 10-200 words align to each kanji and how each pronounces differently and how the shades of meaning are all cleverly worked in first is the backwards way.
The mind doesn't absorb information like a traditional computer, it absorbs it through association like an AI. The association is subconscious. Just like an AI, the more raw data you feed it, the better it'll get. Keep feeding yourself books and you can learn kanji way faster than with vocabulary lists and memorizing stats as though kanji were Pokemon or something.
Kanji is manageable when reading or memorizing. But writing is on a totally different level. In the age of smartphones and computers, you can compose Kanji characters in quick succession. So, writing practice could be somewhat hard to indulge into nowadays. That is, when you are self-studying... Taking Japanese classes, of course, is much effective.
It’s way easier for Chinese to learn Japanese than learning English. Though there’re differences between Japanese’s characters with Chinese characters. For example 邪魔 means “hindrance” in Japanese but in Chinese it means “demon”
I love Japanese x.
大好き💕
I once learnt Japanese in highschool, but I dropped out of the course because the grammar was too hard for me, maybe I am just a fat lazy little fuck
我是日本人。大謝謝了！
@@blackniga420 我是中国人 😙👍
Look at the bottom of 魔 what is it? It’s 鬼(ghost) so which one makes more sense? demon
@@blackniga420 君伪中国语大优
I'm learning kanji. Wish me luck I'm probably going to explode halfway through
So, how's it going for ya?
学的怎么样了
I’m learning Chinese, it’s actually easier than I thought
@@Cryseris 你的母语是哪个语系
青木建太 I never said I was good all I know is that the first symbol is ni as in nihao
2:40 those are semi translated and transliterated Buddhist texts originally written in Vedic Sanskrit
1) Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, not Vedic Sanskrit
2) The untranslated (transliterated) part is mantras, plus some names and certain hard terms like prajña paramita or nirvana, much less than ‘semi’ would suggest.
@Varmaji While Vedic Sanskrit is a natural language, spoken by Aryan tribes in Ancient India and very close to eastern dialects of Persian of the time, Classical Sanskrit is a constructed language codified by the grammarian Pāṇini.
It’s not Vedic Sanskrit.
One tip to many japanese kanji learners is that don't learn it based on jlpt n5 to n1. This will take hella time and you will forget half of the kanjis. The better way is to learn it like english.
1) learn hiragana and katakana
2) learn very basic kanjis with their proper stroke order(seriously it makes it so much easier)
Example-日火弓言手足子力行来etc
3) then learn nouns,pronouns, grammar structure(note- japanese follows SOV format example 'I eat apple' becomes 'I apple eat')
4) then learn various types of objects example
1) various items in house,school,office
2) body parts
3) food items
4) means of transportation
5) directions,public places, countries
6) various greetings such as gm,gn,hello, how are u
7) verbs,tenses
8) animals
9) clothes
This way u will learn the useful items and discard useless kanjis which are rarely used. U can also very easily learn,read and communicate in this process of learning
Exactly, when you learn in stages like this it doesn't seem so difficult
For those wanting to learn Japanese, don't worry yourselves, you can learn only the meaning of the Kanji and memorize how words are pronounced(as we do in every language we try to learn). Nothing bad will come of it, there's no point in memorizing pronunciation when you can just learn a word with a specific Kanji and how he's pronounced THERE.
You can't learn how native talk through a book. Amazing video, but this point needed to be made.
For writing, i recommend learning it, makes WAAAY easier to memorize the Kanji's and how to better structure them.
+Ricardo Castro como vc faz para aprender kanji? você escreve usando a sequência correta dos traços? explica aí.
Ferinoification Eu uso 'Anki' e "Japanese Kanji & Kana A Complete Guide to the Japanese Writing System"
Eu vejo o Kanji no Anki e procuro ele no livro pra saber a ordem dos traços e se não tem um significado muito diferente do que ta escrito no Anki(ja que é o método RTK), só isso mesmo.
Já tinha ouvido falar do Anki. Vou começar em breve a estudar japonês . Mas pretendo começar escrevendo apenas em hiragana e katakana e após começar a aprender os kanjis. Valew pelas dicas.
+Ferinoification why the hell aren't you talking in english
Hànzì, Kanji, Hanja... whatever you call em, they're formidable. Join me for just one more of their fun quirks next week!
Probably gonna not have Chữ Nôm right? The Vietnamese system for Chinese characters, before they were changed into Roman letters, like Korea's Hanja, and Japan's Kanji (into hangul, and hiragana+katakana+kanji).
I've been wondering... are you Joshua Rudder?
Nice explanation!
Just a few pointers
弓 does have reading たらし, however it's archaic and not used today. kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BC%93-145366#E5.A4.A7.E8.BE.9E.E6.9E.97.20.E7.AC.AC.E4.B8.89.E7.89.88
屶 is used for names according to kanken level 1 list. It's very obscure and probably not the best example for kokuji. Probably something like 榊(sakaki) that's bit more difficult than the simplier kokuji but not too obscure.
On kun readings aren't that simple as there are quite a few exceptions. While most of multiple character compounds are in on reading there are lot of 湯桶 and 重箱 such as 係員（くん--おん）and 旧型 (おん--くん）
I agree with you with about usefulness of kyuujitai and ateji, which are only useful if you are a language nerd. But hey the video poster is one. I also quite happen to like learning some obscure stuff. I mean you do need to learn this if you want to achieve the highest level mastery in kanji knowledge exam.
It's true that these kanji are very obscure and not needed. I did mention that the 屶 was what I found from 漢字検定1級 list which is pretty telling.
As for the readings we can look at these words: 見本（みほん） which is kun on despite both having on and kun readings. Or 梅酒（うめしゅ）which also proves the case. They simply have to be learned by heart.
mandarin learners:
laugh in corners
I’m learning Mandarin
@@Cryseris me too
哈哈哈
Im mandarine, but im gonna say japanese kanji is nothing like chinese hanji, maybe some words have same meaning and similar sound but many of the kanji is totally out of our understanding
@@rinsw8872 "Nothing like" ?? are you sure??
漢字は可読性、速読性、情報圧縮性が高い優れた文字。
日本人と中華圏の人以外は理解不能だろうけどね。
僕の意見では、漢字難くないし、それと凄い様子のね。中国人や日本人じゃないから。
My explanation was insufficient about that.I agree that kanji is not so difficult. What I want to say is that foreigners don't understand the efficiency of kanji so much.
Ah I see, fair enough I guess!
Me personally, I am a foreigner but I feel like I fully understand Kanji's value - besides being visually appealing, it adds a lot of depth to the language and makes sentences so much more readable and to be honest, less confusing to me. It can help differentiate a lot between different homophones too. Maybe I'm an exception but that's just me.
Phantom End Gamer 難しく、ですよ。送りがなをちゃんと勉強しましょう笑
I don't speak Japanese at all but somehow I understood what you said🤣
Japanese paper may LOOK like filthy gaijin paper, but it's folded over a thousand times.
And it is strong enough to slice through mountains!
Yeah, it's even worse than AMERICAN money..
I see you are subscribed to this channel to improve on your English. Good, because I can also see your skill for locating humour and satire is lacking.
But if you fold a piece of paper so many times... It just gets 'furry'... keep on doing that and it's liable to disintegrate (go away) altogether... :o/
@@RedstoneLessonsAndYa/Woosh
Coming back to this after studying some n4. Turns out it’s so much easier to read Japanese with the Kanji, since you almost can’t read the kana meanings without them.
Ah yes, this reminds me of my own JLPT N4 experience. The vocabulary section has no kanji (for obvious reason), and it was actually really hard to read everything, even with spaces separating parts of the sentence.
Incidentally, I took the N4 exam with nothing but a year of watching (or rather, attempt to watch) Japanese anime without subtitle; no formal study whatsoever. In hindsight, the exam highlighted just how woefully unprepared I was. I literally picked up new vocabulary WHILE IN EXAM, and I didn't really understand a single thing in the listening portion. Still passed with pretty good mark somehow.
But it feels so good when you are finally able to read Japanese fluently. It took me 2,5 years and 13.000 vocabs though :D
No need to wait around for English translations. That's motivation enough lol XD
ikr? light novels and games never being translated and the Japanese with absolute zero intention on translating it someday. Most painful and annoying language to learn ever, but worth it
that's really damn fast!
oh man these videos are amazing. The production value is through the roof for such a low number of subscribers!
They still mess with pronunciations to get things to fit in. In one of my first classes at university, when we were learning katakana, we had to read this: ハーレーダビッドソン and explain what it said. Since none of us were very good at reading katakana at the time (I can still barely read it), we went at it a syllable at a time: 'haa-ree-da-bid-do-so-n'. We had no clue what it meant, until the teacher finally told us what it said, and then it fell into place: Harley Davidson.
"There's more than one way to skin an 'onyomi'"....
Okay, dad.
Aren't kanji in Japanese kind of like Sumerograms? They're logographs taken from another unrelated language to stand for meanings, while additional grammatical particles are represented by a syllabary (which was also derived from that parent script).
kind of, but rarely used as sounds, more as meaning or sound+meaning
Exactly, the kanji themselves are used as meanings, while man'yogana (and its daughters hiragana and katakana) are used as sounds. Like how Sumerograms are used as meanings, while other Assyrian cuneiform are used as sounds.
You are correct in that Kanji has meaning behind it. For Example, from the Chinese point of view:
子 -> Child, 老 -> Elder, 文 -> Culture,
Child supporting Elder -> 孝 means Filial (good to parents)
Elder talking to Child about Culture -> 教 means Teach
木 -> tree, 爫 -> represents a hand above so 采 means pick up (pluck vegetables)
But some Chinese words use sounds to represent the word. For example
采 is called Cai. Vegetables is also called Cai so we add 艹 which means grass to form 菜 .
In Kanji, vegetables also uses 菜 but is pronouced Sai instead as in Yasai.
In short, some Kanji have meanings behind them while others are based on Chinese pronunciations. It depends on how the word originated.
Isn't that the whole subject of the video???
grammy1620 up
It is funny because everything you say is accurate, but when you actually are in the process of learning the language, you don't necessarily realise it, you just assimilate it pretty naturally (although it probably depends on your/the teacher's method). Don't give up!
that's why I love japanese and chinese languages. If I could I'd study them my whole life
I'm a native Japanese and I tutored many students from around the world when I was in Canadian and the US. Speaking from my experience, I really think Japanese is one of the easiest to become semi-fluent but the hardest to master. It doesn't matter unless you are planning to become a scholar or something, so please don't be scared! Speaking is easy especially for Koreans, South East Asians, Italians, and Spanish. Even if you are English, it'd take only a couple years to become somewhat fluent if you are actually willing to learn.
>Spanish
Oh that explains a lot. The only funny thing is the Rs, where they don’t even sound like Rs at all… yay.
One can become semi-fluent in German in 6 months. If it takes a couple of years for Japanese, it's just not worth it.
@@Wonk_Bonkwdym like Japanese Rs? Or spanish Rs?
@@RaffleRaffle The Rs in japanese sound like Ls
@@sergeyromanov2116 If you don't like German or don't use German, It's also not worth six months.Whether it's worth it depends on your purpose.
I‘m a college student from China, studying Japanese as my 2nd foreign language.It is really easy for Chinese student to pass Japanese test. Sometimes there is a super long sentence that is hard to understand, but I can understand it just dependent on the kanji in it.lol 漢字萬歲！
Japanese is easy
We can be proud of sharing same characters
The funny thing is, spoken Japanese is very simple, at least phonetically, but even the grammar isn't that hard for speakers of Altaic and Uraic languages, for example.
yeah, exactly. I can understand about 50% what they're speaking about. but I can't read anything without using any help
what someone said abt Chinese words(hanzi, kanji)in mandarin & Japanese, it provides eloquence and precision of meaning on paper.
for verbal communication where speed is a major factor, those intricacies can be tucked away
MingJian Yap The Japanese language is not well suited for kanji, that's why kana had to be devised, as well as using kanji for phonetic reading at times.
The Koreans (whose language is similar in grammar, structure, syntax and phonology to Japaese) realized this in the 15th century, and switched to a completely phonetic, original script.
It's much like how Indo-European languages like Persian and Urdu are not well suited for the Arabic script, and a lot of guess work has to be done based on context.
The reading and writing isn't that hard for me, but the grammar is what throws me off. Sometimes I understand every word in the sentence, but still don't know what the hell is being said! Gotta keep studying!
Really good point, never thought about it.
I ain't dropping the language I will continue v':!
Update :
These series of videos came back to haunt me three years later, and here I am. I know how to read japanese to an almost N3 level and can communicate to a N4 level (I still make mistakes tho) I know 1200 out of the 2200 jojo kanji, I can also write them, I'm using heiseg so, some of them I cannot pronounce them but I know what they mean and how they are written. I will evaluate if I want to learn the other 800 which are for writing names. 静 is my favorite name tho.
I got angry at this video, because it discouraged me from learning japanese, I almost drop the language, but since I'm stubborn I didn't gave up.
I could learn this language outside of Japan, you can do the same. What the guy says it's true but it only complicates everything. I'm still angry at this video, but you can accomplish what I've accomplished in less than a year. You can do this.
信じてください。
日本語が多分むずかしいでも楽しいです。
がんばって皆さん。
Keep at it. Most of these Kanji's arent used that much outside of artistic reasons. And even then there are usually helpfull guides to how to read it. Cause even Japanese people cant read this.
Venator thank you :'v
私も
El japonés es hermoso UwU no hay razón para no amarlo. Recuerda: Hasta poder entender los animes sin subtítulos no paramos >:3)/
There is no impossible! If Japanese people can master the Kanji, then so can you!
As a Japanese student, if you completely master this writing system, you can read the sentence very fast. Because kanji represents the meanings and Hiragana and Katakana represent only the sound. So it is able to understand rapidly than other languages. However, it uses a lot of energy.
As someone who’s lived in Japan and studied the language I can say that is untrue. Even when we read other languages such as English we don’t go word by word, we have subliminally memorized the words and are just as fast in reading. Its just a misnomer that you can read Japanese faster, as someone who’s fairly competent in both I can say that much. 日本語の勉強頑張って下さい。
that's how i read japanese as a chinese
It isn't true: study showed that Chinese people (even more succinct than Japanese) read between 3 and 4 characters per second on average
This is about the same speed they'd have when reading in English
Although now the limit is only the brain and not the eyes
It’s less about reading speed and more about clarity. I’ve had this exact discussion with Korean speakers when they tout how user friendly its writing system is (which it indeed is, I learned to read hangeul almost by accident), but unless you know what words those phonetic blocks translate to then it fails to communicate the language’s meaning (i.e. it only works if you speak Korean). The opposite is true of languages that use Chinese characters, I have had personal experience seeing a group of kanji with not even the first clue how to pronounce it verbally, but could still generally make out what was being communicated.
agree with you, i'm a native chinese, i have to pronounce every words in my heart when i read english, that slow my reading speed.
God Almighty, I'm glad I didn't see this before I started learning kanji (43 years ago).
I just learned them and took them as they came. End of story. Why tell beginners every single teeny tiny detail about the Japanese kanji system at the beginning? Kind of like telling a six-year old all about calculus when he is learning how to add single-digit numbers, or a four-year-old when he is just learning to WRITE numbers. There's an order to learning, and videos like this just make things more confusing than they need to be. But you do sound like you're having fun...
I think this video, among his other ones, are for linguistics enthusiasts, not for language learners.
Yeah, but what about people who don’t want to go back to school to learn a language? I wouldn’t want to spend 12 years of my life learning another language, no matter what. Many other languages don’t require another school’s worth of learning to complete, making Japanese much harder.
As someone with a math degree It takes a full school education to build up your math skills to be adequate at entry level calculus. If your writing system takes a comparable amount of effort to learn I'd say somethings gone wrong.
Weaver Games
Eh, I’d argue that you don’t need Euclidean geometry or precalc for calculus, and 6th and 7th grade math shouldn’t exist.
Precalculus imo is just stuff that makes more sense to learn in the context of calculus (weierstrass identities, parametrization, etc.) and is just kiddie analysis.
Euclidean geometry is only really necessary for the trig involved, and not really needed otherwise.
Plus, Algebra 1 and 2 can be learned in a year, and 6th and 7th grade don’t really teach you anything.
You can totally learn calc 1-2 by the age of 13, get real and complex analysis with linear algebra by 14, and topology, calc 3, and abstract algebra by 15, if you study over the summer.
@@Weaver_Games It's called an analogy. It's not supposed to be a 1:1 representation. Learning kanji is nowhere near that difficult.
As someone studying Chinese, it's interesting to see the similarities between Chinese and Japanese. Many of the Japanese kanji words are written the exact same in Chinese and have the same meaning, but the pronunciation is completely different. 圖書館 is library in both languages, and 車 means car in both languages. However, at least Japanese learners don't need to worry about tones, which in Chinese completely change the meaning of the word.
@M. J. H. It’s funny how I as a Mandarin learner was able to understand the words without your definition… kinda cool
@M. J. H. this not the tone as it is in Chinese.
Simply put, Chinese is a tonal language whereas Japanese is not
@@lilac1204 Tones in Mandarin are essentially high and low pitches
In another way Japanese is harder though. You should acknowledge how while in Chinese once you learn the pronunciation of a character that often doesn't change no matter how it is used(or it changes minimally). With Japanese you have to memorize many different pronunciations depending on context.
Kanji is Chinese characters. The ancient Japanese learned wrong Chinese characters and produced some pieces (wrong Chinese text). They did not learn well.
So "Japanese Kanji" means the meaning of wrong understanding and writing the wrong Chinese text.
Some special KANJI combinations are used in ancient Chinese documents (many people think this is different from Chinese characters).
It is also used in southern China today.
This just makes me want to learn Japanese even more. ありがとうございます。
How about 有り難う御座います
How about アリガトウゴザイマス
@@benjiusofficial This hurts to read, jesus
First chinese after japanese
same feeling 👍
ah fuck it. i'm still going to learn japanese.
Do it! It's awesome. Kanji may be madness, but it's wonderful madness. Japanese is a lot of fun to speak and write, I can tell you.
+Andrew Strom yeah... i don't want to be that weeaboo that only speaks two words japanese and says he speaks it fluently. but its so hard to find good (and cheap) lessons on the internet. i tried lingualift,yuta,japanesepod101 and i'm now trying wanikani.
As long as your enthusiastic and determined enough :)
Kanji itself actually isn't too hard to learn if you just learn it slowly! If you just try to memorize all the different pronunciations, it'll be near impossible, but I think most classes and textbooks just introduce one pronunciation at a time with each kanji and shows it to you in context with hiragana that you already know. Definitely not easy, but worth it, especially if you don't want to be those types of weebs who don't speak Japanese; they speak anime and are content with that/are convinced that they know Japanese :P
Tae Kim's grammar guide is the best I've found.
Actually having a mandarin background backed by knowledge of two Chinese dialects at an intermediate level helps. Some of those kanji are used in Chinese dialects but not in Mandarin. And those dialects originated from the ancient times. Wu or Go in onyomi makes it easier for a Shanghainese but not for other dialects while Tang or Kan in onyomi makes it easier for those who speak the Southern dialects. To complicate things further, Japan kept archaic Chinese characters while the meaning of some words are long forgotten in mandarin but not the dialects. 屶 was not created but borrowed from archaic Chinese (meaning lofty) and rebadged with a new meaning. Not exactly Kokuji but Kokkun. Shinjitai is essentially a slight variant of simplified Chinese characters.
thats correct. in Hakka our pronounciation also in Cantonese dialect is almost same as in japanese.
You omitted a very important Kanji reading, jukujikun(熟字訓), or a single kunyomi that is spread across multiple characters acting as a single morpheme. For example, きょう is a single native Japanese morpheme that would normally be assigned to a single Kanji as its kunyomi, but since no appropriate character exists to host this morpheme, two characters must share the burden: 今日. This is one of the most difficult aspects of Kanji, although they are thankfully limited in number, yet many are common. These jukujikun can't even be listed among an individual character's readings because the pronunciation is indivisible in reference to the characters hosting it; in other words, you can't say that きょ is one of 今's readings, nor that う is one of 日's readings.
I actually furiously debated once with a Japanese calligrapher because he insisted that my stroke order for a word I wrote (which is eminently important in calligraphy) was wrong, while I KNEW I was right. We both got slightly insulted, and decided to look it up (hurray for Google!) and realised: Very, very occasionally the stroke order is different in Chinese and Japanese for the same word (Check out the one for '馬' for example!). On the other hand, stroke order is vastly intuitive. Those for recurring side radicals are easily remembered after writing them enough, and for most other words, just imagine you are writing with a brush: start from the top left, then go down and right. Done!
And if you think Japanese has a lot of set multi-word phrases, in Chinese they are expected everywhere, even for writing as quotidian as newspapers and the back of shampoo bottles and television advertisements. I admit that they gave me no end of grief while I was in school, but now that I'm no longer being tested on them, they really make a piece of writing very enjoyable to read. Fragments of Classical Chinese in a dense phrase of poetry scattered in otherwise plain prose, like chocolate sprinkles on vanilla ice-cream~
I am really enjoying this series of videos. nice job!
Thank you!
Fun fact, before I started learning Japanese, I searched up “hard things about learning Japanese” to save myself from that “oh wait there’s more” moment
Isn't the answer to that basically just "Learning Japanese"?
@@Jognt Pretty Much 😔
Wait wait, you spent the whole video talking about why Japanese is a mess, just to end it stating the easiest (and maybe most logical) part about kanji is the maddening one? Stroke order is rather easy, if you know the general rules for it.
Nevertheless, nice video! I have some kanji headache to share, too:
The verb 行く (to go) can be read as both yuku and iku, depending on context. But both readings bear the SAME meaning, so there is no telling.
The verb "au" (to meet) can be writen in several different forms 会う 逢う 遭う depending on what/how you are meeting.
Same for "miru" (to see) 視る 観る 見る 診る 看る.
The word kami (hair 髪) and sori (shaving 剃り) are combined to form the word "kamisori", or razor. But it is written like 剃刀 (shaving blade). The bullshit lies in how the 剃, which should be the sori part of the word, actually becomes the KAMI in this compound.
I have lots of fun learning kanji, but this is definitely a chaotic, broken system.
It's almost as if they did it on purpose to give Japanese a wab-sabi touch. :)
I should clarify there. I don't find stroke order to be the most complex thing about Chinese characters. For me, it was like the cherry on top, the "but wait there's more" that really made me stop and laugh. The video will be more about the process of coming to the kind of stroke order intuitions you have, and why even then there are still many quirks.
Thanks for sharing examples! Wow, 髪 + 剃 > 剃刀 has quite the character etymology. Painfully exquisite.
Ah, I see! Maybe it has to do with how I structured my studies, but since I knew about stroke order from the beginning, it always seemed like a fundamental part of it, while all the readings and weird combinations are the "there is more!" aspect of it. It probably depends on which end of this messy tangle one starts to learn from! :D
FiveADay Kanji Unused? Saw 観る twice recently in regular written media, and I'm not even an active reader myself, since I have only 7 months of Japanese under my belt and am focusing on vocabulary hoarding first (with an average of 6,14 kanjis a day, ha!).
Besides, the things you've pointed out don't invalidate the existence or irregularity of the terms I've mentioned, you are just throwing facts under the rug, which is exactly how people lose touch with etymology and get languages into this puzzling state.
I don't feel like following your advice when "never going to see" has actually translated into "saw twice within a month while not even looking for it". I won't recall where exactly I saw it since I do a lot of zapping, but the construction was something around 映画を観た on both, that's when I learned this usage even existed.
At the end of the day, though, knowing these kanji is important anyway since they are jouyou, and the compounds they appear in all have to do with their basic meaning (something I wish I knew BEFORE cramming the vocabulary version!), so even if it looks like trivia, I figure it can be useful to know this stuff for connecting some dots, and it doesn't cost much brain space.
5 years studying japanese person here, 観る 診る 看る 視る 遭う 逢う some of these are non Jouyou Kanji. that means that they won't appear in newspapers, or any other government things with out furigana on them. so there technically isn't a need to remember them as they usually have the reading on them and it's like "oh it says みる so it must be look". However none of them are archaic, 観る means to watch something in a way you are watching a movie or a youtube video and not just looking at anything. 診るmeans to inspect as a doctor inspects a patient看るmeans to look after someone(like how it's used in 看病) 視る means to see, but not by conventional means, like i saw it used in a visual novel as the person saw the future. 逢う means to meet some one, but it implies that it is a fated meeting like you just had your first encounter with your soulmate or rival. 遭う is to be brought in to something bad like (事故に遭う got into an accident) or (なんで僕がこんな目に遭わなくちゃいけないの？Why do I have to be put though this?) These are nice to memorize if you are a kanji enthusiast, but not totally necessary. One crucial thing to consider is how much fiction do you plan on reading, as many authors will intentionally use hard to read kanji(usually with the reading though) especially if it is aimed at adults(some of the more "literary " ones don't even put the reading on them)
Nowadays they also use English words, but pronounce them in a way that no English speaker can understand =3
Only some katakana words are hard to understand as an english speaker. But others like: Guide (Gaido), Piano (Piano), and many more are easy to understand. Also arent you dead Pitou?
Makudonarudo
Do you know what Menyuu is?
Or Restaran?
Piza?
Toire?
When I heard Kohi it sounded like Coffee to me.
Waifu?
Teebiru?
Paati?
Biiru?
Paatii?
Japanese should express them in Kanji. But Japanese always accept new culture or word, so it is now new japanese word from abroad.
I never knew that the character 行 could be read as あん (an). It’s not _as_ surprising, though, that 弓 can be read as たらし (tarashi).
There is 行灯(あんどん) for example.
I want to learn Japanese ^^
*after watching this
WTF???!!!!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME, JAPAN? GOD, MIND=BLOWN
Nah just kidding. I still want to learn Japanese though
Don't give up, it's easier if you study it in a fun way! \(^o^)_ I started making 1
minute kanji lesson videos with mnemonics so they become unforgettable
Japanese isn't nearly as hard as he makes look like.
It’s not as hard as this dude makes it sound
It's like that with any study subject, especially languages. It starts to look really complex once you try to list every aspect. But in reality, you just learn things one by one at your own pace. Think about any RTS, MOBA or MMORPG videogame. It's really fucking complicated when you think about how much there is to know just to enjoy playing. But you just find out about things one by one slowly and then you realize that you know quite a bunch. You did learn your first language as a child and it's not like it was easier back then. You did literally spent 3 years just to get to the child's vocabulary level.
And this youtuber just makes things look even more complicated. He didn't mention that "the right way to write kanji" isn't that hard to grasp. Complicated kanji simply consist of simplier once and you write them down the same way. Every simplier kanji from top to bottom left to right. That's it, learn 30 of them and you'll be able to intuitively write the other couple of thousands. And the second you encounter a brand new word in text, if you know every kanji it consists of, you can guess it's reading and meaning right at the spot and the word will be set in stone in your head forever. Every system has it's advantages and disadvantages. If it was only worse than the alternatives, Japan would just switch at one moment and live happier.
Trust me this dude is blowing it way out of proportion.
As a Chinese reading Japanese. It's relatively easy to read and learn. It's a weird feeling that you don't know these words, but somehow you know these words.
Your videos fascinate me and make me want to cry at the same time. You crush my optimism but I love you still. I think I'll forget about this video and chosse to go crazy slowly and bit-by-bit than all at one time lol
These readings are pretty numerous. It's easier if you learn an example word for each reading.
For example, learning 行, I would look at something like this:
行列 - ぎょうれつ
行動 - こうどう
行火 - あんか
行く - いく
行う - おこなう
東京行き - とうきょうゆき
Yeah, it's a mistake to even focus on readings when trying to learn kanji. Just learn vocab and you'll get to know the readings as you go. This video seems like it was made to scare people out of learning or by someone who doesn't really know the language.
Chinese character:
1 syllable
1 pronunciation
100% of the time (well, almost)
Japanese character:
2+ pronunciations
1-3 syllables
Consistency too low to imagine
ReporterTorizo 对的！
And yet
Japanese:
A few strokes
Chinese:
Dozen strokes
Trad Chinese:
More strokes than your display can render
Pretty ironic.
@@BichaelStevens Japanese kanji (not kana) actually has more strokes than simplified Chinese. That being said, Chinese does have more nightmare characters.
Actually several Chinese characters have more than one pronunciations.
What a wonderful video!! Thank you!!
After attempting to learn Japanese and Chinese, I was surprised at how easy it was to learn Korean. Or at least I learned to read it, which in large parts of South Korea was enough to read most signs, since most were actually borrowed English words written in Korean. I had a hard time telling taxi drivers where to go, but I was actually able to read the signs on buses and trains to figure out which ones took me nearest to where I was trying to get to.
Welcome to Hangul. A writing system specifically created to help the common person become literate. Still effective 600 years later.
They all balance out in the end. Korean alphabet is the easiest to learn, but the language is harder to pronounce than Japanese.
@@zaryalace7475 That's not balance. Learning phonetics of a few syllables is not the same things as learning / memorizing 3000 kanji.
@@HKim0072 yea, I haven't taken the time to differentiate g/k/kk and b/p/pp sounds so I can't say how long that will take.
I’m Japanese.
I'm not good at English, so I'm sorry if you find it hard to read.
I think Japanese is very difficult.
Most people in Japan can’t use japanese well.
But,we can communicate with many Japanese, because we don’t have to make a perfect sentence!
For example, 「ヤバい-yabai」and「まじ卍-majimannji」don’t have means but, they are used young people.
Your English is much better than my Japanese, much better. If you don't mind me correcting you but you said, "don't have means" when it should be "don't have any meaning" or "doesn't have a meaning"
Thanks for your insight
卍はそうだけど、マジややばいとかは意味があると思います。
マジ➖本当に
やばい➖すごい
ですね
I have studied and re-studied Kanji over the years. I would start each time with high hopes and high motivation, but after a couple of months (on average), I would burn out. Since about one year before COVID, I started a different strategy, and it seemed to work. Instead of using Kanji textbooks (made by foreigners) or JLPT kanji lists, I went ahead and just started using the OFFICIAL Kanji lists given to elementary kids. As of today, I'm 20+ Kanji away from finishing the Grade 4 Kanjis. Instead of trying to be Superman and studying 14 new Kanji a week, I instead only do 4 new ones. Slow pace, but consistent. I have only 6 months of time staying in Japan, past 10 years I have been over here in Thailand. So, as I said before, I recommend using the Kanji lists that the Japanese kids/teens use and another useful thing is to try to master the list of 214 Kanji radicals. I was amused to bring up some of the radicals with RANDOM Japanese adults, and sometimes they had no idea how it was pronounced
日本の文字遊ぶも文化の一つがある
例えば：うらにわにはにわ にわにはにわにわとりがいる おやおや やおやのおやがいもやのおやか
裏庭には２羽、庭には二羽鶏が居る おやおや八百屋の親が芋屋の親か
中国人として、日本文化にも漢字の深さを感じる。一つ一つ漢字は意味があるその意味を組み込んだらwordになる。he meaning of a sentence can be fully expressed without using punctuation.四字熟语谚语文言文，每一段文字的背後都有一段故事。
The writing system is ridiculous if you can't speak the language. All language is spoken first and then written. It's a lot easier to if you speak a language to learn to write it than vice versa. Of course, languages like Arabic have a MUCH easier system of writing than languages like Urdu, English, or Japanese, which are mishmashes of a gazillion different languages and dialects, but the point still holds.
That's why I love Arabic so much. اكتر سهلي
AdmiralPrice for Japanese, if you don't learn the writing system at the same time you limit your self-learning, if you don't have a native Japanese speaker by your side 24/7, you would have to study by books to learn new vocabularies. Nany English speakers think they know Japanese but only using katakana to write is irritating.
Dude Arabic script lacks vowels which makes it horribly difficult for foreigners to learn to read in the language or even learn words from reading. It's not one of the easier languages
For the people, who don‘t know when to use the on (Chinese) or kun (Japanese) reading:
On reading: used when there are more than one Kanji after another
Kun reading: used when the Kanji is alone or after the Kanji follows a Hiragana letter.
For example:
水-water
On reading: sui
Kun reading: mizu
水を飲む。- To drink water. pronounciation: mizu wo nomu (It’s pronounced mizu because it stands alone, Kun reading)
今日は水曜日です。-Today is Wednesday. pronunciation: Kyo wa suiyobi desu. (It’s pronounced sui, because after the Kanji follows another Kanji, On reading)
5:00 "japanese love to combine characters to make a word" but what you through on the screen is just regular Chinese.
4:10 Sushi was fish fermented to stay fresh for longer... So, actually this name makes total sense. They are commanding it to longevity
But it's still an ateji word cause the kanjis used in the word were explicitly for the pronounciation
I thought Sushi had to do with the rice, whilie Sashimi is the fish part? Who can explain this to me please.
@@hendrikbarboritsch7003. That's what sushi is now days. But it all started with people trying to preserve fish for longer.
The old way was burying the fish in layers of rice in a wooden box. And you need to remember that the words formed a long ago. They don't necessarily are going to fit into what the things became even though caring the same writing or pronunciation
Kanji's use is very important and I really like it's function, but the system itself is very impractical with how many there are and how lil sense the combinations make most of the time. I hope they come up with something to fix this problem.
Enough ranting! The reading and writing of 漢字 in Japanese ain't as messy as you claimed. Just check out some English words: iSland, iSle, aiSle, sight vs site, write vs right, survey vs supervise, abridge vs abbreviate, voice vs vocal, siGn vs signal, point vs puncture, lisTen, comB, Psycho, Mnemonic, corPS, cow vs beef vs bovine, left vs gauche vs sinister... If you can get them in English, you can get them in Japanese as well, no big deal!
These Japanese language videos are waaay overdue. Please do more! :D
I promise one more for now. Then it's time to show other languages some love before we return to this beast!
Had to stop and rewind a few times in order for me to actually grasp the information. This shows how complicated the writing system is.
Wow this is quite demotivating to someone who eventually wants to learn Japanese.
indeed
Keep in mind that he's kind of playing up the difficulty for drama.... Kanji is one of the harder parts of learning Japanese, but it's perfectly tractable, and what seems confusing when you start makes a lot more sense with time.
It's like learning _any_ language, really: there's a lot of vocabulary, and basically, well, you have to memorize it all...at first, the sheer quantity can seem overwhelming, but one step at a time...
Also keep in mind that a lot of people have succeeded in learning Japanese, so there's no reason why we wouldn't!
To be fair you don't even need to bother with a lot of this stuff, only if you get super deep into classical literature or etymology.
DO keep in mind that this vid' is a "comic rant". That means he's playing up the complexity for dramatic effect to carry on his "running gag". It's somewhere between a farce and an outright joke.
Yes, the Japanese do have one of the most complicated writing systems in the world. And yes, most of the details being shown in this vid' are relatively true.
That's where the honesty starts to crumple. In practical daily life, worries about specific stroke order (for instance) aren't going to get anywhere. AND a system that can't provide a consistent appearance for a conventional meaning is useless. In your class-work (like at a school with assignments) these technical aspects of language might be glossed over so you're focused on the details you're supposed to be memorizing for the curriculum case at school...
ON your own, however, seeking out the most conventional interpretation(s) in both sound and meaning will greatly simplify your personal quest toward conquering the linguistics. You'll likely find the most helpful instructions to come with lots of phrases like, "99% of the time..." or "The general rule is..." or even "The conventional reading works like..." with a few exceptions.
Furthermore, learning to speak the language is probably the most important. Continue writing in a mix of romanji and kanas as long as you can stand it, picking up kanjis when it's convenient. If (or when) you get to Japan, you always have the option of "asking questions" and impressing the locals that you actually bothered to learn that much and that well.
"The sage knows when not to speak, while the fool is quick to display his folly." :o)
I started learning Hanyu this semester and seeing this just makes me think, that learning to write Hanzi is even easier than I thought ^^' (and to clarify I know that it's not as easy as learning English [btw. non- native writer here] but it's definitely not as hard to learn as many seem to fear) I love writing Chinese, especially those signs in which you can still see the pictogram they were using like with 馬 or 龍 :)
I tried learning Japanese back in 2014, but gave up. I picked it back up over a month ago, but this time I’m committed.
Little known fact, the word "Kanji" isn't actually an on'yomi reading of the Chinese characters "漢字" (meaning Han script) despite what most people will tell you.
That's just a coincidence, people think "Kanji" is a Japanese mispronunciation of "Hanzi" when in actual fact it is a kun'yomi reading which when translated, roughly means "fuck the gaijins".
LMAO This comment should be top comment
Stealthy Mitch wut
so in short kanji can roughly mean fuck foreigners
ay lmao
i love kanji. sure, they're hard, but once you make a mental mnemonic for a character and it sinks in, you can guess the meanings of new words you read 90% of the time, even if you don't know the pronunciation.
Yes! 漢字are beautiful! and I also love making animated mnemonics
It's really cool that you can look at Kanji and you're actually looking at the moment people learned a language from centuries ago.I never knew there exists a writing in this world that chronicles it's own history/creation by itself. Woah
Exactly! That's the beauty of it. It's a time machine encapsulated knowledge (´-ヮ-`)♡
Another example would be the Tibetan writing system, or Thai to some extent (though not much)
Another example would be any Chinese, as it pretty much only changed in pronunciation
For the average person wanting to learn Japanese, it's relatively easy. For someone like this guy or me, with a propensity to wonder where words come from, it's maddening!
It is, in an intricately beautiful way. Languages preserve layers of history in their etymologies, but I'm intrigued how kanji have done that with characters.
This guy again ahahaaa, I have seen you on sooooo many Kanji related videos now man, on like six different channels
Learn Chinese and you'll know where they come from. As a Chinese starting to learn Japanese the only thing confusing is the different readings. The meanings of most kanji are close enough their Chinese counterparts and it's easy to memorize both hiragana and katakana since both are based on Chinese characters as well.
Though isn't both Kanji and Korean Hanja based off Traditional Chinese and not Simplified?
90% of people who know simplified Chinese don't have problems reading traditional Chinese.They are the same written slightly differently.
To me as a native chinese who is learning japanese, kanji is both the easiest and hardest part. For we know what those kanji mean from our mother language but have no idea which japanese pronunciation should be used.
It's easier than you think...
今 = now = いま
今日 = today = きょう
毎日 = every day = まいにち
Usually if you know the meaning, just pull the word.
Sometimes I don't know the word, but I know the meaning. So the sentence makes sense even though I can't say it... LOL!
I think only Chinese and Japanese can understand how beautiful Hanzi/Kanji is , I like many Japanese Kanji words like 花见/一期一会/木漏/青岚/朝颜
I'm learning japanese and I understand how nice the writing system is even if it is rather complicated.
I struggle with kanji all the time but.... trying to read a Japanese sentence without kanji is a pain. so I still love kanji 😂
*Kokuji, Shinjitai* and *Ryakuji* are the ones quite interesting to Chinese people, because many of them don't exist in our language.
If a Chinese masters these it's like knowing every Chinese character ever created
そんなに難しくないけど... 僕の母国語は英語だから、日本語はすごく違った。短い間勉強していたんだけど漢字が (楽しい覚え方を持ってると) 本当に本当にそんなに大変じゃないですね。先ず、読みについて、言葉を覚えるほど一言の漢字だけを覚えなくちゃと気付いてる。例えば「生」はたくさんの読みがあるんですね？「い」とか「しょ」とか「う」とか。だけどただ単語と共に覚えたらもっと簡単になる。そんな風に勉強してみるともっと大変です (ごめんね、日本語がまだ上手ではないですね)
上手な日本語ですよ。
中国語と日本語の大きな違いはそこですね
How the Japanese writing system never collapsed into hiragana over the centuries is truly beyond me. I've been studying the language, and I can just about get my head around spoken Japanese, but the writing systems are a baffling enigma.
Vietnamese is the Romanization of Chinese. Sounds shifts and change. Glyphs do not. Without the glyphs, the meanings will not be anchored.
Example:
Ebonics: poontang, pootytang (to f***, whore)
from the French: putain = prostitute.
Why never collapse completely into hiragana?
ははははながすきです seems way more confusing than 母は花が好きです to me
probably because hiragana on their own take up a lot of space
Maybe in the first place why Chinese writing system doesn’t collapse into alphabetical. My short answer is writing system has shaped the speaking system too. After thousands of years pure alphabetical writing just not working for these languages any more.
@@priciliar.s.simarmata2373 exactly, plus since the same pronunciation can have multiple meanings it makes it difficult to figure out what is actually being said. Tried playing Pokemon in Japanese a few years ago since it was all in hiragana, but gave up when I kept running into sentences I couldn’t figure out cause a word would have multiple meanings that make sense in context. Might make more sense to a Japanese person who’s familiar with how people tend to use the language to express things. And personally I find kanji easier than katakana
5:55 thats kinda far fetched, especially since more complex kanji are usually just the stroke order of the radicals and then you go left to right line by line and put them next to each other in order. but then there are also some harder combinations that don't seem to make sense at first. but most of them seem to follow intuitive patterns. i feel remembering the kanji in general connnected to a meaning and sound way harder than anything about the stroke order
谢谢兄弟，已经疯了 0.0
THX bro, I'm successfully crazy now.
So many people are asking "What's so hard about Kanji strike order?" and I'm asking "Why the hell do Kanji have a stroke order in the first place?"
No... there is no justification for it. If it's necessary to write kanji in a specific way, then it's because they're too complicated.
Well there are two things fundamentally different between alphabetical letters and kanji radicals.
First is the fact that people can recognize letters regardless of whether or not they are properly drawn. Go to America or Britain or any other country that uses the Latin Alphabet and nobody cares how the hell you draw your letters as long as they fall within the margins of what the letter should look like. If there's any uncertainty, such as between an l and i, the reader just asks or, more often, guesses.
Second is just how much more complex kanji are than alphabetical words. Cramming all that information into a smaller space makes a word harder to read. Letters are only written in one direction whereas Kanji radicals are written in two directions within the kanji.
+Shoes The fact that the kanji is crammed into a smaller space makes stroke order even more important. There is literally no room for mistakes when you are writing a complex kanji in a small space.
If you follow the stroke order correctly then you will minimize any wrong stroke that may or may not mess up the whole word. These stroke orders have been refined by scholars and calligraphers for a long time to their present order.
+ A TH-camr Umm... that doesn't make any sense. I would be more inclined to accept that explanation if not for the presence of modern sans fonts for kanji and other Sinnitic logographies. If the line thickness doesn't matter and important markings are easy enough to add, then how exactly does stroke order affect meaning?
Okay, lets assume line thickness doesn't matter while writing.
Let's write 田 for rice field. If we write 十 first then 口, there are a number of things that could go wrong. Your 十 may not form a square, or one of the edges could protrude and you may end up with 由 or 甲. The correct order should be ㄇ then 十 then finally __ Then it is less likely for the inner lines to protrude.
Even starting and ending points are important. For example, compare the first stroke of 千 (thousand) and 干 (dry) . 千 first stroke is from right to left (slight tilt) and 干 first stroke is from left to right (horizontal). Similar characters include 天 and 夭, 壬 and 王 and so on.
Ancient Chinese is written using brushes, so scholars can observe the starting point and ending point of the brush stroke (thicker at
start point, thinner at end point).
If you take into account line thickness, then even simple words like 女 (woman) can look like 大 (big). But if you follow the stroke order, you can determine which character it is.
Sorry for using Chinese not Kanji but I'm sure there are Kanji examples as well.
Had to come back and leave a like and comment. Very impressive video. 👌
I like the history lesson. Hopefully students don't watch this and think it makes Japanese an unapproachable written language. First, how a language came about should be irrelevant to a student learning to read the language. Unless you intend to teach etymology or such, one should care how the language is used now and not how it originated. Second, there's quite a bit of structure that helps learn Japanese and Kanji. Third, do not be afraid to use tricks and techniques to speed up learning and retention. Here's one such trick: DO NOT LEARN PRONUNCIATION FOR KANJI FIRST!!!! As pointed out in the video, due to context there will be a different pronunciation. As such, learn how a kanji is used in a word and later if you want learn that that kanji's "onyomi" because you know two or three words where that kanji's onyomi has appeared. There's a lot more to say, but goes beyond a TH-cam comment.
Hope this series continues. It was quite fun to watch.
Agreed... it's fun, but I think that it's mostly for academic purposes. IMO learning the basic kanji is a lot less ambiguous.
After learning ~1000 kanji I've left Japan and forgotten all of the kanji (aside from simple stuff, which I probably can't write properly). However, I think it can be quite enjoyable learning those first 1000 characters if you're in the right mindset.
To the beginning of the video, my reaction would be:
You have seen every language having just one script. So seeing Japanese using 3 scripts feels weird. That weirdness is what I think brings out the beauty of the language.
Seriously? Hiragana and Katakana actually make Japanese reading easier.
That 漢字は難しいですね on the professor's book killed me. hahaha great!
I'm currently studying Japanese and Chinese and personally I found the characters harder to remember when I'm using Japanese
I’m learning Japanese. All of this is true but at the same time as a student you don’t feel the overwhelming difficulty of Japanese. Once you actually start learning Japanese, things just make sense. You learn how to write a word just in the same way you’d learn how to write a word in any language. Sure, knowing every single onyomi and kunyomi is important but I mostly just like to remember how to write entire words as I expand my vocabulary rather than getting wrapped up in individual characters and their history.
外国の方がここまで詳細に日本の漢字事情に関して説明なさるなんて…！非常に感動しました！
そして、とても面白うございました。
I was so impressed because non-Japanese man explains the complexity of Japanese Kanji in detail. And this movie is interesting.
Hey, I'm going to add to the comments already saying this, but from a relatively new student's perspective- don't worry about the writing system! Kana was really easy to grasp and only took me about three or four days to learn, and kanji writing got way easier once I learned radicals and stroke order. Kanji readings also become more natural the more you immerse yourself in the language- it's all about practice. While learning three different types of writing for one language seems like a lot, it becomes much easier through immersion. Also, learning grammar helps you make sense of things much better, all the way down to the writing. So, please don't be discouraged by this video! Learn at your own pace and do your best.
Last time I was this early, & was a letter.
stop
+N what?
Anh Truong last time i was this early bull shit
+N ok
MichaelKingsfordGray um wot?
とても分かりやすい動画ですね。
But the strength of kanji is that it makes Japanese much easier and quicker to read (for an experienced reader). Since Japanese does not use spaces to differentiate the words, it would be a nightmare to read with only hiragana. The kanji give away the structure and most important parts of a sentence, while also giving a quick clue to the meaning. Words with very similar hiragana can be easily mixed, but since kanji are much more complex, the chance of two words looking very similar is unlikely.
then add the spaces and use romaji. simple.
@@anhpham1461 romaji is terrible, like way worse than just hiragana.
@@LucaRocha2012 how so? I can agree that using only romaji is not a very good idea, but at least compared to hiragana ONLY, romaji looks more clear-cut and neat.
@@anhpham1461 it's just not right, romaji is not uniform, can't accurately represent some japanese syllables and in some cases it's not clear whether the n is the end of syllable or.the beginning of another one (for example れない/れんあい would both be written as renai in romaji, even though they are different sounds/moras). Also romaji doesn't solve the problem of the ridiculous amount of homophones and fast readability that actual japanese can provide, but neither does a hiragana only option, so i digress.
@@LucaRocha2012 you do have a point, sometimes when I input Japanese into the computer I have the same problem lol.
Japanese learner: kanji is so hard
Chinese guy trna learn: 哈哈，我能一边打飞机一边学
這就是漢字文化圏的偉大
@@user-rc2sh5fs5o 正是
I FOUND YA like 5 years late but still commenting to tell my yt algorithm to show me more of this
I love this. Oh my goodness, I could not have subscribed any sooner lol.
Japanese is difficult, but so fun it doesn't really seem difficult to me at all. They're like math or puzzles... both of which I happen to enjoy thoroughly c':