This actually did happen in the early days of video games. Due to software limitations at the time, they couldn't use kanji. As a result, they implemented spacing to tell the words apart.
@@fivetimesyoWhat a stupid sarcastic comment to make. Plenty of other languages that aren't influenced by latin or Germanic languages don't use spaces. Spaces are just part of our languages, it's not a universal concept for everyone.
@@fivetimesyo You basically just told me that either you never tried studying another language, or you were very bad at it to the point that you now want everything to ressemble your native language. You're pathetic buddy
As a french person learning japanese, I have very quickly gotten to a point where it's much easier for me to read sentences that include kanjis than sentences entirely in hiragana/katakana. Not only does it help a lot to notice where words begin and where they end, but it's also better to identify particles and flexional endings, meanwhile hiraganas only are a jumbled mess. Also kanjis are beautiful, I think it would be a shame to remove them from japanese.
@@mokisan Nahh french is hard it's not you... There are many many rules to learn before the grammar and pronounciation make sense, and if your native language is not a romance language there's a big gap to be crossed. Keep it up ! Watch content you like in french with subtitles ! Try to talk with natives if at all possible ! Learning a language is hard, but it is rewarding.
You're not alone. When you start seeing words as words instead of individual characters, kanji is a lot easier to parse individual words. Learning it is balls, though. They somewhat mitigate the problem when they introduce spaces into the sentence structure though. I know I played a lot of old Japanese gameboy games and that was how they avoided the confusion of not having kanji. 「ははは はなが すき」 is at least a little easier to read.
Good point, but there is an even better one: Japanese has way too many words that only differ in accent, so it would be much more difficult to know which of what words you are actually reading from the kana alone. They are all super common words and in many contexts, they can be used interchangeably, so you would always have to guess. In spoken Japanese, you can tell from the context and accent, but in written form, it would be a massive pain. The addition of spaces would lessen the problem shown in this video, but you would have to add some hideous accents marks to the text to deal with the homophones.
Yeah, but the accent can be completely different based on region making context a much more useful method of differentiation. Accent marks aren’t needed, and context alone is enough to understand
@@harrisonmccarn9958, Regional accent differences don't really matter that much, and the context is usually enough, but doesn't have to be in written form, where you have zero visual clues, and it can be a random single-word quote in the middle of a paragraph, where there isn't sufficient context.
Every time i'm discouraged from studying kanji, thinking it pointless, I'm reminded of this video and suddenly I have the motivation again. Very succinct way to get the point across, lol 😅
kanji is the reason most people give up learning nihongo people not learning nihongo means less migration to Japan, an old country that desperately needs good/skilled migrants therefore, kanji is a detriment to the whole country, its economy and way of life it should be kept through shodo, as a form of art, but removed from day to day, like hangul has done in Korea
I feel discouraged due to kanji, and now I feel further discouraged, seeing that the spoken can apparently be such a mess too sometimes. Like, how do you make sense of 4x ha back to back as actual words?
It is fun and convenient to say and write sentences which contain many words in English for the sake of saying things that a foreigner may not understand because of the number of words.
As a Japanese, it is not too difficult to read sentences from which kanji characters have been removed. The system of writing Japanese using hiragana, katakana and spaces is actually the method used in books for kids, or in old video games. The removal of kanji from the Japanese language would actually have an impact on learners of Japanese, rather than on the Japanese adults. For example, if you did not know what the word '柿（kaki）' meant, you could look up the kanji and its reading in a dictionary and understand the kanji. However, if it is written as "かき（kaki）", you will be confused as the dictionary's "かき" field will provide many meanings such as "persimmon", "oyster", "summer", "fence" and so on. This is exactly what those who are now learning Japanese using the Romaji are struggling with. PS: I am not in favour of removing kanji from the Japanese language.
A lot of learners drag on kanji but it's honestly kind of nice that once you've learned the meanings of a lot of kanji, you can quite often guess the meanings of words you've never seen before just from their kanji. You can do this in other writing systems too, of course, but learning latin roots isn't nearly as helpful as learning the meanings of kanji.
I’ve studied Japanese for a little over a decade. This is why kanji is important :) When people first start learning, they go right to romanji which isn’t good. 漢字を勉強しなかったら､たくさんの言葉の違いが分からなくて困ってしまう｡ ローマ字で書いてばかりいると､日本語を読むのは難しくなる。
@@heartroll8719 Learning with romanji is fine, as many are more interesting in speaking/hearing anyway. But learning kanji to the point where it's not just a bunch of random lines, but seeing the repeating patterns, makes for reading learning so much easier. Personally, my beginner class teaching gave bonus points for those that did the tests in hiragana and katakana(writing), so you can bet a lot of the class learned those at least :D
I know your channel is about Japanese Calligraphy(as shown in your name) but your handwriting is absolutely beautiful. Actual art with such a simple pen
Also, I find it bizarre how easy it is to follow spoken Japanese, I always struggled trying to figure out words separately in other languages. But, in Japanese, there's so much emphasis on certain sounds, it's hard not to individualize each word from each other after learning the particles. I hope I'm making sense here
Japanese is a syllable language, which means syllables are given priority by speakers and listeners, which means they have to be clear. Give an audio a listen in Japanese- you might notice that you're not listening "word-by-word". Many other languages on the other hand are word languages, where word boundaries are way more important than syllables (generally languages with more complex syllables, like English or German), where blending in speech is a lot more common because listeners don't have to entirely get the sound, the entire word is paid attention to, they can recognize it without the need for clearness. @silentsarey
@@evrenisprettyuniversal wrong. the answer is that Japanese has a two-tone system, making it easier to tell apart suprasegments, which reflect sentence units.
The pitch accent patterns do a ton of heavy lifting to signal word boundaries, which spaces between the kana can help with. But these pitch accent patterns also disambiguate what would otherwise be homophones (even if that disambiguation only appears on the following particle), and that critical part of speech is missing from kana, but is signalled with kanji.
Laughter in Japanese is a different onomatopoeia altogether, which makes the joke even funnier. I didn’t get the joke at first until I reached that point 😂😂😂
Kanji makes Japanese so much easier! You can understand words you can't read, and even understand a sentence before you can finish reading it! Pro tip: Don't learn kanji independently. As soon as you can read both kana, start learning words with their kanji. You will intuitively start to understand the meaning of the kanji and learn its different pronunciations because you're learning words that use them. Usage and repetition are the biggest keys to learning
@@logandunlap9156 Fine. Spend months learning 1000+ kanji, their readings (no matter how uncommon), and their meanings. Orrrrr, you could just learn words with their kanji. Knowing kanji independently is pretty useless, so focusing on words that use them gains you understanding as well as vocabulary, and with vocabulary and a tiny bit of grammar you can say so much. I'd rather be using and speaking Japanese than rogue memorizing kanji despite Japanese not having any single kanji words
I only started learning Japanese about 1.5 months ago but I'm at a point where I'm starting to use some simple kanji and I honeslty prefer it because of the readability. I know if you don't know any kanji, a sentence with kanji seems scary and frustrating, but once you know what they mean, it's much easier to read a sentence with them than without them. Only issue with kanji sometimes is that if I see one, I don't have the Japanese word in my head, but only the meaning of the kanji. Like I understand the sentence, but if I should read it out loud, I would have to think hard about how it's actually read.
Well there are better ways to implement using just hiragana but yeah Kanji isnt going anywhere. The best adjustment would be the addition of spaces between words. There are Japanese kids books written entirely in hiragana so it does work.
I’m Japanese high school student, learning English. I think both -of- Japanese and English are so brilliant *plural of* language but they are so far *from* each other -s- . They have some advantages and disadvantages so I want to talk about it. (I don’t intend to decide which language is better, so please don’t misunderstand it.) In English, Alphabet is *an* awesome investment _b_ecause it ha *s* different pronunciations in same *letter* when it *is combined* with other *letters to form words* . So the number of Alphabet is only 26. English learner *s* don’t need to remember *an* enormous *number or about of* characters as *in* Japanese Kanji. I think that it’s a big advantage. Thanks to it, I love English and *am* able to enjoy Speaking in English *in* my English class in school. In Japanese, person who *is* learning Japanese must remember *mass* about of characters in Japanese such as Hiragana, Katakana, kanji. But thanks to them, Japanese documents can exhibit entire atmosphere of the document. For example, Japanese has many kind *s* of first person pronoun *s* . Such as ''ぼく、わたし、おれ、わし、わがはい '' etc. If you see them _while_ leading something, you might *find out* something about *writer* such as his age, gender, character, even era. I think this is a big advantage. Each language has so *many* different properties but both of them are wonderful. So I want to learn more about English to -find out- *discover more good things about English* good point. Thank you for reading my long comment. Have a nice day!! (If my English is wrong, please tell me where and how is wrong in this comment.
Your English is very good but there are some errors. My comment is long but I would like to point a few things if you don't mind. Now then, if I may make a few polite corrections: 1) In the second sentence, "I think both (here in this sentence, if it was a sentence with the word 'them' or 'us' then the use of 'of' is needed else if it is a sentence like this or similar to this in structure then there is no need for 'of') Japanese and English are so brilliant languages (plural of language, since there' two languages being mentioned here) but they are so far from each other. ('from' is needed with far since it's a preposition, with each you never use a plural word because each is supposed to refer to each one individually) 2) In the second paragraph first sentence you would like to add 'an' before awesome, making it 'In English, alphabet is an awesome investment (you can combine the second sentence with the first one because you used the conjunction 'because', much like I did just now.) because it has ('has' because there is only one thing being referred to, so you need a singular verb) has different pronunciations (plural because as you said there are a lot of different pronunciations) of the same letter (we use letter here as that's the word for individual alphabets along with the sound or pronunciation they make) when it is combined (the usage of a verb such as 'combined' simply makes the sentence easier to understand and write) with other letters to form words. (a letter combines with other letters to form words hence the change) 3) In the sentence after it should be more like, "English learners (as you are referring to not just a single person) don’t need to remember an (this case is similar to the awesome investment one) enormous number or amount of characters as in (I think there should be a preposition here) Japanese Kanji. I think that's (what you wrote is indeed correct but you could just simplify it further) a big advantage. Thanks to it, I love English and am ('am' is a form of 'be' in this situation since you're referring to yourself, 'be' changes into 'am', when referring to someone else 'be' changes into 'is' or 'are' depending on the number) able to enjoy speaking in English in (here 'on' is incorrect because 'on' is used when you're touching something, this could just be a typing mistake on your end) my English class in school. 4) In Japanese, person who is ('is' here is necessary) learning Japanese must remember tremendous ('amounts of' or 'about the' should be here depending on what you want to convey instead of 'about of' I'm not sure what you were trying to say here) characters in Japanese such as Hiragana, Katakana, kanji. But thanks to them, Japanese documents can exhibit entire atmosphere of the document. For example, Japanese has many kinds (plural since you used 'many' referring to more than one) of first person pronouns (plural again). Such as ''ぼく、わたし、おれ、わし、わがはい '' etc. If you see them while ('while' instead of 'when' because reading is in continuous tense) reading something, you might find out ('feel' is abstract, it doesn't really fit here. 'Find out' is discover, it sounds more concrete which I think goes better with this sentence) something about writer (since you said document and reading then it's something that been written by a writer) such as his age, gender, character, even era. I think this is a big advantage. 5) Each language has ('so many' or 'such' should be here instead of just 'so' alone) different properties but both of them are ('must' doesn't fit here and 'must be' makes your statement more ambiguous whereas 'are' is more declarative) wonderful. So, I want to learn more about English to find out its (I'm not sure what you tried to say here but I think you meant that you want to discover more good things about English) good points. If you read this, then thank you very much. Hope I was of help.
@@stooglesgoogles7246 You're wrong while being so confident, It should be "If my English is wrong, please tell me where and how is it wrong in this comment". Instead of "it is", it should it "is it".
Really interesting comment!! Thanks for sharing your thoughts :) I'm a native English speaker learning Japanese and I like the way both languages write too I really like that in Japanese you write out the meaning of words rather than their sounds with kanji What I like about English writing is that you can see the history of the words in their spelling. For example the word doubt has a silent b. It's related to the word double. It's like a time capsule in the very writing if the word that says that peoole used to describe doubt by saying they had two (or double) thoughts about something :)
Fun fact: The Tale of Genji was written almost entirely in hiragana in the 11th century and it is considered one of the great classics of Japanese literature. At that time, during the Heian period, Hiragana was considered women's writing or informal writing so even when male authors wanted to write female stories or quick informal messages, they would often use hiragana exclusively. It was only much later in history that Hiragana combined with Kanji and Katakana to form the modern Japanese writing system. It is a bit like how the Ancient Romans would use entirely uppercase characters for their official documents but the roman clergy and merchants would use a cursive form of those characters which later became the lowercase letters used in the English alphabet.. and nowadays we add emotes to emphasize meaning, so now we use all 3 sets of characters plus indo-arabic numerals and it feels natural. but if I choose to use all lower case OR ALL UPPER CASE LETTERS, IT'S STILL QUITE READABLE EVEN IF IT IS OFFENSIVE TO THE EYES. and in theory I could sprinkle it with emotes to show that I am 🧐but it would be completely 🤮,🤧and I'd probably get a lot of 👎 and😠 from🙎👱👳.
The Tale of Genji is not written entirely in hiragana. It is a Kanji-Kana mixed text with Kanji characters used in places. It is difficult for modern Japanese to read, but the ancient writing method was to scrap the hiragana and join the characters word by word. Therefore, even sentences in hiragana were easy to read.
It is interesting to see comments that explain the characteristics of Japanese and the degree of difficulty for foreigners to learn Japanese. As a Japanese, I am happy to know that not a few people are interested in Japanese. Please forgive me if my English is wrong.
_As a Japanese, I am happy to know that_ [not a few] _people are interested in Japanese._ "not a few" should be replaced with "many". Saying "not a few" is understandable in English, though it's improper connotation in accordance to the context of the sentence. _[Connotation: an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.]_ _[Context: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.]_ _As a Japanese, I am happy to know that_ many _people are interested in Japanese._ Your English is fine and can always improve, but as far as I can tell you're somewhere between grade 9-12 or a little higher based on 1 sentence and good enough to understand. Most (United States) American students in grade 9-12 don't even speak or write English properly.
When I started learning Japanese we only used hiragana, and I was pretty happy when we started using kanji, it is faster and a lot easier to read if you know the words. I feel like Japanese relies a ton on context as it has many homophones
Yeah. Japanese is a beautiful and elegant language, as long as you only use it to say things people already are expecting you to say. Deviation from expectation creates confusion, and the language is not meant to deal with adding in new concepts, so you end up with just as much loanwords in use as any other.
I think the main problem with the first one is that they write 'wa' as 'ha'. for example, in romanji, it is "haha wa hana ga suki" which looks completely fine. I am still a novice so I mistakes wa as ha many times.
the main reason i think the romaji is more readable is just the spaces separating the words. "haha ha hana ga suki" isn't much less readable, nor is 「はは は はな が すき」(though as a personal thing, it feels kind of wrong to put a space before particles. 「ははは はなが すき」feels more natural to me but I don't think it's convention to write Japanese that way when using spaces)
@@dalmationblack Actually you're correct. I have a few Japanese children's books and textbooks that use either exclusively kana or kana and first grade kanji, and they add spaces only after the particles. Oh yeah, and they treat です like a particle, not a separate verb. On the other hand, they do separate the する in suru-verbs. Interestingly, a proper noun like 「いなばのくに」 "The Land of Inaba", seems to be treated as a single noun. Here's an example from "The White Hare of Inaba" (いなばの白うさぎ): 「ずっと、ずっと むかし。オオクニヌシという かみさまが、いなばのくにを たび していました。せなかには おもそうな にもつを かついでいます。おかあさんの ちがう おにいさんたちが、じぶんたちの にもつを ぜんぶ オオクニヌシに もたせたのでした。でも やさしい オオクニヌシは、もんく ひとつ いいません。」 And with the Kanji included: 「ずっと、ずっと昔。大国主という神様が、因幡の国を旅していました。背中には重そうな荷物を担いでいます。お母さんの違うお兄さんたちが、自分たちの荷物を全部大国主に持たせたのでした。でも優しい大国主は、文句一つ言いません。」
I'm not learning Japanese and this seriously melted my brain, lmaooo..... but that was so beautiful and mesmerising and amazing to watch. Also, very nice penmanship!
My mother likes flowers haha wa hana ga suki はは(は) はな が すき 母 (は) 花 が 好き Shoulder massage kata tataki かた たたき 肩 叩き It may be easier to understand if you look at how to read it
im studying japanese and to me kanji actually made it easier to learn the vocabulary since once you know the meaning of characters, you can guess words containing those characters. 学 means study 生 means living being 学生 means student
Reminds me of the Mandarin poem that is all just different intonations of "ma" - reading it with characters is easy, and it honestly doesn't seem odd at all until you try to read it aloud; if someone told you the poem, however, you couldn't make any sense of it at all. There are so many things present in language that end up being used to add or clarify meaning, it is truly fascinating.
@@senor2930 Nah, it's definitely Ma - it talks about a horse and someone's mother. The Shi poem is a classic too tbh, actually it's probably a better example
Japanese culture is more influential than many Japanese people might realize. Even as an American, I think a lot of Americans also don't realize how influential our own culture is. (I'm not sure how well that will translate 😅)
Japanese culture is enormous in the whole world. I consider Japan as the technology center and the country with the most spread out culture in the world. Even in Brazil there is a Japanese city.
@@anarchyangel5439 The thing is, that third "ha" is supposed to be read as "wa" as it is a particle that marks the topic of the sentence. Written: "Haha ha hana ga suki" Read/Spoken: "Haha wa hana ga suki" Seeing 4 "ha"s in a row is kinda funny tho.
Seriously, as someone learning Japanese for several years including writing by hand for some reason, this person writing so perfectly IN PEN and not in pencil is absolutely bonkers, and my native Japanese tutor tells me that my handwriting is better than many Japanese people because most people just use smartphones/PCs once they leave school, like most Americans and cursive (if they even teach cursive anymore). But I still feel that when I write in the language it's so messy and inconsistent especially kanji compared to this person who basically writes dictionary-perfect every time.
There are actually many old video games for the Nintendo Famicom (the Japanese version of the NES) that exclusively used Hiragana due to limited character sets and memory. It does make stuff harder to read if you're used to Kanji, but it is still readable - which makes sense if you think about it: Hiragana is effectively a pretty decent phonetic transcription of speech, so just like it's possible to understand a Chinese sentence written in Pinyin or IPA, it's perfectly possible to understand a Japanese sentence written in Hiragana. So Japan could probably abolish Kanji if they really wanted to, just like SK switched to using Hangul pretty much exclusively. But doing that would be both a great loss in culture and make texts more unpleasant to read. Kanji serve an important function in Japanese because, contrary to most western languages, it's a very analytical, context-sensitive language. It is way easier to understand if you have Kanji as the larger blocks of meaning and use Hiragana only to link them. The lack of spaces would also make it way harder to read without Kanji.
I have thought about the "what ifs" of Japanese removing the Kanji system and adopting a full hiragana/katakana system and I feel it's in the same vein of wanting to get into English, or it's much more guilty ancestor French, and removing silent letters in words. One thing that I learned myself upon taking English in high school is the overabundance of rules in languages and whether they were necessary. A language is meant to convey an idea between people. Which is why you often get people who either make up words or replace a words meaning (hence urban dictionary). Or how people break rules consistently but sentences make way more sense. Like, in proper English you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition but we constantly end sentences with "at."
@Marcus other example of word that has a kanji form but commonly use in hiragana : ▪︎あなた and 貴方 (you) ▪︎ください and 下さい (please) ▪︎もの and 物 (thing) ▪︎くん and 君 (baby...) ▪︎ひらがな and 平仮名 (hiragana) And so Katakana, like : ▪︎カタカナ and 片仮名 (katakana) ▪︎カバン and 鞄 (bag) _sorry if i wrong cause i am indonesian_
@@kmashup I 100% see over half of those regularly in Kanji, even if it's only in books and may not be in normal writing I count that as the Kanji form still being in use, especially since they aren't old books either.
@@kmashup I've seen them written in kanji when playing mobile games. There is a difference in 下さい and ください。From what I've read, you use the kanji version if you're asking to receive something (e.g.サインを下さい), while if you're making a polite request (e.g. この文例を読んでみてください), you write it in hiragana. As for the others, it's very common to see 貴方 and 鞄, at least from some mobile games I've played. Even if they are more commonly written in hiragana, they're common enough that most people should be able to recognize them once they studied long enough.
One task that has helped me learn some Japanese is translating songs from English to Japanese by myself, or trying to. The more outlandish the song, in fact, the more memorable the words are 💀
I’ve been learning Japanese since 9 (granted 3 years was wasted since as a kid all id do was use Duolingo and read vocab without any memorization strategy) and I’ve heard that’s a good method. What’s the craziest lyric you’ve seen so far? 👰♂️
@@YUGAMISEKAI Sure, but saying that a caligrapher's writing is beautiful is like telling a chef that he is actually good at cooking - it's kind of part of the job. And considering the fact that this was deliberately written in the style of - more or less - a typewriter or computer font, i.e. very clean, very "sterile", which is nothing special as this is one of the foundations from which a caligrapher's personal style derives, I would even go so far as to say that saying the writing is beautiful is like telling a chef he can cook fried eggs well. Yes sure, it requires a certain amount of skill, but it is still a basic skill. Feel free to disagree with me, but I believe that going into extatic exuberance over every little thing you see diminishes or even destroys the value of truly impressive performances.
learning to be happy and appreciative on the little things is the first step to a more positive outlook in life you never know if a simple compliment and appreciation on everyday activity can actually give a big impact to someone, especially if their having a bad day so simple appreciation is great for both ways
I remember when, in videogames from 5th and 6th gen, programmers solved the problem of kanjis not fitting in the game by written them in Katakana. I couldn't understand that they still did that in games of 6th generation because games were gaining more and more screen resolution. An example of that is in _Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door_ where, in its Japanese version, the kanji 「私」 is mostly written as 「ワタシ」.
This is why Korean added spaces between words when they switched from hanja to hangul. ははは はなが すき isn't so hard to read -- I mean, ははは is a little weird but that's an unusual enough problem that it would be fine imo
Korean is a dream to read, meanwhile Japanese still using Kanji entirely defeats the purpose of learning it compared to Chinese. If I am going to have to learn traditional characters, I might as well learn and use the language which only uses simplified versions of them. I can read hangul and pronounce it all, and I have NO IDEA what a single word in hangul means. I love that meaning is the only thing I have left to know.
@@stephenwithaph1566how does it entirely defeat the purpose? simply adding spaces wouldnt change the fact that hiragana alone isnt enough to properly communicate the meaning of different words. sure it improves readability, but most japanese words have others with the same pronunciation and completely different meanings. kanji helps with understanding meaning and sentence structure, essentially serving the same purpose of spaces in helping separate nouns and verbs from particles and other grammar parts.
@@tayzers69 chinese is a great example of a language with multiple characters meaning the same thing requiring context to assess the meaning. like OP posted, "haha wa hana ga suki" はは は はな が すき isn't particularly ambiguous, unless I'm wrong and はは は はな has many different meanings. Also, for clarity, different sentence structure and word choice can be used in extreme cases, including in english: The police police exist to police the police officers. -> police police police police officers The disposition of a character denotes that character's nature. ->The character of a character characterizes the character's character. As a personal gripe, written languages should be easy to learn.That's y peepol mak fun ov iglish speling. We may be used to it, but it's certainly not as clear as it should be, and certainly has room to improve -- katakana doing no favors for japanese's reading learning curve.
For context, I am a Chinese learner learning Japanese. I already passed N1 so I am confident that I know Japanese well enough even though I am not at the native level yet. So I understand my point of view can be biased as I do love Chinese characters aka (hanzi, kanji, hanja), but seeing the comments section honestly sickens me. I will just address some of the comments that are against the use of kanji. 1. Regarding adding of spaces. While it does seem that adding spaces can help in the example given in the video, it's only a short sentence. Reading long texts especially literature and legal texts will be a nightmare if there's no kanji and all hiragana and katakana even with the spaces. Also, if you have studied Japanese, Chinese and Korean, you would have noticed by now that a these three languages do not use spaces. So for people who say that the Japanese should start adopting spaces are thinking from a western mindset, not considering that fact that Asians (in this case japanese, I won't speak for all other Asian languages) think differently from westerners. Also adding spaces won't help when there are words with the same pronunciation in the same sentence. 2. 'Homophones isn't only a Japanese thing, why Japanese can't get rid of kanji and be like the other languages to use context?' While i agree homophones isn't exclusively in Japanese, the way homophones worm for different languages are also different. In English, homophones occur when words of slightly different spelling are pronounced the same, such as 'die' and 'dye'. Even though 'dye' and 'dye' are pronounced the same, they are still spelled differently so you will know which word is being referred to when reading. However in Japanese, as someone else in the comments kindly pointed out, is limited to the 50 sounds hence the pronunciation is very simple. Such as 買う(buy) and 飼う(raise a pet). Both are pronounced and written as かう in hiragana. If kanji is not used, you wouldn't even know which かう they are referring to in written form. So ペットをかう, is it to buy a pet or raise a pet? No one knows when reading. For people asking, 'if they need kanji for written, then how on the world do they converse verbally?' That's the thing, in verbal every day conversations, you are able to clarify be it with your actions such as gesturing or pointing and you can also explain which word you are referring to in person. I do agree that context helps but they only help with real life conversations spoken in daily life. It wouldn't be so difficult to the point where you need to keep guessing which meaning they are referring to since the conversations usually wouldn't be too deep to the point where you need to guess kanji. HOWEVER, I assure you that Japanese are thinking with kanji inside their minds even when conversing. They even write kanji on their palms as a last resort if they still don't know what the other person is talking about. So yes, even kanji can be used in spoken daily life in that manner. 3. 'This seems to be an overcomplication of a simple problem that can be solved witb spaces and punctuation. I understand that kanji is convenient when you learnt it but is it really worth the effort to learn all that to make things easy to read?, I have already pointed out why spaces won't help in the long run in point 1. I will answer that yes, kanji is worth the convenience once you learnt them. The reason why Japanese children are still able to get by with only hiragana and katakana is because they are freaking kids. How difficult is their conversations going to be to the point where you need kanji??!!! As you go to higher level Japanese such as business Japanese, legal, scientific etc etc etc, you definitely need kanji, which also relates back to point 1. 4. Like I said, Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans think differently from westerners. Kanji carries the meaning so it is much easier for them to think and relate as opposed to thinking by pure pronunciation and phonetics alone. 'Having the same pronunciations for many words while depending on the kanji to differentiate the meaning defeats the purpose of a legible language' Again, we think differently from the westerners and we can use Chinese characters in a way that westerners might not be able to understand or appreciate. While there are many arguments that I can make in favour of kanji and I can continue to go on forever, I am going to stop here as whatever I said at the top isn't really as important as I want to say below. 1. Like I said earlier, the comments section sickens me to the point of disgust. While I understand that Japanese is a difficult language to learn, the lack of respect from the commenters truly reminded me of how trashy the Internet can be. Japanese is not your language, it's the Japanese's. If they themselves love and appreciate the use of kanji, I don't see why you guys have any right to call for change when it's not your own language to begin with. (Entitled much?) Expecting Japanese to conform to western conventions instead of accepting and loving Japanese for what it is. 2. 'Lomography is outdated they should have gotten rid of kanji and updated the language to be phonetic' This shows that the people think that phonetic languages are 'superior' while languages like Chinese and Japanese should have 'followed' Korean and gotten rid of Chinese characters. While Korean most uses hanguel, they still do use hanja for homophones especially in official documents etc to avoid confusion. I don't even know where to begin with this line of thought. Where's the respect? Who are you guys to determine that kanji is 'inferior' when you guys probably don't even thoroughly know how Japanese works. People in the comments act like they are geniuses when they can find a counterargument to the point mentioned in the video when they are only touching the tip of the iceberg and doesn't even know how Japanese truly works. 3. 'I gave up studying Japanese because of kanji, they should get rid of kanji to make it more accessible for foreign learners' HUH?!?!?!?!?!?! Like I said in point 1 of this section, Japanese is meant for the Japanese, since when do the Japanese have to care about what foreign learners think? If you chose to pick up Japanese, you have to mentally prepare that it will be a long journey and accept it. I don't understand the concept of having to reform the language for foreigners. That's seriously the most egocentric and selfish thinking I have seen. All in all, the reasons that I come up with in favour for kanji doesn't matter. I just want people to know how to show respect to a language and culture that's different from their own. Japanese have already accepted kanji as part of their culture and they love it. If people can't even show respect to the language, I can't imagine them showing respect to the actual culture and places if they visit Japan. There have already been many instances where foreigners have inconvenienced and disrespected Japanese culture, and it evidently shows how japan is banning tourists from visiting geisha towns because they harassed the geisha for photos etc. If you cannot respect Japanese language and culture, then get lost. Japan won't be a good place for you to be in, period. たかみさんへ この動画が面白くて好きです！ 僕は日本人じゃないですけど中国人として漢字の大事さと大切さがわかります！ 自己的に漢字も好きだから日本人が漢字が好きなことを知って嬉しいです！ だがコメント欄に無礼な外国人が沢山居て漢字のことを責めました。 ぜひこんなコメントを無視して必ず漢字の美しさを世界に見せてください！
@@Said-uz4wz You're right, but I think before Europeans landed in America, there was some sort of writing used by the natives. Btw I'm not an expert of American history 😅
@@simopics when I say Americas I refer to both the south and north America continents; as far as I know (anything besides the US and Canada) they didn't have any writing. Me neither.
This is exactly me, when i was learning kanji in the beginning and after some times i realize how important kanji is, sometimes i read kanji more faster than hiragana lol
you will in effect get something close to either Mandarin pinyin or Vietnamese, and personally neither are easy to read at all, let alone tell the actual words apart
That's quite admirably good, clear, and consistent handwriting. I'm rather envious. **sees your channel/user name** Calligrapher, eh? No wonder your penmanship is so good.
That pen writes absolutely beautiful, I gotta buy it! Also, the clip is funny. Kanji are a pain to learn, but now I see why it makes more sense to use them!
Beautiful handwriting! What kind of pen do you use? I think, even if you could remove kanji without giving place to confusion, it would just make reading so much more difficult, especially for foreigners learning the language!! If you recognise correctly the kanji being used, you can read it instantly, but if it's written in kana, you have to read each letter, and it takes longer when it's not our first language. Besides, one of the coolest things of kanji is that I can read a word made of 2 or more kanji and have no idea how to pronounce it but know exactly what it means, and when we're reading, pronunciation is totally irrelevant. All in all, having kanji, hiragana and katakana makes it much easier to read a text because it contains a lot of metalinguistic information.
Medical words are easier in kanji too. ・Otorhinolaryngology 耳鼻科(ear nose subject) ・pneumonia 肺炎(lung flame) ・Obstetrics and gynecology 産婦人科(birth lady subject) I think English is harder because you have to keep learning words unless you know latin. Japanese might be difficult at first but you just need to know a few thousand and that's it. Elementary school is enough.
After many years here in Japan I have to agree. It’s the funnest thing, when you can’t say out loud the reading of certain kanji but you know exactly what they mean. You get used to it and it gets easier.
Early Japanese arcade games don't support Kanji due to memory limit. It's not that bad, else how would people even talk to each other without the Kanjis in their voice? Spaces were needed, though. I'm not saying Kanjis aren't useful, as I'm well aware of the vast number of homophones in Japanese. I'm just saying that removing Kanjis isn't different from people talking to each other.
Interesting topic. I still find it even more interesting that a lot of Japanese tend to forget a lot of kanji they learnt in school. What would be a good way to retain what we are learning? Any ideas?
To actually use them, like any other skill. We can try writing or poetry as a way to retain those unusual words we seldom use in our daily activities. Reading Japanese literature is also a great way.
Others have mentioned using spaces, that helps parse words. I'll add that for homophones writing native japanese terms in hiragana, chinese loans in katakana, and european (and other) loans in roman letters makes a huge difference.
Yeah the space thing is funny because for example Korean only has one alphabet and they use spaces, and they _usually_ get along fine through context but when homophone problems come along guess how they solve them? With kanji! 😂 (They put the kanji version of the word in parenthesis after it so the reader knows which meaning of the homophone the writer is talking about. Or something like that. 😅) In English we can get around that problem because homophones generally have different spellings and therefore you can tell their different meanings. However that doesn't work in an (almost) phonetic language like Korean. ~:~
@@harshmnr I have a booklet from the 1940s or 50s somewhere in my closet. It was a proposed spelling system for japanese using latin letters. Homophones were spelled differently based on word origin. Native words, chinese loans from tang dynasty era, chinese loans from other dynasties, recent european loans, etc. it was pretty simple
@@LC-hd5dc Until you run into the word Jou which has around 50 definitions. Yeah, good luck with that. Kana would only work if you simplified the language, and then, if you do that, you would lose most of the depth of the language's literature. That might not seem like an issue in English but the big difference is that Japan keeps traditions alive while English doesn't. Medieval literature is mostly gibberish to modern English speakers while Japanese medieval and even ancient literature is still understandable due to kanji.
@@LC-hd5dc It’s legible, but annoying. It works in children’s books because the language is usually pretty simple. But when you start adding more complex 熟語 or god forbid 四字熟語 it just starts getting ugly and slow to read. Yes, you can do it, but no one, least of all native Japanese speakers, really wants to do it. It’s also nice to be able to read quickly and have sentences take up less space. 遠隔操作の飛行機は空高く飛んでる (The remote control plane is flying high in the sky.) えんかくそうさの ひこうきは そらたかく とんでる Both are perfectly readable, but the bottom one just looks uglier and feels like it takes more effort for my brain. Anyone who can read Japanese knows what I mean, but it’s hard to explain to anyone who can’t.
I mean... it works in Pokémon and many other games using subtitles (for a younger audience). The key is to use spaces, pitch markers (as diacriticals) and katakana as well because if it's just hiragana without spaces, then it can indeed get a bit too difficult.
Been studying Japanese for almost 20 years and I have always felt like adding spaces would help mitigate this problem. There are a lot of words with similar sounds, but context clues and spaces between words would do a lot minimize confusion. It’s not like people are confused when they hear these sentences spoken. Also, I’ve always wondered why the article “wa” is written using the character for “ha” but I’ve never really gotten an answer, though my guess is they used to be pronounced as written then changed over time. But it still makes things confusing (same with wo read as o). Still no where near as crazy as the English language spelling-wise lol
Every language has letters / characters that changes sound is just how I see it. Imaging the frustration someone goes through when learning English, and words like "sure" is pronounced "shur", and "slur" isn't pronounced "Shlur"
The original pronunciation of は was "pa," which changed into "fa (using both lips, not teeth)" and the standard sound is now "ha" (Japanese finally stopped using lips and replaced it with glottal sound). You can see the "fa" sound in a Japanese-Portuguese dictionaries written by Christian missionaries in 17th century. However, the lip sound remained in some words such as numeral 羽 (as in 一羽 "ichiwa," whose original sound should be "itipa" and later "ichifa"; N.B. there's also the standard "ha" reading for 羽 itself as in 羽虫 "hamushi") but was reduced into a semivowel with rounded lips. The article "wa" is another example of them, and the kana for the "wa" remains its original: は.
They do add spaces in old video games where they couldn't add kanji, and it is still hell to get through the kana salad. What surprises me more is you saying you have been studying japanese for 20 years, when most people that go for at least 1 year will never even conceive drop kanji usage just because of how useful it is in vocabulary acquisition. It could also be BECAUSE you have a 20 year leverage now you find kanji uneeded. It will also save a lot of paper since you have condensed meaning in fewer characters, the environment also appreciates kanji for that!
I know effectively nothing about the Japanese language and writing system and had always kinda wondered why there was more than one set of characters. Needless to say this was eye opening 🤣
I should go learn Japanese. might earn me a few brain points. honestly, I love the handwriting and the language! I find it very captivating, and the feel of intelligence. better than learning math, at least. the comment section is the final push to motivate me into learning Japanese. plus, I'll get some off time from my video games.
Go for it! I started learning about 5 months ago. It is very difficult, but nothing one can’t conquer if they put their mind to it! And I agree; it is a most beautiful language!
@@snowlynx1585 And if you use spaces between words, that's the problem, because you use kanji, you don't have spaces between words, but if you don't use kanji, you need spaces between words, so you're going to use them
@@ฯทไก it still doesn't work if you use spaces. You need dozens or maybe a hundred new hiragana if you want to use spaces, but japanese already know enough kanji for everyday life so it is pointless
To be fair, the same type of problem could be replicated in English. The remedy in our case is spacing. "はは は はな が すき" and "かた たたき" are very much readable. Wether one considers the necessity for spacing to be a flaw in a language would then be the next question.
I feel like Japanese people are stuck with the idea that it's impossible and that having 100,000 characters is the easier route to take for some reason. It goes right into the "still using fax machines and hanko stamps" folder.
@@MarkyTeriyaki I've heard a Japanese person say that it's part of their history and culture. And to be fair, if that's the argument, I can accept it. I'm not gonna tell Japanese what they ought to do. But the insistance on, "it would be hard to read" is just funny to me.
oh I just saw this after I commented, I suggested the same exact thing. I guess its more traditional for them to save space by using Kanji which can severely reduce the length of sentences and make it more compressed. But honestly i see Kanji as a over-complication of something very simple, if Japanese could be written as easily as it is spoken, I'd be very happy and it'll increase the ease at which this language is transferred to either a new generation or everyone around the globe.
@@ravishbhasin7041 There is a reason Japanese (written) is nicknamed moon runes. Also, yeah from what I understand even their own people have a hell of a time learning it.
the "ha ha ha" feels a little disingenuous lol... if we're removing kanji, may as well fix the dumb "ha = wa" thing while we're at it. ははわはながすき isn't too bad, but I don't know if she likes flowers or noses...
This handwriting is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes. (When I used to study Japanese, my handwriting would also bring tears to your eyes, but not for the same reasons 🤣)
When you have a good base of japanese vocabulary and start enjoying real japanese media, kana only stuff are a nightmare. i was talking to this guy about japanese and i was complaining to him about how i dont like that this specific game was all in hiragana. He was like "what ? all hiragana is way easier". Thats when i realized he was probably not very far and reading only childrens book. heck, even my japanese friend told me she hates kana only stuff. Kanjis are complicated to get into, but it is such an incredible tool to convey a word meaning and avoid the confusion between two similarly pronounced word. It just flows so easily, sometimes even faster than reading the syllables properly. I forgot how to pronounce some words but i know exactly what word it is and instantly from seeing it thanks to kanji. Sometimes i dont even have to read the sentence properly, its like visual recognition. Its incredible and very foreign to a western person that grew up with a western writing system
I've been trying to learn just all the basic kanji for a decade and I'm not even half way. Regardless, please japan, please, _never_ compromise your culture for the sake of simplicity or being inclusive to us gaijin. It is not worth it. When you learn kanji they are immediately recognizable. It takes the brain a split second to process the meaning, often in a tiny space. For instance: "agriculture, industry, and commerce" is 農工商, which is still more economic than the hiragana のうこうしょう. Also, the sense of the word gets completely lost. It would be a huge loss if Japanese were to stop using kanji.
Kanji (漢字, pronounced [kaɲdʑi] (listen)) are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. - Wiki
every language is wacky like this. In Serbian, a perfectly correct way to say "the mountains up there burn even worse" is "Горе горе горе горе!" and it's no less beautiful :)
Reminds me of a Turkish tounge twister we have: "Şu köşe yaz köşesi şu köşe kış köşesi ortada su şişesi". Even though it looks simple it is harder than the really long ones (at least to me 😂). It means that corner is the summer corner this corner is the winter corner in the middle of them there is a water bottle. There are ones with more of similar sounding words like: "Hakkı haklının hakkını yemiş. Haklı Hakkı'dan hakkını istemiş. Hakkı haklıya hakkını vermeyince haklı da Hakkı'nın hakkından gelmiş." This is easier than the 1st one actually 🙂
I easily understand the first one. "Haha (my mom/mom) wa (intertopic) hanaga (flower/flowers) suki (love/loves) desu (end statement)." In Japanese, most of statements structure just like this: Subject + Object + Predicate, with also "wa+desu" as the basic topic maker. Adding "ka" in "wa+desu+ka" creates a question mark for a statement.
Out of topic, I managed to read the hiragana and I'm happy that I still remember it, it has been a long time since the last time I learnt japanese (writings) at school 😄
I mean, that is a problem that is solved with spaces. Other languages have the same problem after all where two words are written the same and you need to figure out what it means. There is a reason why people use German as an example, because the word "umfahren" is the opposite or "umfahren" (first one means to drive around while the other one means to hit someone while driving). It's something most languages have to deal with. And I can make similar looking funny sentences in German like "Fischers Fritze fischt frische Fische". Doesn't mean, we suddenly have to think about including Kanji into the language. Now obviously, there is a reason to still use Kanji and that is that you can read it faster and easier IF you have learned all the Kanji compared to if everything was written in Hiragana. The question is just what you value more. That it's easier to learn the written language or if you want people to read it faster once they are accustomed to it.
This actually did happen in the early days of video games. Due to software limitations at the time, they couldn't use kanji. As a result, they implemented spacing to tell the words apart.
WHAT. A. CONCEPT!!! This is completely novel and should be exported to other languages immediately.
@@fivetimesyoWhat a stupid sarcastic comment to make. Plenty of other languages that aren't influenced by latin or Germanic languages don't use spaces. Spaces are just part of our languages, it's not a universal concept for everyone.
@@gami2406 WHAT. A. REVELATION!!! This makes it even more important to export this concept into other languages immediately!
@@fivetimesyo You basically just told me that either you never tried studying another language, or you were very bad at it to the point that you now want everything to ressemble your native language. You're pathetic buddy
@@gami2406 Yeah, bad languages.
As a french person learning japanese, I have very quickly gotten to a point where it's much easier for me to read sentences that include kanjis than sentences entirely in hiragana/katakana.
Not only does it help a lot to notice where words begin and where they end, but it's also better to identify particles and flexional endings, meanwhile hiraganas only are a jumbled mess.
Also kanjis are beautiful, I think it would be a shame to remove them from japanese.
As someone who is learning french I envy the French. I don't know why I am finding it hard to learn French.
May be I am dumb, lol
@@mokisan Nahh french is hard it's not you... There are many many rules to learn before the grammar and pronounciation make sense, and if your native language is not a romance language there's a big gap to be crossed.
Keep it up ! Watch content you like in french with subtitles ! Try to talk with natives if at all possible ! Learning a language is hard, but it is rewarding.
@@math9172 I am trying to immerse myself in more french. Like some youtube channels and some movies and tv show.
Sadly I have no one to speak too 😅
@@mokisan We can speak in french together if you want xD.
You're not alone. When you start seeing words as words instead of individual characters, kanji is a lot easier to parse individual words. Learning it is balls, though. They somewhat mitigate the problem when they introduce spaces into the sentence structure though. I know I played a lot of old Japanese gameboy games and that was how they avoided the confusion of not having kanji. 「ははは はなが すき」 is at least a little easier to read.
Good point, but there is an even better one: Japanese has way too many words that only differ in accent, so it would be much more difficult to know which of what words you are actually reading from the kana alone. They are all super common words and in many contexts, they can be used interchangeably, so you would always have to guess. In spoken Japanese, you can tell from the context and accent, but in written form, it would be a massive pain. The addition of spaces would lessen the problem shown in this video, but you would have to add some hideous accents marks to the text to deal with the homophones.
Yeah, but the accent can be completely different based on region making context a much more useful method of differentiation. Accent marks aren’t needed, and context alone is enough to understand
However it would improve literacy
Our mother tongue have these kinda problem too
Lei means bridge, sands, buy/bought, tongue, in different sound low to high .
@@j0hnc00, Not using kanji would improve literacy? By making it impossible to read books and newspapers? How? lmao
@@harrisonmccarn9958, Regional accent differences don't really matter that much, and the context is usually enough, but doesn't have to be in written form, where you have zero visual clues, and it can be a random single-word quote in the middle of a paragraph, where there isn't sufficient context.
Every time i'm discouraged from studying kanji, thinking it pointless, I'm reminded of this video and suddenly I have the motivation again. Very succinct way to get the point across, lol
😅
yeah but all them kanji that replace one character can kiss my ass. grew up in japan but learning english was my best decision ever
When you hit n3/n2 level it gets to the point where stuff for n5 learners feels borderine impossible to read due to the lack of kanji
kanji is the reason most people give up learning nihongo
people not learning nihongo means less migration to Japan, an old country that desperately needs good/skilled migrants
therefore, kanji is a detriment to the whole country, its economy and way of life
it should be kept through shodo, as a form of art, but removed from day to day, like hangul has done in Korea
I feel discouraged due to kanji, and now I feel further discouraged, seeing that the spoken can apparently be such a mess too sometimes. Like, how do you make sense of 4x ha back to back as actual words?
海外の人達が日本人では気づかない日本語の難しいところをいっぱい言ってて読むのめっちゃ楽しい
It’s also quite fun to say and read difficult parts of English that foreigners don’t notice in English.
I like pressing the translate button.
It is fun and convenient to say and write sentences which contain many words in English for the sake of saying things that a foreigner may not understand because of the number of words.
I can do the same in Spanish... And I can talk very quickly. Only native spanish speakers will be able to understand me after certain speed.
@@OmicronAwesome yes agreed its a nice button
As a Japanese, it is not too difficult to read sentences from which kanji characters have been removed. The system of writing Japanese using hiragana, katakana and spaces is actually the method used in books for kids, or in old video games.
The removal of kanji from the Japanese language would actually have an impact on learners of Japanese, rather than on the Japanese adults.
For example, if you did not know what the word '柿（kaki）' meant, you could look up the kanji and its reading in a dictionary and understand the kanji. However, if it is written as "かき（kaki）", you will be confused as the dictionary's "かき" field will provide many meanings such as "persimmon", "oyster", "summer", "fence" and so on. This is exactly what those who are now learning Japanese using the Romaji are struggling with.
PS: I am not in favour of removing kanji from the Japanese language.
A lot of learners drag on kanji but it's honestly kind of nice that once you've learned the meanings of a lot of kanji, you can quite often guess the meanings of words you've never seen before just from their kanji. You can do this in other writing systems too, of course, but learning latin roots isn't nearly as helpful as learning the meanings of kanji.
Well said bro
I’ve studied Japanese for a little over a decade. This is why kanji is important :)
When people first start learning, they go right to romanji which isn’t good.
漢字を勉強しなかったら､たくさんの言葉の違いが分からなくて困ってしまう｡
ローマ字で書いてばかりいると､日本語を読むのは難しくなる。
@@heartroll8719 Learning with romanji is fine, as many are more interesting in speaking/hearing anyway. But learning kanji to the point where it's not just a bunch of random lines, but seeing the repeating patterns, makes for reading learning so much easier.
Personally, my beginner class teaching gave bonus points for those that did the tests in hiragana and katakana(writing), so you can bet a lot of the class learned those at least :D
Exactly. While learning & remembering the Kanji is difficult, once you actually know them it's way faster to easier.
My first thought was “why is your penmanship soo good ?!”
Then I looked at your channel name lol
Same but I looked at your comment and saw why lol
@@Tvinuyasha same
I thought does all Japanese take so long to write..
But channel names write on korean(?) language
@@Ray4ik there is a feature where you can let your channel name change based on the language of youtube.
I know your channel is about Japanese Calligraphy(as shown in your name) but your handwriting is absolutely beautiful. Actual art with such a simple pen
That’s the most beautiful handwriting I ever saw …
Also, I find it bizarre how easy it is to follow spoken Japanese, I always struggled trying to figure out words separately in other languages. But, in Japanese, there's so much emphasis on certain sounds, it's hard not to individualize each word from each other after learning the particles. I hope I'm making sense here
Japanese is a syllable language, which means syllables are given priority by speakers and listeners, which means they have to be clear. Give an audio a listen in Japanese- you might notice that you're not listening "word-by-word". Many other languages on the other hand are word languages, where word boundaries are way more important than syllables (generally languages with more complex syllables, like English or German), where blending in speech is a lot more common because listeners don't have to entirely get the sound, the entire word is paid attention to, they can recognize it without the need for clearness. @silentsarey
@evrenisprettyuniversal So how does the comprehension work exactly? Do you just ignore the first oart?
@@evrenisprettyuniversal wrong. the answer is that Japanese has a two-tone system, making it easier to tell apart suprasegments, which reflect sentence units.
@@Emile.gorgonZola Sort of, Japanese has pitch accent. Which is similar to tone, but not the same thing. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch-accent_language
The pitch accent patterns do a ton of heavy lifting to signal word boundaries, which spaces between the kana can help with. But these pitch accent patterns also disambiguate what would otherwise be homophones (even if that disambiguation only appears on the following particle), and that critical part of speech is missing from kana, but is signalled with kanji.
シンプルに字がうますぎる
ボールペンでこんなに上手く描けるのすごすぎ
それなすぎるッ(●´ω｀●)
@@ねこあつめ-k5d 字うまいよな
プロだから当然。
うん
プロだから当然と見るのか
すごく上手いからプロになれたとみるのか
With Kanji: 母は花が好き
No Kanji: 😂😂😂😂すき
Edit: Edited the kanji out because you guys wouldn't shut up about it
Sounds sus af💀💀
😂😂😂😂 and hiragana is so funny too
@@justanobody4928は is the "ha" sound
Laughter in Japanese is a different onomatopoeia altogether, which makes the joke even funnier. I didn’t get the joke at first until I reached that point 😂😂😂
好 is kanji
「はははは」はやっぱり長すぎww
はははははみがきません
（母は歯は磨きません）
" [hahaha] it's too long " why
@@神戸脩生-p4w Mother does not brush
ァﾊﾊﾊハハハ( ﾟ∀ﾟ)八八ﾉヽﾉヽﾉヽﾉ ＼ / ＼/ ＼
@@merytan6660 母(haha) は(wa) 花(hana) が(ga) 好き(suki)
は : もしそれが助詞なら、(wa)と発音する
は : それ以外なら、(ha)と発音する
理由 : 『は』は昔は(pa→fa)と発音した。
それが今では(ha)と発音されるようになった。しかし、助詞の『は』は(fa)に似ている(wa)になった。
Kanji makes Japanese so much easier! You can understand words you can't read, and even understand a sentence before you can finish reading it! Pro tip: Don't learn kanji independently. As soon as you can read both kana, start learning words with their kanji. You will intuitively start to understand the meaning of the kanji and learn its different pronunciations because you're learning words that use them. Usage and repetition are the biggest keys to learning
cap
@@logandunlap9156 Fine. Spend months learning 1000+ kanji, their readings (no matter how uncommon), and their meanings. Orrrrr, you could just learn words with their kanji. Knowing kanji independently is pretty useless, so focusing on words that use them gains you understanding as well as vocabulary, and with vocabulary and a tiny bit of grammar you can say so much. I'd rather be using and speaking Japanese than rogue memorizing kanji despite Japanese not having any single kanji words
better! just learn Chinese first so you know the meaning of Kanji and then head to Japanese
@@mayzavan they change i think
@@mayzavan based
たくみさんの書き方がとっても明確だと思います。羨ましい🙃
それな
コピーしたかのような、人間離れした文字の安定よ…
I only started learning Japanese about 1.5 months ago but I'm at a point where I'm starting to use some simple kanji and I honeslty prefer it because of the readability. I know if you don't know any kanji, a sentence with kanji seems scary and frustrating, but once you know what they mean, it's much easier to read a sentence with them than without them. Only issue with kanji sometimes is that if I see one, I don't have the Japanese word in my head, but only the meaning of the kanji. Like I understand the sentence, but if I should read it out loud, I would have to think hard about how it's actually read.
Maybe you could consider studying Chinese
Same problem japanese have, they know the meaning and can not read it
これは日本人でも一生かけて勉強することです。日本人は外国人よりも長い年月をかけて日本語を勉強するのです。
You dont know shit bozo
Kanji actually very fun
「貴社の記者が汽車で帰社した」とかもやって欲しいです。日本語勉強中の外国人の人達が混乱しそうwww
草
早口言葉系のひらがな化はたしかに面白そうw
日本人でも混乱するw
きしゃのきしゃがきしゃできしゃした。
ゲシュタルト崩壊するな（笑）
何言ってんのか分からなくなりますね笑
きしゃのきしゃがきしゃできしゃした
確かに読みにくいw
I used to confuse when they said "sentence written all in hiragana are difficult to read" but now i understand why
Well there are better ways to implement using just hiragana but yeah Kanji isnt going anywhere.
The best adjustment would be the addition of spaces between words. There are Japanese kids books written entirely in hiragana so it does work.
I’m Japanese high school student, learning English. I think both -of- Japanese and English are so brilliant *plural of* language but they are so far *from* each other -s- .
They have some advantages and disadvantages so I want to talk about it.
(I don’t intend to decide which language is better, so please don’t misunderstand it.)
In English, Alphabet is *an* awesome investment _b_ecause it ha *s* different pronunciations in same *letter* when it *is combined* with other *letters to form words* . So the number of Alphabet is only 26. English learner *s* don’t need to remember *an* enormous *number or about of* characters as *in* Japanese Kanji. I think that it’s a big advantage. Thanks to it, I love English and *am* able to enjoy Speaking in English *in* my English class in school.
In Japanese, person who *is* learning Japanese must remember *mass* about of characters in Japanese such as Hiragana, Katakana, kanji. But thanks to them, Japanese documents can exhibit entire atmosphere of the document. For example, Japanese has many kind *s* of first person pronoun *s* . Such as ''ぼく、わたし、おれ、わし、わがはい '' etc. If you see them _while_ leading something, you might *find out* something about *writer* such as his age, gender, character, even era. I think this is a big advantage.
Each language has so *many* different properties but both of them are wonderful. So I want to learn more about English to -find out- *discover more good things about English* good point.
Thank you for reading my long comment. Have a nice day!!
(If my English is wrong, please tell me where and how is wrong in this comment.
Your English is very good but there are some errors. My comment is long but I would like to point a few things if you don't mind. Now then, if I may make a few polite corrections:
1) In the second sentence, "I think both (here in this sentence, if it was a sentence with the word 'them' or 'us' then the use of 'of' is needed else if it is a sentence like this or similar to this in structure then there is no need for 'of') Japanese and English are so brilliant languages (plural of language, since there' two languages being mentioned here) but they are so far from each other. ('from' is needed with far since it's a preposition, with each you never use a plural word because each is supposed to refer to each one individually)
2) In the second paragraph first sentence you would like to add 'an' before awesome, making it 'In English, alphabet is an awesome investment (you can combine the second sentence with the first one because you used the conjunction 'because', much like I did just now.) because it has ('has' because there is only one thing being referred to, so you need a singular verb) has different pronunciations (plural because as you said there are a lot of different pronunciations) of the same letter (we use letter here as that's the word for individual alphabets along with the sound or pronunciation they make) when it is combined (the usage of a verb such as 'combined' simply makes the sentence easier to understand and write) with other letters to form words. (a letter combines with other letters to form words hence the change)
3) In the sentence after it should be more like, "English learners (as you are referring to not just a single person) don’t need to remember an (this case is similar to the awesome investment one) enormous number or amount of characters as in (I think there should be a preposition here) Japanese Kanji. I think that's (what you wrote is indeed correct but you could just simplify it further) a big advantage. Thanks to it, I love English and am ('am' is a form of 'be' in this situation since you're referring to yourself, 'be' changes into 'am', when referring to someone else 'be' changes into 'is' or 'are' depending on the number) able to enjoy speaking in English in (here 'on' is incorrect because 'on' is used when you're touching something, this could just be a typing mistake on your end) my English class in school.
4) In Japanese, person who is ('is' here is necessary) learning Japanese must remember tremendous ('amounts of' or 'about the' should be here depending on what you want to convey instead of 'about of' I'm not sure what you were trying to say here) characters in Japanese such as Hiragana, Katakana, kanji. But thanks to them, Japanese documents can exhibit entire atmosphere of the document. For example, Japanese has many kinds (plural since you used 'many' referring to more than one) of first person pronouns (plural again). Such as ''ぼく、わたし、おれ、わし、わがはい '' etc. If you see them while ('while' instead of 'when' because reading is in continuous tense) reading something, you might find out ('feel' is abstract, it doesn't really fit here. 'Find out' is discover, it sounds more concrete which I think goes better with this sentence) something about writer (since you said document and reading then it's something that been written by a writer) such as his age, gender, character, even era. I think this is a big advantage.
5) Each language has ('so many' or 'such' should be here instead of just 'so' alone) different properties but both of them are ('must' doesn't fit here and 'must be' makes your statement more ambiguous whereas 'are' is more declarative) wonderful. So, I want to learn more about English to find out its (I'm not sure what you tried to say here but I think you meant that you want to discover more good things about English) good points.
If you read this, then thank you very much. Hope I was of help.
“If my English is wrong, please tell me where and how is wrong in this comment”
It should be “how it is wrong”
@@stooglesgoogles7246 I think its better with "If my English is wrong, please tell me where and how I can fix it"
@@stooglesgoogles7246 You're wrong while being so confident, It should be "If my English is wrong, please tell me where and how is it wrong in this comment". Instead of "it is", it should it "is it".
Really interesting comment!! Thanks for sharing your thoughts :) I'm a native English speaker learning Japanese and I like the way both languages write too
I really like that in Japanese you write out the meaning of words rather than their sounds with kanji
What I like about English writing is that you can see the history of the words in their spelling. For example the word doubt has a silent b. It's related to the word double. It's like a time capsule in the very writing if the word that says that peoole used to describe doubt by saying they had two (or double) thoughts about something :)
Fun fact: The Tale of Genji was written almost entirely in hiragana in the 11th century and it is considered one of the great classics of Japanese literature. At that time, during the Heian period, Hiragana was considered women's writing or informal writing so even when male authors wanted to write female stories or quick informal messages, they would often use hiragana exclusively. It was only much later in history that Hiragana combined with Kanji and Katakana to form the modern Japanese writing system.
It is a bit like how the Ancient Romans would use entirely uppercase characters for their official documents but the roman clergy and merchants would use a cursive form of those characters which later became the lowercase letters used in the English alphabet.. and nowadays we add emotes to emphasize meaning, so now we use all 3 sets of characters plus indo-arabic numerals and it feels natural.
but if I choose to use all lower case OR ALL UPPER CASE LETTERS, IT'S STILL QUITE READABLE EVEN IF IT IS OFFENSIVE TO THE EYES. and in theory I could sprinkle it with emotes to show that I am 🧐but it would be completely 🤮,🤧and I'd probably get a lot of 👎 and😠 from🙎👱👳.
All caps are offensive to my eyes. I prefer lowercased letters.
Japanese be hard
Mind blowing documentary 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
@@itssoritojangru YES
The Tale of Genji is not written entirely in hiragana. It is a Kanji-Kana mixed text with Kanji characters used in places. It is difficult for modern Japanese to read, but the ancient writing method was to scrap the hiragana and join the characters word by word. Therefore, even sentences in hiragana were easy to read.
as someonr who only knows how to read hiragana, im at 0:29 and already baffled
Haha hah haga hakki
I know a few basic kanji, so the first sentence was no issue for me. Haha wa hana ga suki
これはほんとに漢字とひらがなの有難さが分かりますね〜〜🙏
弟が小学入学したての時の教科書が、まさにこんな感じの平仮名だらけだったので…大変読みづらかったのを思い出しました😂😂
コメント欄の日本語勉強中海外ニキネキたち可愛すぎる🤦♀️
日本語に興味を持ってくれてありがとう😭
彼らは正式に話します。
ちなみにニキ(Niki),ネキ(neki)は語頭のア(a)が略されてます。アネキ(Aneki )(姉貴)アニキ(Aniki )(兄貴)の事です。実は今年になって知りましたが以外と古い用例なんですね。日本語の略は独特です。
(一般的に人は)パンケーキを食べると太る→パンケーキは太るetc
It is interesting to see comments that explain the characteristics of Japanese and the degree of difficulty for foreigners to learn Japanese. As a Japanese, I am happy to know that not a few people are interested in Japanese. Please forgive me if my English is wrong.
WOWW YOU DON'T READ MY PROFILE PICTURE
Kanji is a beautiful writing system, despite being difficult.
So you are happy to know that people are interested in Japanese? Your English is good. However, that part is a little confusing.
_As a Japanese, I am happy to know that_ [not a few] _people are interested in Japanese._
"not a few" should be replaced with "many". Saying "not a few" is understandable in English, though it's improper connotation in accordance to the context of the sentence.
_[Connotation: an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.]_
_[Context: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.]_
_As a Japanese, I am happy to know that_ many _people are interested in Japanese._
Your English is fine and can always improve, but as far as I can tell you're somewhere between grade 9-12 or a little higher based on 1 sentence and good enough to understand. Most (United States) American students in grade 9-12 don't even speak or write English properly.
@@9a8szmf79g9 Spoken like a professor.
For more of this topic ,your hand writing is really beautiful
I love reading the first sentence as "HAHAHAHA"
Like someone's mom is losing their mind over flowes
ははははははとわらう。
@@senzenseki yeah something like that
沢山の海外の方が一見わかりにくい日本語に対して「口にするアクセントによって伝わること」や「難しいようでこれだから漢字は必要」ととても丁寧に言ってくれている。
自分なんて、義務教育で学ぶ上に一見して分かりやすい英語にすら「全然分からん！単語覚えたくないけど表現の幅を単語でくれ！」ってなってるのに(笑)
Sì
アメリカ人です。 私はあなたの強制的な文法クラスをうらやましくはありません。 ですからもちろん自主的に日本語の文法を勉強しています。
钓鱼岛是中国的😆
@@carlliu2552 漢字という呪いを日本にもたらした罰としてその島は日本に渡すべきだ
@@CrsdrsWrStnsts bro if not for Chinese you guys won't even have writing system
When I started learning Japanese we only used hiragana, and I was pretty happy when we started using kanji, it is faster and a lot easier to read if you know the words. I feel like Japanese relies a ton on context as it has many homophones
どうして かんじが ない ことが ひらがな だけという かんがえれますか?
にわには 2わ ニワトリが いる
庭には2羽鶏がいる
にわにはにわにわとりがいる
Yeah. Japanese is a beautiful and elegant language, as long as you only use it to say things people already are expecting you to say. Deviation from expectation creates confusion, and the language is not meant to deal with adding in new concepts, so you end up with just as much loanwords in use as any other.
i thought you said homophobes
日本語は「察する」文化の影響を強く受けてる気はしますね
If you remove kanji from Japanese, you definitely have to add spaces for word separation.
肩書き書道家で納得
あまりにも字が綺麗でびっくりした
書いてるとこ見なかったらフォントだと勘違いするレベル
笑ってるみたいになってて草
かたたたwww
@@natrium1420 違う、そうじゃない
かｗたｗたｗたｗ、き
はははは、長過ぎ()
@@natrium1420 ちょま笑わせないでwwwwwwwww
I think the main problem with the first one is that they write 'wa' as 'ha'. for example, in romanji, it is "haha wa hana ga suki" which looks completely fine. I am still a novice so I mistakes wa as ha many times.
Like you, all Japanese wonder about it.
What?! I just started japanese not long ago and didn't know about that, why do they do it?
@@davidlemos1136 sound changes and them not bothering to change it since it would be wierd to write the ha into wa
the main reason i think the romaji is more readable is just the spaces separating the words. "haha ha hana ga suki" isn't much less readable, nor is 「はは は はな が すき」(though as a personal thing, it feels kind of wrong to put a space before particles. 「ははは はなが すき」feels more natural to me but I don't think it's convention to write Japanese that way when using spaces)
@@dalmationblack Actually you're correct. I have a few Japanese children's books and textbooks that use either exclusively kana or kana and first grade kanji, and they add spaces only after the particles. Oh yeah, and they treat です like a particle, not a separate verb. On the other hand, they do separate the する in suru-verbs. Interestingly, a proper noun like 「いなばのくに」 "The Land of Inaba", seems to be treated as a single noun. Here's an example from "The White Hare of Inaba" (いなばの白うさぎ):
「ずっと、ずっと むかし。オオクニヌシという かみさまが、いなばのくにを たび していました。せなかには おもそうな にもつを かついでいます。おかあさんの ちがう おにいさんたちが、じぶんたちの にもつを ぜんぶ オオクニヌシに もたせたのでした。でも やさしい オオクニヌシは、もんく ひとつ いいません。」
And with the Kanji included:
「ずっと、ずっと昔。大国主という神様が、因幡の国を旅していました。背中には重そうな荷物を担いでいます。お母さんの違うお兄さんたちが、自分たちの荷物を全部大国主に持たせたのでした。でも優しい大国主は、文句一つ言いません。」
The first sentence without kanji is quite funny hahahaha
I'm not learning Japanese and this seriously melted my brain, lmaooo..... but that was so beautiful and mesmerising and amazing to watch. Also, very nice penmanship!
My mother likes flowers
haha wa hana ga suki
はは(は) はな が すき
母 (は) 花 が 好き
Shoulder massage
kata tataki
かた たたき
肩 叩き
It may be easier to understand if you look at how to read it
サバ いばる=The mackerel swells
サバイバル=survival
かんじが ないけど カタカナと わかちかきが いれば よみやすい~
そんなフレーズ一生使わないww
@@滅茶苦茶パンダ アニメ クレヨンしんちゃんに あります。
@@ฯทไก あるかどうかじゃなく使わねーんだよ
こういうの好きwww
本当ね〜
His writing is damn beautiful ✍🏻 I have no words to explain how beautiful it is
Beautiful
yes very bootyful
@@dont5014 i won't 😐
slow too, 2h to writing a sentence
How to check if a commenter is a girl:
Complimenting a SEA man. Check.
Korean boy band in pfp. Check.
Emoji use. Check.
im studying japanese and to me kanji actually made it easier to learn the vocabulary since once you know the meaning of characters, you can guess words containing those characters.
学 means study
生 means living being
学生 means student
Reminds me of the Mandarin poem that is all just different intonations of "ma" - reading it with characters is easy, and it honestly doesn't seem odd at all until you try to read it aloud; if someone told you the poem, however, you couldn't make any sense of it at all.
There are so many things present in language that end up being used to add or clarify meaning, it is truly fascinating.
I recommend you to read a Chinese article which names 施氏食狮史. Chinese language is quite different.🤓
What's the name?
sorta reminds me of buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo except you cant really understand that written or spoken lol
@@uncleho1945 I know the Shi poem, he said Ma poem. I think he was confusing Shi for Ma.
@@senor2930 Nah, it's definitely Ma - it talks about a horse and someone's mother. The Shi poem is a classic too tbh, actually it's probably a better example
海外の人たちが真面目に日本語のこと考えてて感心するなぁ
難しいですが、コツをつかみます。
@@inkchariot6147 頑張って！
WOWW YOU DON'T READ MY PROFILE PICTURE
Japanese culture is more influential than many Japanese people might realize. Even as an American, I think a lot of Americans also don't realize how influential our own culture is.
(I'm not sure how well that will translate 😅)
Japanese culture is enormous in the whole world. I consider Japan as the technology center and the country with the most spread out culture in the world. Even in Brazil there is a Japanese city.
This gave me a chuckle. As soon as I saw the first English sentence I saw were this was going 😂
😂😂😂 I already started laughing as soon as I read the sentence. I knew what was about to come 💀🤚🏾
"Hahahaha"
@@anarchyangel5439 The thing is, that third "ha" is supposed to be read as "wa" as it is a particle that marks the topic of the sentence.
Written: "Haha ha hana ga suki"
Read/Spoken: "Haha wa hana ga suki"
Seeing 4 "ha"s in a row is kinda funny tho.
こんなに日本に関心がある方がいるのがとても嬉しいです。日本語を大事にしようとおもいました。
私もよ。外国人が私たちの言語を学ぶのをとてもうれしいです。
The penmanship is so clean and precise.
Seriously, as someone learning Japanese for several years including writing by hand for some reason, this person writing so perfectly IN PEN and not in pencil is absolutely bonkers, and my native Japanese tutor tells me that my handwriting is better than many Japanese people because most people just use smartphones/PCs once they leave school, like most Americans and cursive (if they even teach cursive anymore). But I still feel that when I write in the language it's so messy and inconsistent especially kanji compared to this person who basically writes dictionary-perfect every time.
WOWW YOU DON'T READ MY PROFILE PICTURE
except the す, that kinda すcks
There are actually many old video games for the Nintendo Famicom (the Japanese version of the NES) that exclusively used Hiragana due to limited character sets and memory. It does make stuff harder to read if you're used to Kanji, but it is still readable - which makes sense if you think about it: Hiragana is effectively a pretty decent phonetic transcription of speech, so just like it's possible to understand a Chinese sentence written in Pinyin or IPA, it's perfectly possible to understand a Japanese sentence written in Hiragana. So Japan could probably abolish Kanji if they really wanted to, just like SK switched to using Hangul pretty much exclusively.
But doing that would be both a great loss in culture and make texts more unpleasant to read. Kanji serve an important function in Japanese because, contrary to most western languages, it's a very analytical, context-sensitive language. It is way easier to understand if you have Kanji as the larger blocks of meaning and use Hiragana only to link them. The lack of spaces would also make it way harder to read without Kanji.
@jormungand72 You're absolutely right, I've fixed it.
Your handwriting, wow! SO beautiful ❤️
How? Its pretty average for someone who wrote since 7
It’s just strokes with fancy swirls at the end that make it look good. Pretty average for Japanese.
@@buklau837 well... you do it, dude 🙄
I have thought about the "what ifs" of Japanese removing the Kanji system and adopting a full hiragana/katakana system and I feel it's in the same vein of wanting to get into English, or it's much more guilty ancestor French, and removing silent letters in words.
One thing that I learned myself upon taking English in high school is the overabundance of rules in languages and whether they were necessary. A language is meant to convey an idea between people. Which is why you often get people who either make up words or replace a words meaning (hence urban dictionary). Or how people break rules consistently but sentences make way more sense. Like, in proper English you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition but we constantly end sentences with "at."
That preposition rule was never a real thing, it was invented by people trying to make English more like Latin, which never worked well
@@brandenjames2408 same thing with the split infinitive, no?
@@murderwill320 yep
whatcha gettin' at?
This is mind-blowing information for me.
今日は 今日は 日曜日です
こんにちは きょうは にちようびです
あなたは「きょうは きょうは にちようびです」と言ったと思う。「こんにちは」の言葉はいつも平仮名で書いた
@Marcus other example of word that has a kanji form but commonly use in hiragana :
▪︎あなた and 貴方 (you)
▪︎ください and 下さい (please)
▪︎もの and 物 (thing)
▪︎くん and 君 (baby...)
▪︎ひらがな and 平仮名 (hiragana)
And so Katakana, like :
▪︎カタカナ and 片仮名 (katakana)
▪︎カバン and 鞄 (bag)
_sorry if i wrong cause i am indonesian_
@@kmashup I 100% see over half of those regularly in Kanji, even if it's only in books and may not be in normal writing I count that as the Kanji form still being in use, especially since they aren't old books either.
@@kmashup Most of those are definitely used VERY often in kanji especially in media like movies, games and novels
@@kmashup I've seen them written in kanji when playing mobile games. There is a difference in 下さい and ください。From what I've read, you use the kanji version if you're asking to receive something (e.g.サインを下さい), while if you're making a polite request (e.g. この文例を読んでみてください), you write it in hiragana. As for the others, it's very common to see 貴方 and 鞄, at least from some mobile games I've played. Even if they are more commonly written in hiragana, they're common enough that most people should be able to recognize them once they studied long enough.
This is why other languages introduced word spacing.
One task that has helped me learn some Japanese is translating songs from English to Japanese by myself, or trying to. The more outlandish the song, in fact, the more memorable the words are 💀
I’ve been learning Japanese since 9 (granted 3 years was wasted since as a kid all id do was use Duolingo and read vocab without any memorization strategy) and I’ve heard that’s a good method. What’s the craziest lyric you’ve seen so far? 👰♂️
WRONG EMOJI
*🤯
@@bubbleswashere. Did you know that you can edit comments?
@@voidbite uh huh. Did you know that you can kindly stop yourself and think before trying to nitpick at someone you don’t know?
Your writing is absolutely beautiful!
I mean, the "Calligrapher" in his username is a hint as to why.
@@brkr78 have you never seen a complement before
@@YUGAMISEKAI Sure, but saying that a caligrapher's writing is beautiful is like telling a chef that he is actually good at cooking - it's kind of part of the job. And considering the fact that this was deliberately written in the style of - more or less - a typewriter or computer font, i.e. very clean, very "sterile", which is nothing special as this is one of the foundations from which a caligrapher's personal style derives, I would even go so far as to say that saying the writing is beautiful is like telling a chef he can cook fried eggs well. Yes sure, it requires a certain amount of skill, but it is still a basic skill.
Feel free to disagree with me, but I believe that going into extatic exuberance over every little thing you see diminishes or even destroys the value of truly impressive performances.
@@brkr78 I imagine that a chef would be happy if someone complimented their cooking, even if it was something quite simple.
learning to be happy and appreciative on the little things is the first step to a more positive outlook in life
you never know if a simple compliment and appreciation on everyday activity can actually give a big impact to someone, especially if their having a bad day
so simple appreciation is great for both ways
As difficult as kanji can be to learn, they definitely do provide context in a sentence and shorten it down, provided you know them
クリスマスの日本は面白い
クリスマスの ひ ほんは おもしろい
クリスマスの にっぽんは おもしろい
"Provided you already know what's coming next, you'll understand what's coming next."
@@ldobehardcoreif you learn things you know them, a mindblowing concept for you im sure
I remember when, in videogames from 5th and 6th gen, programmers solved the problem of kanjis not fitting in the game by written them in Katakana. I couldn't understand that they still did that in games of 6th generation because games were gaining more and more screen resolution.
An example of that is in _Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door_ where, in its Japanese version, the kanji 「私」 is mostly written as 「ワタシ」.
Your calligraphy makes my mouth water with jealousy, even though I almost never write in Japanese in my daily life!
とっても綺麗で滑らかな筆使いが見ていて心地良いです✨ずっと見てられる(*´꒳`*)💕どうしたらこんなに綺麗な字を描けるようになりますか？私は「左手で描いたの？」って時々言われるくらい下手なんです💦
Aww
私は両利きでどちらの手でも字を書けますが、残念ながらどちらで書いても下手です。
なので、恐らく左手で書いたことがないと思われるコメ主さんには、まだ可能性が残されている？試さない方がいいか.....
それにしても、字が綺麗な人の筆使いは綺麗ですよね。
私は字が綺麗な人にはよく「焦るな、丁寧に書けばいいだけだから」と言われます。
@@GawaineRodry アドバイスありがとうございます(* ॑꒳ ॑* )⋆*✨左右両方で描けるってすごいです！ドラムやったら上手そうです✨早速私も左手で描いてみたのですが「初めて日本語描いた人ですか？」って感じの予想の上行く破壊力を持った字が爆誕しましたw「焦らず丁寧に書く」心がけてみます(*´꒳`*)
文字が凄まじく汚い人間ですが、使うペンの相性でかなり変わります。
昔はクルトガと、適当な三色ボールペンを使っていたのですが、今は少し重めのシャーペンや濃いめの鉛筆(芯を伸ばすやつ付き)と個別になってる0.5ミリ程度のボールペンを使ってます。
ペンでかなり文字が変わるのでよかったら試してみてください
文字の練習はとにかく自分が綺麗に書ける方法を探すみたいなやり方してます。
当時を知る友達から文字綺麗になったと言われました
This is why Korean added spaces between words when they switched from hanja to hangul. ははは はなが すき isn't so hard to read -- I mean, ははは is a little weird but that's an unusual enough problem that it would be fine imo
also a spelling reform on ha -> wa to reflect phonetic change would be appropriate
@@HaramGuys, I agree with you and @miladragon.
Korean is a dream to read, meanwhile Japanese still using Kanji entirely defeats the purpose of learning it compared to Chinese. If I am going to have to learn traditional characters, I might as well learn and use the language which only uses simplified versions of them. I can read hangul and pronounce it all, and I have NO IDEA what a single word in hangul means. I love that meaning is the only thing I have left to know.
@@stephenwithaph1566how does it entirely defeat the purpose? simply adding spaces wouldnt change the fact that hiragana alone isnt enough to properly communicate the meaning of different words. sure it improves readability, but most japanese words have others with the same pronunciation and completely different meanings. kanji helps with understanding meaning and sentence structure, essentially serving the same purpose of spaces in helping separate nouns and verbs from particles and other grammar parts.
@@tayzers69 chinese is a great example of a language with multiple characters meaning the same thing requiring context to assess the meaning.
like OP posted, "haha wa hana ga suki"
はは は はな が すき
isn't particularly ambiguous, unless I'm wrong and はは は はな has many different meanings.
Also, for clarity, different sentence structure and word choice can be used in extreme cases, including in english:
The police police exist to police the police officers.
-> police police police police officers
The disposition of a character denotes that character's nature.
->The character of a character characterizes the character's character.
As a personal gripe, written languages should be easy to learn.That's y peepol mak fun ov iglish speling.
We may be used to it, but it's certainly not as clear as it should be, and certainly has room to improve -- katakana doing no favors for japanese's reading learning curve.
For context, I am a Chinese learner learning Japanese. I already passed N1 so I am confident that I know Japanese well enough even though I am not at the native level yet. So I understand my point of view can be biased as I do love Chinese characters aka (hanzi, kanji, hanja), but seeing the comments section honestly sickens me.
I will just address some of the comments that are against the use of kanji.
1. Regarding adding of spaces. While it does seem that adding spaces can help in the example given in the video, it's only a short sentence. Reading long texts especially literature and legal texts will be a nightmare if there's no kanji and all hiragana and katakana even with the spaces.
Also, if you have studied Japanese, Chinese and Korean, you would have noticed by now that a these three languages do not use spaces. So for people who say that the Japanese should start adopting spaces are thinking from a western mindset, not considering that fact that Asians (in this case japanese, I won't speak for all other Asian languages) think differently from westerners. Also adding spaces won't help when there are words with the same pronunciation in the same sentence.
2. 'Homophones isn't only a Japanese thing, why Japanese can't get rid of kanji and be like the other languages to use context?'
While i agree homophones isn't exclusively in Japanese, the way homophones worm for different languages are also different. In English, homophones occur when words of slightly different spelling are pronounced the same, such as 'die' and 'dye'. Even though 'dye' and 'dye' are pronounced the same, they are still spelled differently so you will know which word is being referred to when reading. However in Japanese, as someone else in the comments kindly pointed out, is limited to the 50 sounds hence the pronunciation is very simple. Such as 買う(buy) and 飼う(raise a pet). Both are pronounced and written as かう in hiragana. If kanji is not used, you wouldn't even know which かう they are referring to in written form. So ペットをかう, is it to buy a pet or raise a pet? No one knows when reading.
For people asking, 'if they need kanji for written, then how on the world do they converse verbally?' That's the thing, in verbal every day conversations, you are able to clarify be it with your actions such as gesturing or pointing and you can also explain which word you are referring to in person. I do agree that context helps but they only help with real life conversations spoken in daily life. It wouldn't be so difficult to the point where you need to keep guessing which meaning they are referring to since the conversations usually wouldn't be too deep to the point where you need to guess kanji. HOWEVER, I assure you that Japanese are thinking with kanji inside their minds even when conversing. They even write kanji on their palms as a last resort if they still don't know what the other person is talking about. So yes, even kanji can be used in spoken daily life in that manner.
3. 'This seems to be an overcomplication of a simple problem that can be solved witb spaces and punctuation. I understand that kanji is convenient when you learnt it but is it really worth the effort to learn all that to make things easy to read?,
I have already pointed out why spaces won't help in the long run in point 1. I will answer that yes, kanji is worth the convenience once you learnt them. The reason why Japanese children are still able to get by with only hiragana and katakana is because they are freaking kids. How difficult is their conversations going to be to the point where you need kanji??!!! As you go to higher level Japanese such as business Japanese, legal, scientific etc etc etc, you definitely need kanji, which also relates back to point 1.
4. Like I said, Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans think differently from westerners. Kanji carries the meaning so it is much easier for them to think and relate as opposed to thinking by pure pronunciation and phonetics alone. 'Having the same pronunciations for many words while depending on the kanji to differentiate the meaning defeats the purpose of a legible language' Again, we think differently from the westerners and we can use Chinese characters in a way that westerners might not be able to understand or appreciate.
While there are many arguments that I can make in favour of kanji and I can continue to go on forever, I am going to stop here as whatever I said at the top isn't really as important as I want to say below.
1. Like I said earlier, the comments section sickens me to the point of disgust. While I understand that Japanese is a difficult language to learn, the lack of respect from the commenters truly reminded me of how trashy the Internet can be. Japanese is not your language, it's the Japanese's. If they themselves love and appreciate the use of kanji, I don't see why you guys have any right to call for change when it's not your own language to begin with. (Entitled much?) Expecting Japanese to conform to western conventions instead of accepting and loving Japanese for what it is.
2. 'Lomography is outdated they should have gotten rid of kanji and updated the language to be phonetic' This shows that the people think that phonetic languages are 'superior' while languages like Chinese and Japanese should have 'followed' Korean and gotten rid of Chinese characters. While Korean most uses hanguel, they still do use hanja for homophones especially in official documents etc to avoid confusion. I don't even know where to begin with this line of thought. Where's the respect? Who are you guys to determine that kanji is 'inferior' when you guys probably don't even thoroughly know how Japanese works. People in the comments act like they are geniuses when they can find a counterargument to the point mentioned in the video when they are only touching the tip of the iceberg and doesn't even know how Japanese truly works.
3. 'I gave up studying Japanese because of kanji, they should get rid of kanji to make it more accessible for foreign learners' HUH?!?!?!?!?!?! Like I said in point 1 of this section, Japanese is meant for the Japanese, since when do the Japanese have to care about what foreign learners think? If you chose to pick up Japanese, you have to mentally prepare that it will be a long journey and accept it. I don't understand the concept of having to reform the language for foreigners. That's seriously the most egocentric and selfish thinking I have seen.
All in all, the reasons that I come up with in favour for kanji doesn't matter. I just want people to know how to show respect to a language and culture that's different from their own. Japanese have already accepted kanji as part of their culture and they love it. If people can't even show respect to the language, I can't imagine them showing respect to the actual culture and places if they visit Japan. There have already been many instances where foreigners have inconvenienced and disrespected Japanese culture, and it evidently shows how japan is banning tourists from visiting geisha towns because they harassed the geisha for photos etc.
If you cannot respect Japanese language and culture, then get lost. Japan won't be a good place for you to be in, period.
たかみさんへ
この動画が面白くて好きです！
僕は日本人じゃないですけど中国人として漢字の大事さと大切さがわかります！
自己的に漢字も好きだから日本人が漢字が好きなことを知って嬉しいです！
だがコメント欄に無礼な外国人が沢山居て漢字のことを責めました。
ぜひこんなコメントを無視して必ず漢字の美しさを世界に見せてください！
Korean uses spaces
The way he writes is so satisfying. Man I love Kanji
It's fascinating how different the "writing characters" developed in the history all around the world
it actually never began in the Americas, the Europeans brought it
@@Said-uz4wz You're right, but I think before Europeans landed in America, there was some sort of writing used by the natives. Btw I'm not an expert of American history 😅
@@simopics when I say Americas I refer to both the south and north America continents; as far as I know (anything besides the US and Canada) they didn't have any writing. Me neither.
@@Said-uz4wz Understood 👍🏼
@@simopics you are correct, Mayans had the glyph System. It is completely wrong to state there were no writing systems in America before Europeans.
THE HANDWRITING IS SO GOOD
I have learned enough Japanese now that I genuinely laughed while watching this! I have a long way to go but this is amazing lmao
Kanji also helps Chinese people to guess the meaning of the Japanese sentences without learning Japanese at all, and the accuracy is decent.
I mean the accuracy is mostly under 25% but we don't need to memorize the liter so it helps me learn the meaning easily
@@iainchao7846 yeah could be said the same vice versa. Some characters are different tho so we need to be careful.
But makes it harder for the cirilic and latin alphabets.
Kanji also helps Japanese people to guess the meaning of the Chinese sentences lol.
Didn't know we are same.
If you already know Chinese and English, just memorize the 50on well with some basic grammars you are almost flying
This is exactly me, when i was learning kanji in the beginning and after some times i realize how important kanji is, sometimes i read kanji more faster than hiragana lol
海外勢がめっちゃ難しい分析してて、日本語に申し訳なくなった(´･ω･｀)
なんかわかる、、
Your handwriting is beautiful. I have fallen in love with your handwriting!!
What if you remove the kanji but invent a system to denote the proper pitch-accent? Would that be easy to read?
you will in effect get something close to either Mandarin pinyin or Vietnamese, and personally neither are easy to read at all, let alone tell the actual words apart
@@darkness74185 I agree, but how do blind Chinese people read Chinese braille? It’s based on Pinyin and doesn’t annotate for tone.
@@alexiscool8474 yeah you just can't, so you'll have to hard train yourself to pick from context clues, and writing is almost entirely off the table
That's quite admirably good, clear, and consistent handwriting. I'm rather envious.
**sees your channel/user name** Calligrapher, eh? No wonder your penmanship is so good.
Kanji is a serious pain to study and learn, but we all know we get lost without it. xD
That pen writes absolutely beautiful, I gotta buy it! Also, the clip is funny. Kanji are a pain to learn, but now I see why it makes more sense to use them!
I tensed at how beautifuly you wrote them kanji
I've been learning Japanese for two years and it's now wayyy harder to read a block of text without kanji. Besides they're half the fun.
Beautiful handwriting! What kind of pen do you use?
I think, even if you could remove kanji without giving place to confusion, it would just make reading so much more difficult, especially for foreigners learning the language!!
If you recognise correctly the kanji being used, you can read it instantly, but if it's written in kana, you have to read each letter, and it takes longer when it's not our first language. Besides, one of the coolest things of kanji is that I can read a word made of 2 or more kanji and have no idea how to pronounce it but know exactly what it means, and when we're reading, pronunciation is totally irrelevant.
All in all, having kanji, hiragana and katakana makes it much easier to read a text because it contains a lot of metalinguistic information.
there is a writing brush pen
fude pen 筆ペン hard type
me: wow such pretty handwriting
also me: oh he's a calligraphy teacher LMFAO
Medical words are easier in kanji too.
・Otorhinolaryngology
耳鼻科(ear nose subject)
・pneumonia
肺炎(lung flame)
・Obstetrics and gynecology
産婦人科(birth lady subject)
I think English is harder because you have to keep learning words unless you know latin. Japanese might be difficult at first but you just need to know a few thousand and that's it. Elementary school is enough.
単語単位で言ったら、日本語より英語の方がよっぽど複雑でわかりにくいよね。
漢字で書いてくれると、読めなくても直感的に意味がわかるから便利だと思う。
@@rinpopo7812 まさにそうだよね
Same in Vietnamese
@@rinpopo7812 文字の種類が多ければ、一文字に込められる意味が詳しくなる
After many years here in Japan I have to agree. It’s the funnest thing, when you can’t say out loud the reading of certain kanji but you know exactly what they mean. You get used to it and it gets easier.
Early Japanese arcade games don't support Kanji due to memory limit. It's not that bad, else how would people even talk to each other without the Kanjis in their voice? Spaces were needed, though.
I'm not saying Kanjis aren't useful, as I'm well aware of the vast number of homophones in Japanese. I'm just saying that removing Kanjis isn't different from people talking to each other.
It is not bad just because you dont care how fast you can read.
Yeah but also the sentences and phrases are abolutely limited and childish...
Also it does sometimes take several guess work and readings to understand what they are saying, espicially without audio
Exactly, all you need is spaces.
@@pengu8734 spoken japanese is limited and childlish? Lmao
As someone who only speaks English, I have no idea what I'm doing here, and what I just watched.
Without kanji, saying you need more paper in life could get very philosophical, very quickly.
その日本は面白い、そして日曜日日本の日食食べた
そのひ ほんは おもしろい、そして にちようび にほんの にっしょく たべた
Interesting topic. I still find it even more interesting that a lot of Japanese tend to forget a lot of kanji they learnt in school. What would be a good way to retain what we are learning? Any ideas?
To actually use them, like any other skill. We can try writing or poetry as a way to retain those unusual words we seldom use in our daily activities. Reading Japanese literature is also a great way.
小説を読む。おすすめ
Others have mentioned using spaces, that helps parse words. I'll add that for homophones writing native japanese terms in hiragana, chinese loans in katakana, and european (and other) loans in roman letters makes a huge difference.
Yeah the space thing is funny because for example Korean only has one alphabet and they use spaces, and they _usually_ get along fine through context but when homophone problems come along guess how they solve them? With kanji! 😂 (They put the kanji version of the word in parenthesis after it so the reader knows which meaning of the homophone the writer is talking about. Or something like that. 😅)
In English we can get around that problem because homophones generally have different spellings and therefore you can tell their different meanings. However that doesn't work in an (almost) phonetic language like Korean.
~:~
@@harshmnr I have a booklet from the 1940s or 50s somewhere in my closet. It was a proposed spelling system for japanese using latin letters. Homophones were spelled differently based on word origin. Native words, chinese loans from tang dynasty era, chinese loans from other dynasties, recent european loans, etc. it was pretty simple
kana only + spaces is how children's books are written, it's definitely legible
@@LC-hd5dc Until you run into the word Jou which has around 50 definitions. Yeah, good luck with that. Kana would only work if you simplified the language, and then, if you do that, you would lose most of the depth of the language's literature. That might not seem like an issue in English but the big difference is that Japan keeps traditions alive while English doesn't. Medieval literature is mostly gibberish to modern English speakers while Japanese medieval and even ancient literature is still understandable due to kanji.
@@LC-hd5dc It’s legible, but annoying. It works in children’s books because the language is usually pretty simple. But when you start adding more complex 熟語 or god forbid 四字熟語 it just starts getting ugly and slow to read. Yes, you can do it, but no one, least of all native Japanese speakers, really wants to do it.
It’s also nice to be able to read quickly and have sentences take up less space.
遠隔操作の飛行機は空高く飛んでる (The remote control plane is flying high in the sky.)
えんかくそうさの ひこうきは そらたかく とんでる
Both are perfectly readable, but the bottom one just looks uglier and feels like it takes more effort for my brain. Anyone who can read Japanese knows what I mean, but it’s hard to explain to anyone who can’t.
I mean... it works in Pokémon and many other games using subtitles (for a younger audience). The key is to use spaces, pitch markers (as diacriticals) and katakana as well because if it's just hiragana without spaces, then it can indeed get a bit too difficult.
弟が漢字嫌いで勉強してくれないのでこれ見せて説得してきます
Been studying Japanese for almost 20 years and I have always felt like adding spaces would help mitigate this problem. There are a lot of words with similar sounds, but context clues and spaces between words would do a lot minimize confusion. It’s not like people are confused when they hear these sentences spoken. Also, I’ve always wondered why the article “wa” is written using the character for “ha” but I’ve never really gotten an answer, though my guess is they used to be pronounced as written then changed over time. But it still makes things confusing (same with wo read as o).
Still no where near as crazy as the English language spelling-wise lol
My teacher told me that は is used specifically because it looks nicer. The same applies for へ being used in place of え.
Every language has letters / characters that changes sound is just how I see it. Imaging the frustration someone goes through when learning English, and words like "sure" is pronounced "shur", and "slur" isn't pronounced "Shlur"
The original pronunciation of は was "pa," which changed into "fa (using both lips, not teeth)" and the standard sound is now "ha" (Japanese finally stopped using lips and replaced it with glottal sound). You can see the "fa" sound in a Japanese-Portuguese dictionaries written by Christian missionaries in 17th century. However, the lip sound remained in some words such as numeral 羽 (as in 一羽 "ichiwa," whose original sound should be "itipa" and later "ichifa"; N.B. there's also the standard "ha" reading for 羽 itself as in 羽虫 "hamushi") but was reduced into a semivowel with rounded lips. The article "wa" is another example of them, and the kana for the "wa" remains its original: は.
They do add spaces in old video games where they couldn't add kanji, and it is still hell to get through the kana salad.
What surprises me more is you saying you have been studying japanese for 20 years, when most people that go for at least 1 year will never even conceive drop kanji usage just because of how useful it is in vocabulary acquisition.
It could also be BECAUSE you have a 20 year leverage now you find kanji uneeded. It will also save a lot of paper since you have condensed meaning in fewer characters, the environment also appreciates kanji for that!
@@MsSoulBladertry to say は？to every japanese, you will find out how fanncy it will be.
I know effectively nothing about the Japanese language and writing system and had always kinda wondered why there was more than one set of characters. Needless to say this was eye opening 🤣
please explain it to me sensei
Ive been learning japanese for a few months and ive been putting off learning kanji. It's just terrifying
I should go learn Japanese. might earn me a few brain points.
honestly, I love the handwriting and the language! I find it very captivating, and the feel of intelligence. better than learning math, at least. the comment section is the final push to motivate me into learning Japanese. plus, I'll get some off time from my video games.
something funny about someone with a weeb username trying to act nonchalant about liking japanese
As a guy learning Japanese as well as giving Entrance Exam, believe me, Maths is easier 😂😂
Go for it! I started learning about 5 months ago. It is very difficult, but nothing one can’t conquer if they put their mind to it! And I agree; it is a most beautiful language!
คำพ้องเสียงอาจมีในภาษาเวียดนามด้วย แต่ภาษาเวียดนามไม่ใช้คำว่าคันจิ ภาษาญี่ปุ่นก็เช่นเดียวกัน
どうおんいぎごは ベトナムごも ありうる。 でも ベトナムごは かんじを つかわず、にほんごも おなじ。
わたしも、
ベトナムです
That's because you use spaces between words....japanese doesn't and it doesn't have to be forced to use roman numbers like vietnamese were
@@snowlynx1585 And if you use spaces between words, that's the problem, because you use kanji, you don't have spaces between words, but if you don't use kanji, you need spaces between words, so you're going to use them
@@ฯทไก it still doesn't work if you use spaces. You need dozens or maybe a hundred new hiragana if you want to use spaces, but japanese already know enough kanji for everyday life so it is pointless
tbh this is why we invented a revolutionary thing called the "space" between words
ButIcanreadandwritewithoutspace
@@caseypepan980 yesbutitcangetabithardtoreadifyouhavealotofveryshortwordsoneafterthenextlikethis
it's fun to read, but a bit of a headache
@@caseypepan980 itgetsveryhardtoreadafterawhileandwithotherwordsalthoughitsreallycoolitmakesmyeyeshurt
We had exactly this issue in the medieval era, until some Irish priests made it cool to add spaces in their Bibles.
K
"Shi" can still mean 42 different things
😂😂😂lolz!!!!😂😂😂😂 This was Amazing and hilarious!😂
To be fair, the same type of problem could be replicated in English. The remedy in our case is spacing.
"はは は はな が すき"
and
"かた たたき"
are very much readable.
Wether one considers the necessity for spacing to be a flaw in a language would then be the next question.
I feel like Japanese people are stuck with the idea that it's impossible and that having 100,000 characters is the easier route to take for some reason.
It goes right into the "still using fax machines and hanko stamps" folder.
@@MarkyTeriyaki I've heard a Japanese person say that it's part of their history and culture. And to be fair, if that's the argument, I can accept it. I'm not gonna tell Japanese what they ought to do. But the insistance on, "it would be hard to read" is just funny to me.
Here is your savior Aristophanes of Byzantium.
oh I just saw this after I commented, I suggested the same exact thing. I guess its more traditional for them to save space by using Kanji which can severely reduce the length of sentences and make it more compressed. But honestly i see Kanji as a over-complication of something very simple, if Japanese could be written as easily as it is spoken, I'd be very happy and it'll increase the ease at which this language is transferred to either a new generation or everyone around the globe.
@@ravishbhasin7041 There is a reason Japanese (written) is nicknamed moon runes.
Also, yeah from what I understand even their own people have a hell of a time learning it.
the "ha ha ha" feels a little disingenuous lol... if we're removing kanji, may as well fix the dumb "ha = wa" thing while we're at it. ははわはながすき isn't too bad, but I don't know if she likes flowers or noses...
Can't stop laughing at this point 🤣, my apologies, I'm gonna learn kanji
'ha ha ha ha'......I knew that one coming
This handwriting is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes. (When I used to study Japanese, my handwriting would also bring tears to your eyes, but not for the same reasons 🤣)
When you have a good base of japanese vocabulary and start enjoying real japanese media, kana only stuff are a nightmare. i was talking to this guy about japanese and i was complaining to him about how i dont like that this specific game was all in hiragana. He was like "what ? all hiragana is way easier". Thats when i realized he was probably not very far and reading only childrens book.
heck, even my japanese friend told me she hates kana only stuff. Kanjis are complicated to get into, but it is such an incredible tool to convey a word meaning and avoid the confusion between two similarly pronounced word. It just flows so easily, sometimes even faster than reading the syllables properly. I forgot how to pronounce some words but i know exactly what word it is and instantly from seeing it thanks to kanji. Sometimes i dont even have to read the sentence properly, its like visual recognition. Its incredible and very foreign to a western person that grew up with a western writing system
I've been trying to learn just all the basic kanji for a decade and I'm not even half way. Regardless, please japan, please, _never_ compromise your culture for the sake of simplicity or being inclusive to us gaijin. It is not worth it. When you learn kanji they are immediately recognizable. It takes the brain a split second to process the meaning, often in a tiny space.
For instance: "agriculture, industry, and commerce" is 農工商, which is still more economic than the hiragana のうこうしょう. Also, the sense of the word gets completely lost. It would be a huge loss if Japanese were to stop using kanji.
Kanji (漢字, pronounced [kaɲdʑi] (listen)) are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. - Wiki
Por0d0mulle , there is no push to remove kanji, if so, the motive wouldn't be for foreigners
every language is wacky like this. In Serbian, a perfectly correct way to say "the mountains up there burn even worse" is "Горе горе горе горе!" and it's no less beautiful :)
In Dutch we have: Wat was was voor was was was? Means: what was wax before wax was wax?
Or: Als vliegen vliegen vliegen vliegen vliegen achterna. Which means: If flies fly, flies fly following flies. Or something…
Reminds me of a Turkish tounge twister we have: "Şu köşe yaz köşesi şu köşe kış köşesi ortada su şişesi". Even though it looks simple it is harder than the really long ones (at least to me 😂). It means that corner is the summer corner this corner is the winter corner in the middle of them there is a water bottle. There are ones with more of similar sounding words like: "Hakkı haklının hakkını yemiş. Haklı Hakkı'dan hakkını istemiş. Hakkı haklıya hakkını vermeyince haklı da Hakkı'nın hakkından gelmiş." This is easier than the 1st one actually 🙂
I easily understand the first one.
"Haha (my mom/mom) wa (intertopic) hanaga (flower/flowers) suki (love/loves) desu (end statement)."
In Japanese, most of statements structure just like this: Subject + Object + Predicate, with also "wa+desu" as the basic topic maker. Adding "ka" in "wa+desu+ka" creates a question mark for a statement.
おばあさんは "おいる"
"オイル"で りょうりを する
漢字を使わないテキストは珍しくないんだけど(子供向けとか)、カタカナ、改行、句読点、そして英語みたいにスペースあけるとかめっちゃ頑張ってるのを思い出した。
何もないひらがなだと解読作業が発生するな。
Out of topic, I managed to read the hiragana and I'm happy that I still remember it, it has been a long time since the last time I learnt japanese (writings) at school 😄
I mean, that is a problem that is solved with spaces. Other languages have the same problem after all where two words are written the same and you need to figure out what it means. There is a reason why people use German as an example, because the word "umfahren" is the opposite or "umfahren" (first one means to drive around while the other one means to hit someone while driving). It's something most languages have to deal with. And I can make similar looking funny sentences in German like "Fischers Fritze fischt frische Fische". Doesn't mean, we suddenly have to think about including Kanji into the language.
Now obviously, there is a reason to still use Kanji and that is that you can read it faster and easier IF you have learned all the Kanji compared to if everything was written in Hiragana. The question is just what you value more. That it's easier to learn the written language or if you want people to read it faster once they are accustomed to it.
Even with my 4 years in Japan, this is the first time I've seen readable Japanese handwriting.
You must be living in a cave or something if this is the first time you've seen a readable one