OK, I have to admit that learning how to read and write Japanese isn't going to be a quick process. Japanese people also spend years learning kanji. But there's good news. Learning basic Japanese grammar isn't that difficult. Actually, it could be easier than learning English grammar which can be full of exception and "weird" rules and non-rules lol So if you want to learn how to speak Japanese like native Japanese speakers and not like textbooks which can be pretty unnatural, I can help you. Click here and subscribe bit.ly/3ozIanw
I'm currently learning Japanese in uni, and I got hiragana and katakana pretty easily, but now we're getting into kanji and its horrible. I still have trouble with writing some simple sentences even
For me, the "drawbacks" between English and Japanese is there's no consonant in Japanese itself and English phonemes are all "hunggy" and that's why English or Japanese learners found both ways are "feels" difficult, in another word, they(learners) got really BAD teachers~
It would be if Arabic numerals averaged over 10 strokes and weren't also required for Japanese fluency (一, 二, 三 isn't enough, you need to know 1, 2, 3 on top of that).
Japanese people thought Chinese characters were too complicated and so tried to invent other ways of writing. As a result, they made the writing system even more complicated.
The fact that they have multiple sounds for the same character, while for us Chinese, different sounds = different characters. It's nice though that we can communicate to each other by writing if needed
I've also heard most of this already, but it was very nice and helpfull too to have this consice recap of everything. Now I just hope he makes a similar video about the different Kanji readings. :)
MichaelKingsfordGray My apologies. The actual spelling in Japanese is 「キュゥべえ」which is short for 「インキュベーター」 More importantly, if you had actually bothered to learn anything about the franchise, you'd have realised that the official translation is "Kyubey".
It’s a novel that is written from 9033 to 9044 about events that happened from 8973 to 8984. That of course is the period of the series of wars instigated by the over-consulate of the Zebulon System when he claimed the defunct Imperial Crown of the greater Eastern Trakasianian Star system. If you remember the future correctly, in this book, you will know the climax comes when the Trakasianian nobles must decide to flee the Trakasianian capital of Moscobatia or remain when the city is put to the torch to keep it and its supplies of pure refined molecular carbon from falling into the hands of Zebulionese ravagers. The book will have several lengthy discourses into the contemplations about the nature of god, suffering, the Christ figure in the role of human history, historiographical discourses into the role of historians in reflecting man’s self back to himself through historical example etc.
English (I'm American), Spanish, German, Hebrew, Ancient Greek. Some French and Russian. These are my languages, and learning was a lot of work, over many years, from a lot of different sources. Your breakdown of the history of Japanese writing, with its benefits, rationale, and cultural linkages, ranks among the most insightful and cogent language instruction I've ever encountered. Excellent work. Thank you.
I've learned hiragana and katakana when I was still in high school, through Microsoft Paint on Windows XP. I decided to learn them mostly because I used to read a lot of manga where the onomatopoeia wasn't translated, and I wanted to know what the " じー ", " ドキドキ " and " ゴゴゴゴゴ " meant XD. Since I'm Brazilian, it was easy for me to learn the phonetics, because our "beabá" (the alphabet and basic syllables) is quite similar to the Japanese one. But kanji is still complicated for me; there are so many similar ones with the same pronunciation, so it's quite difficult to remember even the "most important" ones. But someday I'll get there...
@@i5879 I never actually watched or read it, I was just using the meme as a reference XD. But I do plan on watching it to see what that "GOGOGOGO" thing is about!
This video was really interesting, I love to learn about the historic circumstances that created the Japanese writing system of today. As for the comparison with the upper and lowercase letters in the Latin alphabet, it may play an insignificant part in English, French and other languages, in German however, it actually makes a big difference. There are many rules that dictate if a word is spelled with upper or lowercase. If you use the wrong one, it’s a substantial grammatical error and there are even words that change their meaning depending on the spelling. That being said, from time to time, some people propose the idea of dropping the many uppercase spellings and using lowercase letters almost exclusively like in English. With some changes it could work, the language would lose some of its clarity but the spelling would also become much less complicated. Despite that, I doubt that this is going to happen any time soon, most German speakers, much like the Japanese, don’t want to change such an integral and culturally ingrained part of their language.
7:58 Ah yes, that's the plaque from Trajan's Column in Rome. Latin letters evolved into lowercase, which was the norm for a thousand years, but Europeans adopted uppercase as well as lowercase after rediscovering the exquisite lettering they found on those old Roman monuments, and the plaque on Trajan's Column is probably the very best example because of how neat and perfect the letters are. There's even a font in Microsoft Word named "Trajan" based entirely on that plaque.
I truly never believed that anyone could justify using three seemingly redundant alphabets concurrently as a logical writing system... Yuta, you did it.
It's complicated because you have to learn a lot *LIKE A LOT* of Chinese words to replace the original Japanese words (Hiragana). The main reason why we have to use Kanji it's because to not write a long sentence just for a simple word. Well, welcome to Japan, everyone!
Haha whats wrong in writing long sentances? It's easier that way, if you only used either katakana or hiragana it would have been soo fucking easy. I would have learned japanese so easily bcs in my langauge writing sistem is like that.
Well the real welcome to Japanese is when you find out that は is pronounced “ha” as a character and “wa” as a particle in lesson 1. So as the sentences get longer you spend longer trying to work out if it is ha or wa. The lack of spaces between the words also make it harder for some of us the read the sentence. It just takes time and practice.
You get used to it Its not complicated It's called a different language for a reason. Also japanese has a lot of homophones and seeing a kanji also makes reading faster and big words and logos easier to spot
Wow, your analogy of uppercase and lowercase letters for hiragana and katakana and your analogy of numbers for kanji was brilliant. I always thought that kanji was related to visual representation of words in a way but I wasn't sure. I regained my motivation for learning Japanese after this video :) Keep up the great work.
When you compared the interchangeably to UPPER/lowercase letters...my brain 🧠 went😳😳👀👀🤗🤗どうもありがとうございます。 It would have taken me forever to get that correlation 😅😂😭 I just started learning so thank you~~
I love to study Kanji. Really I do 😁 Although, I've to say that I'm often very confused. It drives me crazy when it comes to the On and Kun readings... In particular, for example for a single Kanji in On-reading there are often more than four different ways to pronounce and read that certain character. And that point is the most difficult one for me. I've no problems learning the single meanings of a character or memorizing the stroke-order and writing them down. But the many possibilities of reading gives me headache 😔😔 I know that Kanjis shouldn't be studied separately (sign by sign) but as whole words or word combinations/patterns, which makes sense because of the different readings and pronunciations. And I also read daily (Japanese subtitles, mangas, text messages of Japanese friends) and write daily as well. But it seems like I'm getting more and more confused. So I wanted to ask you Yuta, if you could have a clue or an idea how to deal with Kun and On-reading a bit better? Maybe there is a trick or kind of a system that I haven't yet discovered, which will help me when it comes to On and Kun-reading. Have a lovely day Yuta and thank you so much for your videos 🤗
It's not really complicated, just a bit messed up. Some reading ambiguities are harder to resolve than others. E.g. *風* : the meanings of かぜ and ふう are so different, a lower-intermediate learner of Japanese can read 風 correctly based on the context without a second's delay. *開く* : あく or ひらく? These two words have the same meaning, but they are not interchangeable in many cases. A learner needs to develop intuition in order to read the kanji correctly most of the time. *明日* : あした, あす or みょうにち? They have the same meaning, but the nuances are different. The author will probably have to provide furigana. *依存* : is it いぞん or いそん? *瞬く* : is it まばたく or またたく? Depends on who you ask and how old you want to sound.
It’s so weird that I know all of hiragana by heart but have difficulty remembering all of katakana. I guess it was the same for Japanese people in the past too.
This was by far the best explanation video for why 日本語 uses all 3 systems of writing. My favorite bit was your UPPERCASE and lowercase analogy, as well as the number one - it eliminated any remaining doubts I had. 0:18 Also, I'm so glad I could understand this: 僕の名前はキユウベエ。 Boku no namae wa kyuubee My name is Kyuubee. I can't write the kanji for 'boku' but I visually understood what it meant. ほんとに ありがとう ございます！
*_The moment when you realized that one Weaboo goes to Japan for the first time and can't see the subtitles everywhere._* Weaboo: _NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!_
lol. Foreign language stuff in cities can be strange sometimes. I still feel kinda weird running into signs written in Chinese in the middle of large Australian cities. And it's not just places like 'chinatown' It's a LOT of inner city locations, train stations and so on... But... Yeah, sometimes you do have to consider tourists... Nothing worse than getting your transit system clogged up with foreigners who can't even work out the name of the train station they're trying to get to...
This was so informative, thank you! I would love to hear more stories about the history of Japan, I love the way you tell them, much more interesting than reading from Wikipedia or something... If you feel inspired to do this again, I'd love to listen, even if it's a longer video ^-^
I love that the scene from a video game that you used was from final fantasy, it's what got me to start learning Japanese myself 僕の日本語は独学で学んだ。勉強嫌いだったが、趣味か興味で学ぶと楽しくなった。結局勉強も好きになった
The examples for kanji for disambiguation at 10:18 are all Chinese readings, but needing kanji to disambiguate also applies for native Japanese words, like おもい (思い vs. 重い) or ひく (引く vs. 弾く vs. 轢く)
Newcomers to Japanese should especially welcome the usage of katakana because it immediately gives the clue that the word is a foreign word, likely an English word that can be sounded out.
This is such a detailed and very easy to understand Yuta! Thank you so much! I always wondered the differences and the lower/uppercase and the Kanji being similar o writing numbers really helped make me understand how Japanese people would interpret it on a normla, common basis. I really appreciate your content, please keep uploading for a ,long time!
As an English speaker and writer, Japanese ans Chinese writing is simply something to be admired. I just like the shapes and art of it. It started 60 years ago when I was 6 yrs old and my parents bought our first Mah-jong set. Which is kind of ironic as we were living in Aden at the time, and were already enjoying the lovely shapes made by Arab writing!
1:22 his expression. I know most of my Korean, Chinese and Japanese friends really get frustrated when people say that "isn't Japanese, Chinese, and Korean the same?" Thank you, Yuta for this very informative video.
It is easier just like native English speaker trying to learn Spanish, Italian, French, etc. (Maybe the examples aren’t that accurate but you get the idea) But because of different evolutions took place in all of these languages, they still require tons of effort to learn and master
Thank you for explaining all of this to me as I have just started my journey into learning Japanese and was very confused why there are multiple scripts.
Thank you for this explanation. I always wondered why people would say Kanji shouldn't be used... It's part of the learning process and it makes you discover the nits and crannies of the language. You are right about the visual representation, even with the alphabet used to make words in English. When you're able to just glance at a word, you already done the visual reading. It is the same process.
"That b**** can't even write kanji properly" LMAO! I had started learning the writing system, when I was about 12. I wanted to be able to read some of the games I wanted, that were not coming to the States. I also wanted to make games, and thought I'd have to move to Japan (I didn't like western games). Then I just thought the writing was really beautiful, especially as an artist- and it became fun being able to read. Weeee Final Fantasy, giving the rat tail to Bahamut, was always my favorite part lol.
More Japanese complications: We were visiting 和気鵜飼谷温泉 with some Japanese friends a few weeks ago, and outside the entrance was a large map of what I believed to be 東和気町, and I was shocked to read the heading as "まっぷ". So I asked my friends why the sign is borrowing the English word for map instead of using 地図, and my one friend turned the question back to me and asked, "Better yet, why doesn't it read "マップ"?
@@KuraIthys Because without kanji japanese language would be normal language like others. Kanji just obscure real problem of japanese language. Alphabet that uses several characters instead of single letters in too stiff. They have so many words that use just 1-2 of them over and over again because there is just not enough combination to create new words.
When something doesn't make sense it makes it hard for me to learn. Some weird mental roadblock I have. And the way you explain everything makes so much sense.
Once you know Kanji, you never want to go back. Most of my students complain about Kanji at first, but they always have to admit I was right when I told them they'd be grateful for having them.
I'm learning Japanese and I'm STRUGGLING with the katakana and kanji and failed to understand the purpose compared to other languages, but you absolutely blew my mind with the capital/lower-case and numbers examples from English!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think the reason the person who said "Japanese is unnecessarily complicated" and not Chinese, is because the person probably thought why use kanji if Japanese already have hiragana. Chinese doesn't have hiragana nor katakana
@@euomu At least Chinese has just one writing system, right ^^'? I totally get the pronounciation trouble, though. Learning those (and not getting them all mixed up) definitely is quite a hassle. Especially for someone who - like me - has grown up with whole sentences having melodies (like "pulling" a sentence up in the end to make it a question) rather than every syllable having one of their own. I definitely know that 1st and 2nd tone tend to sound pretty similar pronounced by a European like me because we tend to pronounce things like a question when being uncertain about them
at least chinese is more consistent because their language is more related to the writing system. They only use hanzi and have one reading for one letter in general
@@euomu . I'm a fluent Mandarin speaker, but I CAN NOT read Chinese for the life of me. I've taken Chinese school but I just can't remember all the words. I personally find reading/writing wayyyyy harder.
As a beginner who did 'remembering the kanji' right from the beginning, whenever I read a word I know in hiragana only, I get confused even though I would've known the reading of the kanji. Now I'm a bit further along in my journey and getting used to it, using kanji makes things a lot more logical.
This really speaks to the power of habit: Part of the reason people feel kanji make things easier is that they get used to it. Most competent readers learn to spot for kanji, not hiragana sequences. If all writing was in spaced hiragana, people would start to spot for familiar sequences the same way English readers spot for word forms.
Brilliant explanation about why all three scripts are used, and the analogy to English writing makes it so easy to understand. Plus I learned something because I'd never thought of written English in that way!
@@NestorMandela It's just weird to me because I don't normally see a mix of katakana and hiragana in the same word/name. Maybe it's just one of those "ateji" rule breaking things that the japanese language sometimes have.
@@sadgoy. it's not related to ateji, it's just a stylistic choice. Think of how in English, some music artists and rappers use weird symbols instead of letters in their name (Ke$ha, Tekashi 6ix9ine, P!nk, etc.) It looks cooler - that's the only reason
@@masterp443 You're right. That does make more sense. I mean I know ateji has more to do with unofficial readings being used for kanji compounds but.... I do have to agree that "キュウベえ" looks better than "キュウベエ"
The best video about the topic I've seen so far! And that comparison of English lower/upper cases and Japanese hiragana/katakana stroke me the most. Same as seeing Kanji as written digits in English.
I googled "mahou shoujo" expecting to find a respectable way to call someone professional or a great person or something similar to that, and I chuckled when I realized it was something COMPLETELY different than I was expecting Hahaha
No kanji is the reason why Korean is far more easier to learn than Japanese, been learning Japanese for years but struggle to remember kanji so I can't read properly, I've only been learning Korean for 2 months and I can read just about anything with relative ease.
With the numbers funnily enough before he even brought the second version of the paragraph on screen I was already converting them in my head to the basic number version to make it easier
Thanks for the vid! BTW: "literate" is pronounced "LI-te-rit", similar to how "immaculate" and other similar adjectives (or nouns) are pronounced. In some cases you have verbs that are spelled the same but pronounced like you did, "leit". You probably knew that.
This was an excellent explanation. Thank you so much! However, I'll go on writing like a child for at least another year before trying to broaden my Kanji
I've just started trying to teach myself Japanese (spoken and written), and I found this video astounding helpful in understanding the differences and history of the different writing systems. Thanks for posting!
Some thoughts I had while I was going through this video: 1. The point about kanji being faster to read is debatable. People do not read English letter by letter. I'm referring to this famous text: I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins can raed tihs too. It's possible that if you write Japanese in pure kana, people will eventually be able to read it just as fast as with kanji. 2. There are many homonyms, but wouldn't the reader be able to figure it out from context? The spoken language does not need Kanji, so wouldn't the written language be fine? This was already demonstrated by older games. Atleast for simple, everyday text. 3. IMO Shinjitai and Simplified Chinese are not comparable. In Simplified Chinese, the simplified radical is used everywhere, while in Japanese, the simplified radical is used only in specific Kanji. This is additional inconsistency. 4. Did Japan ever consider doing something about the complication that is On and Kun readings? Korea had the right idea IMO. 5. One of the explanation I've seen as to why Kanji is required are the sheer number of homonyms. Korean and Vietnamese comparitively doesn't have many homonyms, so they were able to drop Chinese in their writing. 6. My theory as to why Japanese has so many homonyms is that Japanese simply doesn't have enough sounds. Korean has more consonants and vowels while Vietnamese has tones. Maybe the extra i, e, o in Old Japanese would have reduced the number of homonyms. 7. Is Katakana really required? Wouldn't it be easier to write foreign words in Hiragana itself and add some marking like the quotation marks in English?
1. No, it's not debatable at all. Do you know japanese? reading a text with kanji is 100x faster and no amount of practice in hiragana will let you get to that. That english example while obviously shows we don't actually need words properly written, doesn't really compare to what it's like to read with kanji. And even then we still kinda do read letter by letter. 2. 100% agreed, while it's true that kanji makes reading easier, it's by no means necessary to understand japanese, since people understand each other when speaking perfectly. 3. idk, irrelevant 4. It's not really complicated. Jukugo = on; kanji by itself or okurigana = kun, except for some exceptions. 5. What's the point to this? 6. I think 100%, the lack of sounds is bound to make homophones 7. No, it's not. But neither is uppercase letters, bold letters, underlined letters, italic letters, etc. It adds emphasis and it's a good distinction between japanese and loan words. Not necessary, but makes the language better
6:46 Yuta you seem to have switched the 8 and the 9 😅 I'm assuming from the looks of the letter that it must be from 1893. So you must have said it wrong. The video is very interesting tho
Hi Yuta, i saw your video about Can Japaneses understan Chinese? Wanna make videos about Japanese people's understanding on Korean or Okinawan? Or are you gonna make videos about minority languages in Japan such as Ryukyuan or Ainu? I heard Ryukyuans & Ainus wanna revive their language
Can Japanese understand Chinese? No, not quite. Yuta made a video asking random strangers to read and guess the meaning of some Chinese phrases and they most failed because even though both languages share kanji, not only do Chinese and Japanese read them differently, but the meanings between certain kanji combinations have changed over the centuries of language evolution between the two languages. Spoken Chinese does not sound like Japanese at all when you compare entire phrases and sentences, but some Chinese nouns have a faint resemblance to Japanese nouns of Chinese origin and Japanese nouns that have been repurposed into Chinese sound faintly similar.
I know this video isn't about this, but due to typing all the time I mess up even trying to write basic katakana by hand like ソンツシ... it's so embarrassing... >_
That was a really good explanation, comparing English and Japanese with Japanese's writing systems, especially kanji. It helped me understand the concept of kanji a bit more now, thank you!
I love how much information you always give us in your videos!! I will always be a faithful follower bc you go in-depth with your topics and bring concrete resources to your vids. thank you so much for your hard work!! -a fan from Florida
At first, many years ago, I thought it was weird there were 3 writings in Japanese, but now I've learned the language more and understand more how it works it kinda makes sense and actually makes it easier to read. Especially since there are no spaces in Japanese, if it was all 1 writing, it would've been MUCH harder to identify where a word ends and the next begins or if a character is a particle or part of a word. The part I like most is that often a kanji is used for the meaning and then the hiragana that follows indicates the conjugation, or whether it's a noun or a verb.
@@Rogerfsps Spaces is a western thing. If you compare both writing styles, they each have their pros and cons. Why do we have to write or say so many words just to explain what we mean? I mean this comment could've been written in just a few words in Japanese, yet here I am writing how many lines to say what I need to say.... You can sometimes literally say an entire English sentence in 1 or 2 words. "I'm gonna take Claire to the football match tomorrow" in Japanese is "Tomorrow claire footballmatch bring". "Do you want to eat?" is "eat?". "Do you speak Japanese" is "Japanese speak?" And so on. Also, the particles like WA, GA, NI, WO, etc basically function as spaces. You get used to it, just like you're used to spaces.
@@Censtudios The many words thing is a language structure thing, not a writing system thing. English is a much more analytical language than Japanese - it doesn't inflect words much, and makes heavy use of helper words instead. Japanese is more synthetic, meaning that it inflects words to alter their meaning. Korean for example has basically identical structure to Japanese but uses a space-separated, phonetic writing system. More analytical languages usually have stricter sentence structure, and you can't omit as many words from analytical sentences without losing meaning. Your eat example sounds like you're comparing reasonably formal English to colloquial Japanese - in everyday speech, you'd likely just hear "wanna (go) eat?"
I probably have learnt more in this one video than in ALL of the videos from you I've watched COMBINED (including the way too many p o r n related ones 😒) so Thank you so much for that Yuta - very informative! 😊
They had much the same mess for a long time. Before the invention of hangeul in the 1400s, they used various kinds of indigenous phonetic script mixed with hanja, very much like the Japanese did and do. They just had a push to use hangeul and discontinued hanja education in the 1900s and it succeeded. It's helped by nationalistic sentiment of being freed from Japanese occupation and hangeul being a genuinely amazing native innovation.
Korean has more sounds than Japanese. There are many homophones in Korean, but because Korean has more sounds and more sound combinations it has less homophones than Japanese. If Koreans find a Sino-Korean word may be ambiguous they will write the kanji right next to the word in question to disambiguate its meaning.
I swore to love and study obediently Kanji the day I saw a pretty long daily conversation written with only hiragana : you can't read it, it is too difficult to process without the Kanji.
wanikani.com I'm not affiliated with them, I just think it's the best way to learn kanji lol I've been on it for 2 months and I already know 200+ kanji and like 600+ words with kanji
Long story short japanese created this mess for themselves and for japanese learners simply because they stole someone else's writing system and being overly conservative nation who hates most new things couldn't let it go or replace it with something better. Korean and Vietnamese languages both used the same kanji in the past and they both successfully ditched them altogether using only alphabet nowadays. If you write text just in hiragana and katakana it can be a pain to read but lots of problems would be solved if japanese language started using spaces between words to separate all the gibberish. Japanese has tons of homonyms, like for example for "こうとう" the dictionary gives me like twenty different unrelated words, which makes ditching kanji not that easy. It's to the point that japanese don't understand each other which こうとう was actually meant so they have to confirm by saying "you mean the kou kanji from this word or form this word and tou from this word?". Why not use more understandable words instead? Like ハイクラス instead of 高等、赤い光 instead of 紅灯 and so on? Why even have tons of different words meaning the same to begin with? Japanese have stolen tons of foreign words from different languages and use them every day anyway and even created some on their own (wasei eigo) like ベビーかー (baby car) which means "stroller". Why wasn't it 幼子自動車 or some other shit in Thai case for example? I don't see how stealing some more foreign words to distinguish homonyms would harm anyone. Learning any other language it takes couple months before you're able to read literature. With japanese you be like learning it for two-three years, finally getting your N2 and still not being able to read an average novel because every second word is a new word or new kanji which you won't see anywhere else. And even if you know those kanji there's gonna be some new combination which has nothing to do with the original kanji meanings and you would end up looking up in the dictionary every minute, halting your reading process all the time. And all of it doesn't matter because you'll forget these words/kanji anyway since they aren't even used aside from some novels where authors just like to show off using rare words, just so your ass couldn't read it. Kanji are helpful when you need to cram in lots of information in a tight space like newspapers or old retro video games. But in any other situation kanji are just a roadblock, a hurdle and a third wheel. "zankoku na tenshi to Thesis, madobe kara yagate tobitatsu, hotobashiru atsui Pathos de, omoide wo uragiru nara" - see? You don't need no hiragana, katakana or kanji at all to read japanese. Anyone can read this and even look up words in the dictionary. Spaces between words separate and distinguish particles. And for names, pronouns and foreign words there are uppercase letters to distinguish them. Anyone can read and understand "konnichiwa". Only Japanese people and Japanese learners can read こんにちは. Case closed.
Excellent video Yuta! Basic common sense shows why the Japanese language is written the way it is. It is all about context and the nuances that only kanji can give. I will continue on with my Japanese language self-studies as I move along with my Uni classes.
People that claim Japan should give up Kanji are normally the ones who want to learn Japanese without effort or necessary time or are just too much noob yet and will eventually see they were wrong. Some people are even lazy to take kana, which you can master 90% in a month. Dude, if kids learn this, why wouldn't you? You just need to breath and do things in proper time and it will come naturally and proportionally to your effort applied with strategy.
In most cases you're right. In my case, there are other factors. I was able to read any novel in English from 3, which gave me a massive advantage in education, which trickled down to the rest of my life. I doubt very much that any Japanese people will be able to experience that. I also have a half-Japanese son who is going through the long, painful slog of learning Kanji right now. I have students who absolutely hate Kanji study. Hiragana and Katakana are not difficult to learn. Kanji is an example of widespread inefficiency.
@@TrickWithAKnife you could not read "any" novel from three (years old or even grade three). There are books, poems, and articles that are too advanced to fully understand for even the most educated professors, researchers, linguists, and literature critics. Just like Japanese, you gradually build up your reading comprehension skills with practice
@@masterp443 I could read all of the novels I had access to, which was mostly a decent collection of novels written for adults which my parents had. Obviously I couldn't read every possible written material that existed - that would be an absurd claim. I'm not sure why you would even argue that point. The learning curve is much steeper for Japanese and it may be impossible for me to clearly explain the cognitive windows that are opened by having freedom with written materials at a young age. The ability to absorb functional vocabulary much faster than would have been possible if the books had contained Kanji is only part of it. You gain access to more advanced ideas, ways of thinking and deeper insight into humanity. It's almost criminal to deprive Japanese children of that option.
@@TrickWithAKnife but they're not deprived of anything. They have furigana for really hard kanji and they use spaces for hiragana only books. Japanese are just as literate as English speakers.
@@TrickWithAKnife and don't forget the many homophones in Japanese. Kanji unlocks the "deeper meaning" that you're talking about, and when combined with furigana enable literacy and access to complicated subjects
As a first-year student of Japanology at my university, the thing I find the hardest (at the moment) are the particles. Particularly (ooh, an unintended pun!!) HA/WA, GA, DE, HE/E and NI. Anime doesn't really help in that regard, because 90% of it is in informal speech and then they start leaving them out all together. I've got my work cut out for me!
Tbh there are only like 5 or so youll get the hang of them quickly and if you want to learn how to omit them You have to start to consume large amounts of japanese media or speak with japanese peopke to pick up the habits dos and donts (especially anime speach) Living in japan for example is a good example I know youre a first year but like everything it depends on how much tine youre investing in it to be good
OK, I have to admit that learning how to read and write Japanese isn't going to be a quick process. Japanese people also spend years learning kanji.
But there's good news. Learning basic Japanese grammar isn't that difficult. Actually, it could be easier than learning English grammar which can be full of exception and "weird" rules and non-rules lol
So if you want to learn how to speak Japanese like native Japanese speakers and not like textbooks which can be pretty unnatural, I can help you. Click here and subscribe bit.ly/3ozIanw
I'm currently learning Japanese in uni, and I got hiragana and katakana pretty easily, but now we're getting into kanji and its horrible. I still have trouble with writing some simple sentences even
For me, the "drawbacks" between English and Japanese is there's no consonant in Japanese itself and English phonemes are all "hunggy" and that's why English or Japanese learners found both ways are "feels" difficult, in another word, they(learners) got really BAD teachers~
i would suggest reading the book: remembering the kanji 1 by james W. heisig
in about a months worth of time i have learned about 300 kanji,
@Cantrips have you heard of dutch? i am dutch and for almost all words there is a alternative to the rules, gramatically dutch is overly complicated.
*cough* garbage advice
"Go back to watching anime with subtitles."
That was _unnecessarily_ hurtful.
LMAO
He meant good but that was unconsciously savage 👁👄👁😂
non keigo english
subtitles are in romaji
that was actually a good comparison, kanji with numbers
yeah I never thought about that. 33. two identical numbers but both with different pronouncuation!
Haha yeah, that one got me as well. It literally made me change my mind
there are details of this video that are brilliant
It would be if Arabic numerals averaged over 10 strokes and weren't also required for Japanese fluency (一, 二, 三 isn't enough, you need to know 1, 2, 3 on top of that).
but worse. yuta said it himself. numbers are very simple glyphs. kanji is very complex.
Japanese people thought Chinese characters were too complicated and so tried to invent other ways of writing. As a result, they made the writing system even more complicated.
nice point.
Lol
Meanwhile, Korea was like “eff hanja” and went full 한글.
The fact that they have multiple sounds for the same character, while for us Chinese, different sounds = different characters. It's nice though that we can communicate to each other by writing if needed
I agree
I've heard almost all this already, but this is by far the most comprehensive single source of this information I've heard.
I've also heard most of this already, but it was very nice and helpfull too to have this consice recap of everything. Now I just hope he makes a similar video about the different Kanji readings. :)
yes of course
"We use Kanji, because we can" **drops the mic**
That's honestly the best argument lol
@@tzukishiro uP
“Yes, I do have real friends. Thank you very much.” XD perfect timing. 3:36 lol
Remember, Kyubey is not anyone's friend! 😳
Make a contract with me, and subscribe to my channel!
Sign a contract, and regret it forever. XD
Or... At least until you turn into a Witch...
Yuta hath become Collector Of Souls.
That Japanese Man Yuta Bahaha! Lol, that's a great one
MichaelKingsfordGray My apologies. The actual spelling in Japanese is 「キュゥべえ」which is short for 「インキュベーター」
More importantly, if you had actually bothered to learn anything about the franchise, you'd have realised that the official translation is "Kyubey".
English, Japanese, and history lesson all in one video
11:11 small correction: it would be nineteen forty four, the year ninety fourty four is about 7000 years in the future ;)
Didn't even notice
It still makes sense; even though it won't be accurate for 7000 years...
ʕ•ٹ•ʔ
It’s a novel that is written from 9033 to 9044 about events that happened from 8973 to 8984. That of course is the period of the series of wars instigated by the over-consulate of the Zebulon System when he claimed the defunct Imperial Crown of the greater Eastern Trakasianian Star system. If you remember the future correctly, in this book, you will know the climax comes when the Trakasianian nobles must decide to flee the Trakasianian capital of Moscobatia or remain when the city is put to the torch to keep it and its supplies of pure refined molecular carbon from falling into the hands of Zebulionese ravagers. The book will have several lengthy discourses into the contemplations about the nature of god, suffering, the Christ figure in the role of human history, historiographical discourses into the role of historians in reflecting man’s self back to himself through historical example etc.
@@sethk2384 Dont forget about dio coming back to life again too but this time jotaro wasn't there ro stop him
Yuta likes intentionally adding errors...yes?
English (I'm American), Spanish, German, Hebrew, Ancient Greek. Some French and Russian. These are my languages, and learning was a lot of work, over many years, from a lot of different sources. Your breakdown of the history of Japanese writing, with its benefits, rationale, and cultural linkages, ranks among the most insightful and cogent language instruction I've ever encountered. Excellent work. Thank you.
"He needs to behave"
Wow, dunno why, but broke into laughter on this one 😂
Me too haha I thought he was gonna apologize to it for smacking it... But no, what an alpha
Me too I was like felt that the pets in my house will start making noise all of sudden.
I've learned hiragana and katakana when I was still in high school, through Microsoft Paint on Windows XP. I decided to learn them mostly because I used to read a lot of manga where the onomatopoeia wasn't translated, and I wanted to know what the " じー ", " ドキドキ " and
" ゴゴゴゴゴ " meant XD. Since I'm Brazilian, it was easy for me to learn the phonetics, because our "beabá" (the alphabet and basic syllables) is quite similar to the Japanese one. But kanji is still complicated for me; there are so many similar ones with the same pronunciation, so it's quite difficult to remember even the "most important" ones. But someday I'll get there...
Google Kanji damage and/or Heisig method. It much easier to learn them that way.
TheDimensioner ✊🏼
Are you a JoJo fan by any chance?
@@i5879 I never actually watched or read it, I was just using the meme as a reference XD. But I do plan on watching it to see what that "GOGOGOGO" thing is about!
@@ClaytonCLF Yes, you must.
That Magical Girl Yuta
LOL
Isn't that the #Rule63?
y E S
Hahaha
nice one
11:11
Starts novel in 1993 and finishes in 1944, but it only took him 11 years
*Plays X-files music*
I wonder if that was intentional.
I noticed that too.
0:25 Roasting your audience right off the bat? ... The madlad.
I made the right choice by subscribing.
I felt so attacked lol
Hehe
B A T
@@foxy126pl6 * *sweats in worldwide pandemic* *
HAHAHAHAHA
This video was really interesting, I love to learn about the historic circumstances that created the Japanese writing system of today.
As for the comparison with the upper and lowercase letters in the Latin alphabet, it may play an insignificant part in English, French and other languages, in German however, it actually makes a big difference. There are many rules that dictate if a word is spelled with upper or lowercase. If you use the wrong one, it’s a substantial grammatical error and there are even words that change their meaning depending on the spelling. That being said, from time to time, some people propose the idea of dropping the many uppercase spellings and using lowercase letters almost exclusively like in English. With some changes it could work, the language would lose some of its clarity but the spelling would also become much less complicated. Despite that, I doubt that this is going to happen any time soon, most German speakers, much like the Japanese, don’t want to change such an integral and culturally ingrained part of their language.
the fact that kyubey stares at me the whole video scares me tbh
seriously, great analogies! as a german, speaking english and learning japanese since a couple month this was really helpful! ありがとうございました
7:58
Ah yes, that's the plaque from Trajan's Column in Rome. Latin letters evolved into lowercase, which was the norm for a thousand years, but Europeans adopted uppercase as well as lowercase after rediscovering the exquisite lettering they found on those old Roman monuments, and the plaque on Trajan's Column is probably the very best example because of how neat and perfect the letters are. There's even a font in Microsoft Word named "Trajan" based entirely on that plaque.
I truly never believed that anyone could justify using three seemingly redundant alphabets concurrently as a logical writing system... Yuta, you did it.
It's complicated because you have to learn a lot *LIKE A LOT* of Chinese words to replace the original Japanese words (Hiragana). The main reason why we have to use Kanji it's because to not write a long sentence just for a simple word.
Well, welcome to Japan, everyone!
It also helps with all the homophones in Japanese too:)
ですね 笑
Haha whats wrong in writing long sentances? It's easier that way, if you only used either katakana or hiragana it would have been soo fucking easy. I would have learned japanese so easily bcs in my langauge writing sistem is like that.
Well the real welcome to Japanese is when you find out that は is pronounced “ha” as a character and “wa” as a particle in lesson 1. So as the sentences get longer you spend longer trying to work out if it is ha or wa.
The lack of spaces between the words also make it harder for some of us the read the sentence. It just takes time and practice.
You get used to it
Its not complicated
It's called a different language for a reason. Also japanese has a lot of homophones and seeing a kanji also makes reading faster and big words and logos easier to spot
Wow, your analogy of uppercase and lowercase letters for hiragana and katakana and your analogy of numbers for kanji was brilliant. I always thought that kanji was related to visual representation of words in a way but I wasn't sure. I regained my motivation for learning Japanese after this video :)
Keep up the great work.
Haha, "The author started working on his first novel in 9033" I did not know that Yuta was from the future.
I also noticed that.
When you compared the interchangeably to UPPER/lowercase letters...my brain 🧠 went😳😳👀👀🤗🤗どうもありがとうございます。
It would have taken me forever to get that correlation 😅😂😭
I just started learning so thank you~~
どうも有難うございます。。
I love to study Kanji. Really I do 😁 Although, I've to say that I'm often very confused. It drives me crazy when it comes to the On and Kun readings... In particular, for example for a single Kanji in On-reading there are often more than four different ways to pronounce and read that certain character. And that point is the most difficult one for me. I've no problems learning the single meanings of a character or memorizing the stroke-order and writing them down. But the many possibilities of reading gives me headache 😔😔 I know that Kanjis shouldn't be studied separately (sign by sign) but as whole words or word combinations/patterns, which makes sense because of the different readings and pronunciations. And I also read daily (Japanese subtitles, mangas, text messages of Japanese friends) and write daily as well. But it seems like I'm getting more and more confused. So I wanted to ask you Yuta, if you could have a clue or an idea how to deal with Kun and On-reading a bit better? Maybe there is a trick or kind of a system that I haven't yet discovered, which will help me when it comes to On and Kun-reading. Have a lovely day Yuta and thank you so much for your videos 🤗
2:55, 2:58
The kanji-kana-gana conversion chart is super useful for me as a chinese learning japanese
素晴らしく分かりやすい説明ですね！
日本人だけど、大文字と小文字や数字に例えるところ、なるほど〜と感心しました。
清少納言と紫式部のやりとりウケる😂
It's not really complicated, just a bit messed up. Some reading ambiguities are harder to resolve than others.
E.g.
*風* : the meanings of かぜ and ふう are so different, a lower-intermediate learner of Japanese can read 風 correctly based on the context without a second's delay.
*開く* : あく or ひらく? These two words have the same meaning, but they are not interchangeable in many cases. A learner needs to develop intuition in order to read the kanji correctly most of the time.
*明日* : あした, あす or みょうにち? They have the same meaning, but the nuances are different. The author will probably have to provide furigana.
*依存* : is it いぞん or いそん?
*瞬く* : is it まばたく or またたく? Depends on who you ask and how old you want to sound.
It’s so weird that I know all of hiragana by heart but have difficulty remembering all of katakana. I guess it was the same for Japanese people in the past too.
This was by far the best explanation video for why 日本語 uses all 3 systems of writing. My favorite bit was your UPPERCASE and lowercase analogy, as well as the number one - it eliminated any remaining doubts I had.
0:18 Also, I'm so glad I could understand this:
僕の名前はキユウベエ。
Boku no namae wa kyuubee
My name is Kyuubee.
I can't write the kanji for 'boku' but I visually understood what it meant.
ほんとに ありがとう ございます！
This video actually helped me understand kanji a lot better ありがとうございます！
3:33 "yes i do have real friends"
why do i feel attacked
"Yes, i do have real friends, thak you very much."
You're such a moOOood!
*_The moment when you realized that one Weaboo goes to Japan for the first time and can't see the subtitles everywhere._*
Weaboo: _NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!_
But there are actually english subtitles.
Until you venture out of the cities that is.
lol. Foreign language stuff in cities can be strange sometimes.
I still feel kinda weird running into signs written in Chinese in the middle of large Australian cities.
And it's not just places like 'chinatown'
It's a LOT of inner city locations, train stations and so on...
But... Yeah, sometimes you do have to consider tourists...
Nothing worse than getting your transit system clogged up with foreigners who can't even work out the name of the train station they're trying to get to...
Maybe in cyberpunk future , cybernetics eye will added subtitle
ありがとうございました。This was a fantastic overview of Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. 💮
0:26
shots fired
It was a critical hit!
This was so informative, thank you! I would love to hear more stories about the history of Japan, I love the way you tell them, much more interesting than reading from Wikipedia or something... If you feel inspired to do this again, I'd love to listen, even if it's a longer video ^-^
I love that the scene from a video game that you used was from final fantasy, it's what got me to start learning Japanese myself
僕の日本語は独学で学んだ。勉強嫌いだったが、趣味か興味で学ぶと楽しくなった。結局勉強も好きになった
The examples for kanji for disambiguation at 10:18 are all Chinese readings, but needing kanji to disambiguate also applies for native Japanese words, like おもい (思い vs. 重い) or ひく (引く vs. 弾く vs. 轢く)
Newcomers to Japanese should especially welcome the usage of katakana because it immediately gives the clue that the word is a foreign word, likely an English word that can be sounded out.
Hiragana, katakan, and *T H E H O L Y B I B L E*
d a t g i o wkwkwk
d a t g i o
W
@@ADeeSHUPA WKWKWKKWKWKWK
This is such a detailed and very easy to understand Yuta! Thank you so much!
I always wondered the differences and the lower/uppercase and the Kanji being similar o writing numbers really helped make me understand how Japanese people would interpret it on a normla, common basis.
I really appreciate your content, please keep uploading for a ,long time!
As an English speaker and writer, Japanese ans Chinese writing is simply something to be admired. I just like the shapes and art of it. It started 60 years ago when I was 6 yrs old and my parents bought our first Mah-jong set. Which is kind of ironic as we were living in Aden at the time, and were already enjoying the lovely shapes made by Arab writing!
1:22 his expression. I know most of my Korean, Chinese and Japanese friends really get frustrated when people say that "isn't Japanese, Chinese, and Korean the same?" Thank you, Yuta for this very informative video.
That's a pretty stupid thing to get frustrated at when both Korea and China literally took the Chinese letters and made their language adapt to it...
@@tzukishiro Korean doesn't use chinese characters anymore. It uses a completely different system.
@@luminareflare4914 still there are 60% of Korean language has Chinese loanwords u can't change that
@@luminareflare4914 in political situation or literature situation, Chinese character is still used
Japanese language learner: *exists*
Chinese language: *it's free real estate*
I get it
I got that reference
I dont
It is easier just like native English speaker trying to learn Spanish, Italian, French, etc. (Maybe the examples aren’t that accurate but you get the idea) But because of different evolutions took place in all of these languages, they still require tons of effort to learn and master
So it’s not FREE real estate, more like “owner needs some quick cash so 25% off” real estate
Thank you for explaining all of this to me as I have just started my journey into learning Japanese and was very confused why there are multiple scripts.
Thank you for this explanation. I always wondered why people would say Kanji shouldn't be used... It's part of the learning process and it makes you discover the nits and crannies of the language. You are right about the visual representation, even with the alphabet used to make words in English. When you're able to just glance at a word, you already done the visual reading. It is the same process.
"That b**** can't even write kanji properly" LMAO! I had started learning the writing system, when I was about 12. I wanted to be able to read some of the games I wanted, that were not coming to the States. I also wanted to make games, and thought I'd have to move to Japan (I didn't like western games). Then I just thought the writing was really beautiful, especially as an artist- and it became fun being able to read. Weeee Final Fantasy, giving the rat tail to Bahamut, was always my favorite part lol.
More Japanese complications:
We were visiting 和気鵜飼谷温泉 with some Japanese friends a few weeks ago, and outside the entrance was a large map of what I believed to be 東和気町, and I was shocked to read the heading as "まっぷ". So I asked my friends why the sign is borrowing the English word for map instead of using 地図, and my one friend turned the question back to me and asked, "Better yet, why doesn't it read "マップ"?
lol. Can't read the kanji, but I know the rest of what you're saying...
Fragmentary knowledge of a language can be... Interesting...
@@KuraIthys Because without kanji japanese language would be normal language like others. Kanji just obscure real problem of japanese language. Alphabet that uses several characters instead of single letters in too stiff. They have so many words that use just 1-2 of them over and over again because there is just not enough combination to create new words.
When something doesn't make sense it makes it hard for me to learn. Some weird mental roadblock I have. And the way you explain everything makes so much sense.
very interesting. you are so good at explaining things.
Once you know Kanji, you never want to go back.
Most of my students complain about Kanji at first, but they always have to admit I was right when I told them they'd be grateful for having them.
That's just how it goes lol
Once you learn some, you realize it wasn't so difficult
pretty much, it makes reading things a lot faster imo. Writing is always the hardest part with kanji/hanzi.
Kyubey says you don't need Yuta's course if you make a "one-time" deal with him😉
Very cool history lesson, thank you!
I'm learning Japanese and I'm STRUGGLING with the katakana and kanji and failed to understand the purpose compared to other languages, but you absolutely blew my mind with the capital/lower-case and numbers examples from English!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Japanese is unnecessarily complicated"
Lol Chinese is unnecessarily complicated
I think the reason the person who said "Japanese is unnecessarily complicated" and not Chinese, is because the person probably thought why use kanji if Japanese already have hiragana. Chinese doesn't have hiragana nor katakana
Chinese is actually less difficult to read, but a lot harder to pronounce in my opinion
@@euomu At least Chinese has just one writing system, right ^^'? I totally get the pronounciation trouble, though. Learning those (and not getting them all mixed up) definitely is quite a hassle. Especially for someone who - like me - has grown up with whole sentences having melodies (like "pulling" a sentence up in the end to make it a question) rather than every syllable having one of their own. I definitely know that 1st and 2nd tone tend to sound pretty similar pronounced by a European like me because we tend to pronounce things like a question when being uncertain about them
at least chinese is more consistent because their language is more related to the writing system. They only use hanzi and have one reading for one letter in general
@@euomu . I'm a fluent Mandarin speaker, but I CAN NOT read Chinese for the life of me. I've taken Chinese school but I just can't remember all the words. I personally find reading/writing wayyyyy harder.
As a beginner who did 'remembering the kanji' right from the beginning, whenever I read a word I know in hiragana only, I get confused even though I would've known the reading of the kanji. Now I'm a bit further along in my journey and getting used to it, using kanji makes things a lot more logical.
This really speaks to the power of habit: Part of the reason people feel kanji make things easier is that they get used to it. Most competent readers learn to spot for kanji, not hiragana sequences. If all writing was in spaced hiragana, people would start to spot for familiar sequences the same way English readers spot for word forms.
Brilliant explanation about why all three scripts are used, and the analogy to English writing makes it so easy to understand. Plus I learned something because I'd never thought of written English in that way!
とても面白いです！Even some of my other Japanese friends didn't know this. Subbed!
That Japanese Man Yuta,
Having that Kyube around shows that you really know your audience: bunch of weebs
@Shaun G I want to take japanese classes do I need to bring earplugs? :L
Shaun G get over urself mate lmao
@Shaun G Wish there was japanese classes where I live lol
shut up and pray to the goddess of hope
True, true. I have lived in Japan for over 16 years and speak read and write it but I have no freaking idea who Kyube is.
0:17
僕の名前はキュウベえ
Boku no namae wa kyuube
"My name is kyubey"
Don't know why you made the last "e" in hiragana but it looks better that way I guess.
That's in fact the Canon way to write it, I'm curious too about why. Hope Yuta replies!
@@NestorMandela It's just weird to me because I don't normally see a mix of katakana and hiragana in the same word/name. Maybe it's just one of those "ateji" rule breaking things that the japanese language sometimes have.
@@sadgoy. it's not related to ateji, it's just a stylistic choice. Think of how in English, some music artists and rappers use weird symbols instead of letters in their name (Ke$ha, Tekashi 6ix9ine, P!nk, etc.) It looks cooler - that's the only reason
@@masterp443 that's my guess too, taken into account its the name of a fictional being from an anime.
@@masterp443 You're right. That does make more sense. I mean I know ateji has more to do with unofficial readings being used for kanji compounds but....
I do have to agree that
"キュウベえ" looks better than "キュウベエ"
This was so interesting and well put together.. but I must say.. “he needs to behave” was the highlight 🤣
The best video about the topic I've seen so far!
And that comparison of English lower/upper cases and Japanese hiragana/katakana stroke me the most. Same as seeing Kanji as written digits in English.
I was learning Japanese and he uploaded this video 😂
k
Yuta is the most educational mahou shoujo, right QB?
I googled "mahou shoujo" expecting to find a respectable way to call someone professional or a great person or something similar to that, and I chuckled when I realized it was something COMPLETELY different than I was expecting Hahaha
No kanji is the reason why Korean is far more easier to learn than Japanese, been learning Japanese for years but struggle to remember kanji so I can't read properly, I've only been learning Korean for 2 months and I can read just about anything with relative ease.
With the numbers funnily enough before he even brought the second version of the paragraph on screen I was already converting them in my head to the basic number version to make it easier
11:17 Who cares about his first novel!? The author invented a time machine!!!
Thanks for the vid! BTW: "literate" is pronounced "LI-te-rit", similar to how "immaculate" and other similar adjectives (or nouns) are pronounced. In some cases you have verbs that are spelled the same but pronounced like you did, "leit". You probably knew that.
This was an excellent explanation. Thank you so much! However, I'll go on writing like a child for at least another year before trying to broaden my Kanji
I've just started trying to teach myself Japanese (spoken and written), and I found this video astounding helpful in understanding the differences and history of the different writing systems. Thanks for posting!
Some thoughts I had while I was going through this video:
1. The point about kanji being faster to read is debatable. People do not read English letter by letter. I'm referring to this famous text:
I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins can raed tihs too.
It's possible that if you write Japanese in pure kana, people will eventually be able to read it just as fast as with kanji.
2. There are many homonyms, but wouldn't the reader be able to figure it out from context? The spoken language does not need Kanji, so wouldn't the written language be fine? This was already demonstrated by older games. Atleast for simple, everyday text.
3. IMO Shinjitai and Simplified Chinese are not comparable. In Simplified Chinese, the simplified radical is used everywhere, while in Japanese, the simplified radical is used only in specific Kanji. This is additional inconsistency.
4. Did Japan ever consider doing something about the complication that is On and Kun readings? Korea had the right idea IMO.
5. One of the explanation I've seen as to why Kanji is required are the sheer number of homonyms. Korean and Vietnamese comparitively doesn't have many homonyms, so they were able to drop Chinese in their writing.
6. My theory as to why Japanese has so many homonyms is that Japanese simply doesn't have enough sounds. Korean has more consonants and vowels while Vietnamese has tones. Maybe the extra i, e, o in Old Japanese would have reduced the number of homonyms.
7. Is Katakana really required? Wouldn't it be easier to write foreign words in Hiragana itself and add some marking like the quotation marks in English?
1. No, it's not debatable at all. Do you know japanese? reading a text with kanji is 100x faster and no amount of practice in hiragana will let you get to that. That english example while obviously shows we don't actually need words properly written, doesn't really compare to what it's like to read with kanji.
And even then we still kinda do read letter by letter.
2. 100% agreed, while it's true that kanji makes reading easier, it's by no means necessary to understand japanese, since people understand each other when speaking perfectly.
3. idk, irrelevant
4. It's not really complicated. Jukugo = on; kanji by itself or okurigana = kun, except for some exceptions.
5. What's the point to this?
6. I think 100%, the lack of sounds is bound to make homophones
7. No, it's not. But neither is uppercase letters, bold letters, underlined letters, italic letters, etc.
It adds emphasis and it's a good distinction between japanese and loan words. Not necessary, but makes the language better
6:46 Yuta you seem to have switched the 8 and the 9 😅 I'm assuming from the looks of the letter that it must be from 1893. So you must have said it wrong. The video is very interesting tho
You are very clear Yuta. Great teacher
Hi Yuta, i saw your video about Can Japaneses understan Chinese? Wanna make videos about Japanese people's understanding on Korean or Okinawan? Or are you gonna make videos about minority languages in Japan such as Ryukyuan or Ainu? I heard Ryukyuans & Ainus wanna revive their language
The subjects in Japan I am most interested in are Ainu and Ryukyu. I hope more people bring them into the light!!
@@Kurufinwe_Fayanaro i heard nowadays so many Ryukyuans tried to revive their languages
Can Japanese understand Chinese? No, not quite. Yuta made a video asking random strangers to read and guess the meaning of some Chinese phrases and they most failed because even though both languages share kanji, not only do Chinese and Japanese read them differently, but the meanings between certain kanji combinations have changed over the centuries of language evolution between the two languages. Spoken Chinese does not sound like Japanese at all when you compare entire phrases and sentences, but some Chinese nouns have a faint resemblance to Japanese nouns of Chinese origin and Japanese nouns that have been repurposed into Chinese sound faintly similar.
I know this video isn't about this, but due to typing all the time I mess up even trying to write basic katakana by hand like ソンツシ... it's so embarrassing... >_
Well I can read hiragana and katakana after a month learning, so don’t give up mate it’s quit easy just be motivated
Agree
You can memorise hiragana and katakana in one afternoon. Kanji is a completely different thing
I learned hiragana and katakana in three hours about six years ago.
That was a really good explanation, comparing English and Japanese with Japanese's writing systems, especially kanji. It helped me understand the concept of kanji a bit more now, thank you!
I love how much information you always give us in your videos!! I will always be a faithful follower bc you go in-depth with your topics and bring concrete resources to your vids. thank you so much for your hard work!!
-a fan from Florida
At first, many years ago, I thought it was weird there were 3 writings in Japanese, but now I've learned the language more and understand more how it works it kinda makes sense and actually makes it easier to read. Especially since there are no spaces in Japanese, if it was all 1 writing, it would've been MUCH harder to identify where a word ends and the next begins or if a character is a particle or part of a word. The part I like most is that often a kanji is used for the meaning and then the hiragana that follows indicates the conjugation, or whether it's a noun or a verb.
Or you know... you could just use spaces.
@@Rogerfsps Spaces is a western thing. If you compare both writing styles, they each have their pros and cons. Why do we have to write or say so many words just to explain what we mean? I mean this comment could've been written in just a few words in Japanese, yet here I am writing how many lines to say what I need to say....
You can sometimes literally say an entire English sentence in 1 or 2 words.
"I'm gonna take Claire to the football match tomorrow" in Japanese is "Tomorrow claire footballmatch bring".
"Do you want to eat?" is "eat?". "Do you speak Japanese" is "Japanese speak?"
And so on.
Also, the particles like WA, GA, NI, WO, etc basically function as spaces. You get used to it, just like you're used to spaces.
@@Censtudios The many words thing is a language structure thing, not a writing system thing. English is a much more analytical language than Japanese - it doesn't inflect words much, and makes heavy use of helper words instead. Japanese is more synthetic, meaning that it inflects words to alter their meaning. Korean for example has basically identical structure to Japanese but uses a space-separated, phonetic writing system. More analytical languages usually have stricter sentence structure, and you can't omit as many words from analytical sentences without losing meaning.
Your eat example sounds like you're comparing reasonably formal English to colloquial Japanese - in everyday speech, you'd likely just hear "wanna (go) eat?"
Did you just make a deal with that alien creature on your desk?
Oh! I get it now. Thank you Yuta. And thank you for your free Japanese lessons.
This video was brilliant and informative!! Thank you, Yuta!!!
Make a video on japan reacting to Western Anime memes.
0:25 well luckily you dont need Kanji to understand anime without subs
I probably have learnt more in this one video than in ALL of the videos from you I've watched COMBINED (including the way too many p o r n related ones 😒) so Thank you so much for that Yuta - very informative! 😊
11:30 wow, thanks, that explains so much!
After this I understand the writing system so much better, thank you so much!!
I’m wondering how Korean escaped all this mess
They had much the same mess for a long time. Before the invention of hangeul in the 1400s, they used various kinds of indigenous phonetic script mixed with hanja, very much like the Japanese did and do. They just had a push to use hangeul and discontinued hanja education in the 1900s and it succeeded. It's helped by nationalistic sentiment of being freed from Japanese occupation and hangeul being a genuinely amazing native innovation.
Korean has more sounds than Japanese. There are many homophones in Korean, but because Korean has more sounds and more sound combinations it has less homophones than Japanese.
If Koreans find a Sino-Korean word may be ambiguous they will write the kanji right next to the word in question to disambiguate its meaning.
*readjusts Kyubey*
"Remember, being Kanji is suffering."
before clicking i knew Yuta would mention his Japanese lessons in the video. Never change, Yuta! This was a great video! Arigato, Yuta-san!
I swore to love and study obediently Kanji the day I saw a pretty long daily conversation written with only hiragana : you can't read it, it is too difficult to process without the Kanji.
Im having a hard time with kanji :(
wanikani.com
I'm not affiliated with them, I just think it's the best way to learn kanji lol
I've been on it for 2 months and I already know 200+ kanji and like 600+ words with kanji
Long story short japanese created this mess for themselves and for japanese learners simply because they stole someone else's writing system and being overly conservative nation who hates most new things couldn't let it go or replace it with something better.
Korean and Vietnamese languages both used the same kanji in the past and they both successfully ditched them altogether using only alphabet nowadays.
If you write text just in hiragana and katakana it can be a pain to read but lots of problems would be solved if japanese language started using spaces between words to separate all the gibberish. Japanese has tons of homonyms, like for example for "こうとう" the dictionary gives me like twenty different unrelated words, which makes ditching kanji not that easy. It's to the point that japanese don't understand each other which こうとう was actually meant so they have to confirm by saying "you mean the kou kanji from this word or form this word and tou from this word?". Why not use more understandable words instead? Like ハイクラス instead of 高等、赤い光 instead of 紅灯 and so on? Why even have tons of different words meaning the same to begin with? Japanese have stolen tons of foreign words from different languages and use them every day anyway and even created some on their own (wasei eigo) like ベビーかー (baby car) which means "stroller". Why wasn't it 幼子自動車 or some other shit in Thai case for example? I don't see how stealing some more foreign words to distinguish homonyms would harm anyone.
Learning any other language it takes couple months before you're able to read literature. With japanese you be like learning it for two-three years, finally getting your N2 and still not being able to read an average novel because every second word is a new word or new kanji which you won't see anywhere else. And even if you know those kanji there's gonna be some new combination which has nothing to do with the original kanji meanings and you would end up looking up in the dictionary every minute, halting your reading process all the time. And all of it doesn't matter because you'll forget these words/kanji anyway since they aren't even used aside from some novels where authors just like to show off using rare words, just so your ass couldn't read it. Kanji are helpful when you need to cram in lots of information in a tight space like newspapers or old retro video games. But in any other situation kanji are just a roadblock, a hurdle and a third wheel.
"zankoku na tenshi to Thesis, madobe kara yagate tobitatsu, hotobashiru atsui Pathos de, omoide wo uragiru nara" - see? You don't need no hiragana, katakana or kanji at all to read japanese. Anyone can read this and even look up words in the dictionary. Spaces between words separate and distinguish particles. And for names, pronouns and foreign words there are uppercase letters to distinguish them. Anyone can read and understand "konnichiwa". Only Japanese people and Japanese learners can read こんにちは. Case closed.
This was really informative to me, thanks Yuta 🙂
Excellent video Yuta! Basic common sense shows why the Japanese language is written the way it is. It is all about context and the nuances that only kanji can give.
I will continue on with my Japanese language self-studies as I move along with my Uni classes.
"Why writing Japanese is so complicated"
Me: NANI?!? See? It's not that hard
すごい
Baka kimi have no life.....
何 kanji for nani なに
People that claim Japan should give up Kanji are normally the ones who want to learn Japanese without effort or necessary time or are just too much noob yet and will eventually see they were wrong.
Some people are even lazy to take kana, which you can master 90% in a month. Dude, if kids learn this, why wouldn't you?
You just need to breath and do things in proper time and it will come naturally and proportionally to your effort applied with strategy.
In most cases you're right. In my case, there are other factors. I was able to read any novel in English from 3, which gave me a massive advantage in education, which trickled down to the rest of my life. I doubt very much that any Japanese people will be able to experience that.
I also have a half-Japanese son who is going through the long, painful slog of learning Kanji right now.
I have students who absolutely hate Kanji study.
Hiragana and Katakana are not difficult to learn. Kanji is an example of widespread inefficiency.
@@TrickWithAKnife you could not read "any" novel from three (years old or even grade three). There are books, poems, and articles that are too advanced to fully understand for even the most educated professors, researchers, linguists, and literature critics. Just like Japanese, you gradually build up your reading comprehension skills with practice
@@masterp443 I could read all of the novels I had access to, which was mostly a decent collection of novels written for adults which my parents had.
Obviously I couldn't read every possible written material that existed - that would be an absurd claim. I'm not sure why you would even argue that point.
The learning curve is much steeper for Japanese and it may be impossible for me to clearly explain the cognitive windows that are opened by having freedom with written materials at a young age. The ability to absorb functional vocabulary much faster than would have been possible if the books had contained Kanji is only part of it. You gain access to more advanced ideas, ways of thinking and deeper insight into humanity.
It's almost criminal to deprive Japanese children of that option.
@@TrickWithAKnife but they're not deprived of anything. They have furigana for really hard kanji and they use spaces for hiragana only books. Japanese are just as literate as English speakers.
@@TrickWithAKnife and don't forget the many homophones in Japanese. Kanji unlocks the "deeper meaning" that you're talking about, and when combined with furigana enable literacy and access to complicated subjects
As a first-year student of Japanology at my university, the thing I find the hardest (at the moment) are the particles. Particularly (ooh, an unintended pun!!) HA/WA, GA, DE, HE/E and NI. Anime doesn't really help in that regard, because 90% of it is in informal speech and then they start leaving them out all together. I've got my work cut out for me!
Tbh there are only like 5 or so
youll get the hang of them quickly and if you want to learn how to omit them
You have to start to consume large amounts of japanese media or speak with japanese peopke to pick up the habits dos and donts (especially anime speach)
Living in japan for example is a good example
I know youre a first year but like everything it depends on how much tine youre investing in it to be good
My favorite sentences are these ending with を because I was so confused like YO HOW CAN YOU OMIT THE END THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE SENTENCE
Thank you very much for this video ! You explained everything very well, with humour and good examples, it was so pleasant to watch!