The Kanji Iceberg Explained
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 มิ.ย. 2024
- “Japanese is easy.” - My Japanese Professor
Intro: (0:00)
The Basics: (1:11)
Japanese is Easy Right?: (4:05)
Oh No: (6:52)
Japanese is Possible Right?: (12:37)
Nihilism: (19:08)
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Resources:
Alternate titles:
Are Kanji Hard?
What are Kanji?
Japanese Iceberg Explained
Is Japanese the Hardest Language?
Keywords:
Language learning
Kanji
japanese language
iceberg
Apologies for the long wait, life has been hectic. Anyways, next video will not take as long, haha.
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it already did
I will never call French horribly inefficient again
@@aliceberethartFuck, I autocorrected that, and didn't realize your wordplay.
为什么学习日语，中文比日语好 😁😅
I learn Japanese and French at the same time
@@Zapatero078 Maybe you should do Japanese sessions and French sessions instead of both at once? Unless Frapanese is your goal, that is.
@@llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogeryc... 因为中国没有文化所以没有意思
If you know this language and it's not your native language. You deserve a golden statue of yourself.
This guy is giving everyone the impression that it's this super hard thing. It's not.
You learn vocab and then everything else that he's talking about is something you just casually observe.
But ill take the statue sure haha
The point isn't about Native it is about Reading
Insert Obama awarding Obama meme here
I don't know why I'm doing this to myself
“The Kanji on the left means day, the Kanji on the right means book. This means the day of the book.”
The word in English is 'dook', as in "I sat down for a long dook".
Kanji activates my fight or flight response.
Nah only math does it to me.
Stop sign in Taiwan:Pause
School zone sign in Taiwan:Literature😂😂😂
I studied Japanese as a kid (14-16) to watch anime and play the Pokémon games a year early, I probably learned 1000-2000 words (many that only appeared in games like "jumped out" as in "A wild Farfetchd Jumped Out") and probably about 500 Kanji.
I left it alone but could still understand anime pretty well without looking at the subtitles.
About 6 years later I got back into languages when I went to Europe and it turned out my French was actually trash. I got obsessive and got my French good again but just believed my Japanese was good enough.
About 4 more years later I got really into Chinese, and a lot of Japanese characters ended up helping, but Simplified Chinese makes most characters different so really maybe only 50 or so Kanji were truly helpful.
I still thought my Japanese was pretty good, but I got so good at Chinese that it somehow overtook my Japanese, and one day I met a japanese person and when I tried to speak Japanese, only Chinese could come out. I really wonder why that is, I think because I think in Kanji and kana, Chinese and Japanese were stored in the same theoretical "box" in my brain and Chinese ended up overtaking it.
Now I pretty much just remember the writing of Kanji but not most readings, and the kana, and the grammar principles but I have to think very hard to remember words.
Moral of the story, consistency matters most and if you don't use it you WILL lose it.
omggg same, i studied Japanese as a kid, now im really passionate about chinese and im leaving behind japanese... I should get back to it before i start forgetting stuff, but i undarstand the feeling of struggling with japanese because of chinese...
Are you going to study Japanese again?
@naoko707 yeah I started using this card game called Japanese the game and it's helped me remember so much. Just gotta practice speaking more
It's true for everything even maths. You can't remember everything especially if you're 50 and the last time you did maths was in highschool
Understanding spoken Japanese is my weakest skill of em all. But aside from speaking to Japanese people there's really no way to practice it. Learning thru anime is very slow and inefficient.
I thought he was gonna start talking about how hiragana are also originally kanji when he mentioned removing kanji at the end. Definitely the “Luke, I am your father” moment of Japanese learning. Overall pretty good and comprehensive video imo
I tried to limit my mention of Hiragana and Katakana so that presumably someone who doesn't know Japanese can still follow the video. Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji all introduce unique solutions/issues 😂 My first video on this channel goes into the problems of Katakana specifically!
I have learned some Chinese before. After stepping into Japanese kanji, I noticed a lot of the "multiple readings for the same character" happens because:
instead of using different character for different word (like Chinese), in Japanese multiple words can be written with the same character, usually followed by hiragana so you can guess the pronounciation.
So Japanese uses less characters, while Chinese uses more characters
i just love the "guess the pronunciation part". feels like a system made by bad teachers so they can say whatever they teach is never wrong
This is so true. If you find kanji hard, it means you haven't learned enough.😂
By "less characters" you mean less kanji because otherwise hiragana takes a lot of space compared to a kanji which is more "compact".
we call the 四字熟語 “成语” in china. it is sooo hard, we had to learn so many of them and understand their background when we were young.
Oh, interesting! I don't know enough about Chinese to understand how compound words work given that I thought word order determined grammar, but if its anything like 四字熟語 then I feel your pain, haha.
@@lazyfluency yeah, it is quite similar to 四字熟語. I think some of them lost in translation throughout the years. such as 一石二鸟 is more commonly replaced as 一举两得 or 一箭双雕 in chinese. A lot of pain to learn them, but these things make you sound smart haha
Now I'm starting to wonder if there are any Japanese original 四字熟語. Like it is one thing to have to learn esoteric culture from hundreds of years ago, but it is another thing to learn about cultural references from an entire other country with a separate language and culture, lol. I am also terrible with geography which doesn't help, haha
@@lazyfluency There are a lot of Japanese original ones, like 花鳥風月 and 風林火山 and etc; Korean and Vietnamese also happen to have a bunch of their own. China basically came up with the most troll language trend that the Sinosphere all adopted
ahhhh.... I see... Thanks China😂
I'm half japanese and watching this video made me realise all of the fustrating things that we just see as normal. good luck japanese learners xd
"There is a correct way to write Kanji" -> There is stroke order, and then there is 必...
me: yes, but also i'm going to ignore that
@@badrequest5596 The Japanese order is different from the Chinese order, and the Chinese order is different from the Taiwanese order. And then from historical manuscripts that preserved the flow of writing, we know that there are another 2 or 3 ways of writing it that's different from _either_ Japanese, Chinese or Taiwanese.
At this point, you could probably write it any way you like and still claim it's valid.
@@andyyang5234nice, ima start writing it right to left, bottom to top- thanks for your blessing😮
I'm just glad the verbs you've taught me doesn't have any complex irregularities.
"We all Suck at Kanji"
This video randomly popped up in my feed and I'm very impressed. I've been learning Japanese for 3-4 years now and this video actually had a surprising amount of useful information I'd never noticed or been told (such as the meaning tending to be on the left hand and reading on the right) I feel I learned a fair bit. Big kudos.
This is one of the most well crafted videos i have ever seen and it deserves a reward. i am honestly blown away.
Thanks so much!
I can go you one deeper on the iceberg: 百舌鳥 (mozu/もず) is TWO syllables/mora but THREE characters. Not even a silent one like 五右衛門 (goemon/ごえもん), which has 4 characters and 4 syllables/kana but actually MORE characters than syllables/kana.
A mozu is a bull-headed shrike, a kind of bird.
Damn, that's a nice find😂
There is actually another bird with similar naming shenanigans. I can't remember what it is though🥲
well at least the last one is "tori" and that's enough for most I guess
Also 赤車使者, but reading as MIZU
Fantastic video, fascinating information clearly explained by someone who knows what he’s talking about. And the graphics and sound are a lot of fun as well.
I have two kanji questions from my own time in Japan I’d like to learn more about:
- given there are so many kanji, what sort of limitations are there in terms of what kanji you can write on the computer? How did this work in the early days of computers of Japan?
- what’s the deal with those tiny “idiot hiragana” you sometimes see over kanji in books? I know this is mostly done in writing for kids, but I feel I sometimes saw it in other places too. I definitely remember seeing them over the names of politicians on election posters, which I guess makes sense now having learned about the crazy world of kanji names.
Wow! Just a bit ago I was reading your community post about iceberg videos! Huge fan, thank you so much!
Answering the first question is a whole deep dive and video in itself, but I will say that one benefit Japanese had over Chinese at the time was that Japanese already had two phonetic scripts. This made the transition to typing a lot less painful. In fact, the first novel ever written (and by a woman at that), The Tale of Genji was written entirely in the phonetic script hiragana. Which is to say that technically speaking, Japanese does not need kanji to function. Although kanji can be absurdly difficult, there are many benefits that kanji has in Japanese once you get used to it.
As for the second question, the "idiot hiragana" (lol) tell you how to read kanji. Whether or not the reading for any given kanji is provided is based on the target audience of the work, and the kanji's frequency/difficulty. The larger the audience, the more likely you will see readings provided. Which is why election posters (thankfully) tend to provide name readings. As I said though, most of the time, name readings are not provided. This is especially so for family names. As to why, I think this has to do with the fact that many family names are common place, so even if the readings are weird, if you are born and raised in Japan, the assumption is that you should know how to read them. With that said, even for native speakers, reading people names is like rolling a dice and assuming your dice roll is correct, haha. Which is probably why the government recently enacted naming legislation.
Hi JJ, I am a huge fan and love your videos about Canada. Since I started watching your content, I became fascinated about Canada and politics, and I want to pursue politics when I'm older. I'm not a Japanese speaker or a professional, I'll be happy to provide you with my 2 cents for question no.1 .
Initially, it was difficult to write Kanji on the computer because of limited memory. When JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) was developed where it covered a small amount of Kanji (6,355). Afterwards, Unicode was developed. It was a way to represent text and to way to promote compatibility across different systems and languages. The expanded memory and processing capacity of computers enables them to handle larger character sets, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters in CJK Unicode. CJK became a common framework used in East Asian writing systems. This unification helps in standardizing the representation of common characters across these languages and each character is assigned a code. It also provided a standardized input system such as hiragana and romaji (latin alphabet) in Japanese and Pinyin for Chinese.
However, there are still many limitations of CJK unicode. For example, the Chinese Character Biang seen in 0:04 still can't be written due to the complexity, as the rendering engine or application does not handle complex characters well. Additionally, regional languages such as my native tongue of Cantonese has Characters that still aren't able to be processed on the computer. There is so much more to explain but it would require take much longer to cover everything.
Thanks for making videos and inspiring me and I hope this explanation is useful.
@@socoollafunnyvideo It is! Thanks!
In the early days of personal computers, you couldn't write kanji, only katakana. The keyboards would have a 'kana mode' key, which would flip between typing with the Latin alphabet and katakana, sort of like how caps lock works with upper and lowercase letters. The displays at the time did not have the resolution to display kanji well enough to be readable without making them comically big (I think most fonts were 8x8 pixels at the time), nor did they have the memory/storage to have a usable set of kanji, as far as I know.
Writing kanji on the first computers with kanji support involved writing a hexadecimal code for the character in question that you'd look up in a manual, sort of like alt-codes on Windows (are those still a thing?). However, people quickly began writing programs to make the conversion from kana to kanji (IME) easier, and for a time a lot of programs did it in their own way - so a word processor and a spreadsheet program might have different systems for doing the conversion. This ended up coalescing into generally having just one IME.
Generally, you can write any kanji you might need, although IMEs don't have literally every kanji, so sometimes you might have to copy-paste it. I think you can also manually add characters to the conversion dictionary, but I haven't found the need to do that personally. Sometimes it doesn't give the right kanji, but I've found that often, if you write a different reading (especially the onyomi), it'll be in the conversion list somewhere. For example, writing 'so' in order to get 塑 'deku' (I think deku isn't used much, so writing 'deku' doesn't work).
The small kana are called furigana, and are used to indicate how to read something, as you know. They're used when you don't expect at least some of the audience to know how to read what you wrote, when you want to differentiate between ambiguous readings (like the 身体 example he gave), or when you want to imply something or give the reader extra information maybe not present in dialogue, for example if someone says 'That bastard...', you can write the kanji for the name of the person, then put 'bastard' as furigana, if that makes sense. Sometimes authors will also make up words or terms, and so furigana can be used to introduce how to read them. I hope that makes sense.
@@doesthisusername fascinating! The role of computers in Japan for writing would make a good video
People often says "AIYO why uses Kanji when can just use Hiragana and Katakana", while not knowing that actually Hiragana and Katakana are also originated from Manyougana (万葉仮名) which are Kanji being adopted phonetically.
The use of hiragana phonetically is fundamentally different from kanji which is why I many people feel this way. Darth Vader might be Luke's father but that doesn't mean that Luke is Darth Vader😂
Been in Japan over 20 years and read Japanese at native level, and I can tell you one of the most annoying things is when something is written all in hiragana when it's usually written in kanji. It takes way longer to read, because Japanese has so many homophones. You can't get rid of kanji without completely changing the spoken language, too.
@@lazyfluency I don't understand the Starwars reference but I think he's trying to say that you have to respect the origin because there is a crossover. It's actually the cursive script that helped create the look of standard hiragana, and kanji readings gave the sound.
I know you say it's frustrating but think of Kanji as a tool to explain things with more depth. Even in English we have millions of words with complex origin but you only use the uncommon words when appropriate. There are basic ways to write, then there's more meaningful ways to write. Kanji give you the choice.
Let's not act like English words can't be confusing too
@@ThePallidor Homophones are not the reason for that. Kanji feel easier for natives and proficient foreigners because the way human brains process language is that we see a set of squiggles on the page/screen and our brains connect that shape with a word of the language. You process eg. English words just the same as you do kanji.
This has a flipside: Since fluent reading happens via mass exposure to the written form of a word, if a word is almost always written with kanji, your brain connects the kanji squiggles to the word and not the hiragana ones. If we write 大丈夫 most of the time, not だいじょうぶ、 'lo and behold, the first set of squiggles feels sensible, the second you have to expend effort to figure out what they're trying to say.
Why? Because your brain hasn't drawn the connection between this set of squiggles だいじょうぶ and its meaning. But it has drawn those connections between all the Latin letters in this post and the English words I intend to make you think about so you have no trouble reading my writing. Similarily, Korean people who are exposed to a completely alphabetic written version of their own language have no issue seeing 괜찮아 and connecting it with their equivalent of 大丈夫。
Basically: Fluency in reading is just about exposure, it doesn't actually matter whether Japanese is written with mixed script or only kana, people would come to read either style fluently through the mass exposure of lived life. Korean went through the exact same transition from a mixed script to completely phonetic script, and it worked out fine. Koreans read their language the same as I read Finnish or English.
If kanji were necessary for a readable language, Korean wouldn't be readable (they have all the same problems as Japanese due to a similar language with a similar history) and it would be impossible to talk about things clearly in Japanese. Yet Korean is functions fine with a phonetic script and you clearly can speak about complex topics in Japanese (and thus record them understandably with a phonetic script). People would just need to get used to it, and they would get used to it over time. It would be slow and feel uncomfortable for a while at first, though.
@@TheAwesomeAccount Kanji are perfectly fine in explanations, but in that aspect belong in etymological dictionaries, not everyday writing.
The shown calligraphy is very simple as long as you remember how to write "clouds" and "dragon" and mash them up together
youtube algorithm has blessed me once again, subbed!
Kanji, all the pain and stress of learning Chinese with none of the benefits of learning chinese
Bye bye no conjugations and consistent reading 😭
It's worth noting that 四字熟語 is a practice that extends far beyond Japanese - it's basically in large part Literary (Classical) Chinese. Japanese has its own idiomatic 4 character phrases, but fundamentally it comes from the same tradition, and a huge number of Japanese phrases were imported from Classical Chinese where these were common. It's so difficult because it's like learning a whole another language with the way ideas were constructed within the constraints of the Classical Chinese language. If there were an equivalent (which there isn't) it'd be kinda like learning idiomatic Latin and Greek philosophy but without learning Latin or Greek first and just using the readings we have borrowed from the languages into English.
There are also ghost kanji (yure kanji which appeared out of nowhere, an interesting story on its own), simplified kanji where hard to write parts of a kanji are replaced with katakana or latin alphabet letters and many more curiosities.
Kanji are one of the things that drew me into Japanese. They're beautifully complex and more convenient than any other writing system imo.
More power to you!
Yeah I’m learning them and I think they’re fun to learn and read
I do like the high information density per space taken up
Dude... Beautiful? Complex? Sure. Convenient? Sorry, I don't think you can say that with a straight face haha.
Kanji are also one of the things that drew me into Japanese and I love them for the same reasons as you.
Yes it can be convenient to see a new word you don't know that is composed of kanji you do know and you can deduce the meaning of it (that's one of the most satisfying things to have happen to you while learning Japanese btw). Yes they can be convenient to save space sometimes or even convey a complex meaning with few strokes.
But the INconveniences way waaaaaaaay outweigh the actual conveniences overall. This video does a pretty good job of showing that I think.
The Japanese writing system is the most inconvenient, inefficient, contrived piece of junk ever conceived by human beings. It is worse than cuneiform or hieroglyphs. And those went out of fashion over 2000 years ago. It simply has no redeeming qualities.
If you tell anybody on this planet to come up with a writing system that is easy to learn, easy to read and write nobody would say "hey why don't we base it on Japanese?" Even the most hardcore Japanese scholar wouldn't do that.
There is absolutely no reason why a culture that has no writing system should pick the Japanese. There is absolutely no reason why Japan should pick the Japanese writing system.
When you go to a country and ask a professor of the language "Can you read everything that is written in your language" and the answer is "No" than it is a really really bad writing system.
I didn't know about your channel, but I'm glad this popped up in my feed. Great job, I really enjoy your video format, how well put together it is, and I appreciate the rant. I know this pain :')
Thanks so much!
There exists a 533-stroke character that one can get when you combine the more-conventional (literally the 3 cloud and 3 dragon characters in their square forms stacked. Normally to fill a square character cell they are vertically-squished, but...) Taito Kanji as the entire left side of the character (so you don't squish the combination of 3 clouds and 3 dragons in their square forms) and then for the right half of the character, you take the artistic 108-stroke Bonnō Kanji which represents the Klesas/108 worldly desires, and then below it you put the frivolous and unfortunate Dhó character that has 341 strokes. The character is read as Bonnōtodhó, which is a portmanteau of Otodo (dark in Japanese, also one of the readings of the Taito kanji), preceded by Bonnō (the 108 worldy desires Kanji whose meaning translates to trouble, but that can also be interpreted as suffering due to the way in which those 108 worldly desires are said to cause it). So Bonnōtodhó means "dark suffering" (Dhó is purely phonetic, and in Japanese phonology canonically is represented as ddō via a sokuon). The Dhó character was intended to be specifically a Chinese character by its creators, as ridiculous (and not in a good way) as they are. However, you need to use Hangul and the Middle Korean/Jeju Dialect tone marks (but luckily not obsolete non-Unicode Middle Korean Hangul) to represent "Bonnōtodhó" perfectly without substitutions like you need in Japanese (Bonnōtoddō). Yes, the character was made thanks to a Westerner. Great effort was made to follow the rules and to even do stuff like create an Ideographic Description Sequence for the character. Also, if the 720x720px version is too big, there's also a canonical 16x16 version that just manages to work. Also the character was created in good faith and was done just because it was possible. Publishing the actual character is something that I don't know how it would go, but it was made 6 years ago. It's something that was done out of boredom.
There is also a 736 stroke character called shinzo which was made in 2022 or 2023 I believe. Thankfully these aren't actually used in writing. I can't imagine the amount of cramps I would get😂
@lazyfluency Apparently Shinzo lacks a meaning and its reading was actually the name of one of the creator's friends. Bonnōtodhó has a meaning and reading derived from the input characters. Also if you drew the 16x16px version you could technically use it in running text. It may not necessarily be the biggest constructed Kanji, but it was engineered to check all the boxes of a more-typical Kanji in a non-contrived way. Also, it's structured in a way where it would make a good component Kanji if you're trying to further push the record. Quite a few superlarge Kanji have stuff like the walk component which can make combinations look wonky. Shinzo also has this issue. Also, if you squeezed Taito into the top left quadrant of the character, you could fit one more character underneath. However I'm already at a 4-syllable 2-word character, and it's getting tight. Also, Huang and Shinzo both use a too-thin Serif font to go well with the image, and cause clunkiness when trying to portmanteau Bonnōtodhó with it. Also for it to make sense, the extra character needs to be a Kanji with a meaning that fits with the other two. Nothing however stops you from using this as a component character to use in a new composite character. That said, squishing it probably wouldn't exactly work well. Oh and I should mention that printing it out on Letter-size paper is just barely possible. An attempt at a 623-stroke character ended up filling an entire large rectangular drawing pad when someone hand-wrote it. This character's print-out leaves room, AND it can fit in 16x16. The Shinzo and 623-line characters can't. Basically, Bonnōtodhó is the largest "practical" character. Also its proportions are not hyper-stretched like Huang and Shinzo are.
As a 中国人, I’m always tempted to read kanji the Chinese way instead of the Japanese way (even in a Japanese context…) 日本が好き becomes “Ri ben ga hao ki” instead of “Ni hon ga su ki”
I am the opposite case. I tend to read Chinese in Japanese pronunciation immediately after I take Japanese lessons, haha
great video, informative and presented in an entertaining way. keep it up!
After all I love Kanji and I'm glad they exist. Despite all the difficulties they perfectly fit to Japanese👍
beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say😂
@@lazyfluencyDid you just 努力の賜物 his ass?
Thank you for the effort
This video was not only extremely funny but also really informative, I'm surprised to see your channel does not have a lot more subscribers than it has so far!
Definitely looking forward to more content, keep up the good work ❤
Appreciate the kind words! Currently working on the next video! Looks like it will be awhile though as its a little ambitious😂
you have incredible editing! subbed!
i really enjoyed this video, thank you for sharing. subbed
This is gooodd. I really love the fact that you added frequency and frustation bars 😂
You are really funny. I love this. Informative and funny, and so much effort in one video. Even the info box quote - amazing. Respect, my guy!
Bro, the names thing is actually so true. I would be walking through the neighborhood with my mom and brother and look at the name placards and I could never guess the reading correctly.
best editing and most effort i have seen in a video in a long time. subscribed just for effort if anything
Your video was super informative and relatable 😂 I understand the pent up rage. Thanks for making this video!
The words in jujutsu kaisen aren't really "heiroglyphic-inspired" but rather an old typography of Chinese called "seal script" which does look cool hence why it is used often enough
It's sorta half seal-script, but also not entirely - probably for general legibility reasons.
this is why studying kanji in isolation is a waste of time (unless you want to learn to write by hand, good luck with that btw) and i just study kanji by learning vocabulary directly.
100 percent agree! I didn't discuss learning strategies in this video as I saw this as more of a fun way to do a deep dive into kanji as opposed to a how to learn Japanese video.
@@lazyfluency I know, i just thought that it was related to the topic. Good video btw!
Kanji is just vocab. The Kanji Kentei is a good test with great training materials that teach you kanji as vocab, though also teach you about all other aspects of kanji. If you get to 2nd kyuu, you have native level understanding of kanji in every aspect, except names. For names you just have to read and quiz yourself on a ton of names.
@@ThePallidor I have no interest in taking the Kanji Kentei nor learning to write japanese by hand. This is why i dont waste my time (subjective) learning kanji individually and all their readings. People who have interest in it are free to do so.
The amount of quality in your videos is unmatched. Your graphics are high quality and incredibly helpful! I'm baffled as to how you have under 10k subscribers
Appreciate the kind words!
Awesome vid, as always! I'm in full support for transfering the section you had in the podcast where you rant about Japanese into videos for the main channel. I think i speak on behalf of everyone when i say we all enjoy a Joey rant.
Someone already commented, but i will add my own frustration with the 大 situation. I never get it right and i always feel like a complete idiot because it's so basic.
Also, a week or so ago, i decided to pickup some netsuke and Japanese prints we have at the office and try my luck at reading. I had promised myself i wouldn't do that before i close my kanji gap, which i did, so i felt confident. I knew i wouldn't be able to read the name, but i was hoping to recognize kanji. And then i encountered the cursive kanji problem, haha. That was a very sad moment. To top it all, everyone at the office knows i'm learning Japanese and they ask me to read stuff when we have Japanese things, and i never can and they're all "Pfft...you don't know anything...what have you been learning all this time..", hah.
I have always seen learning Japanese to be similiar to attending a liberal arts school (which I attended, haha). You put in a shit ton of work, and at the end of the day any time you respond to a question about where you went to school, people just assume you spent your time frolicking in the park. For Japanese I think this is because most people (atleast in America) have some experience learning Spanish, which is one of the easiest languages to learn for native English speakers. So people relate their experience to being able to read a book after 2-3 classes and then wonder how someone can study for 4+ years and still struggle reading manga. Now I'm not looking for validation from other people when it comes to language learning, but I will say that even now as I feel comfortable with pretty much any text/audio that comes my way, most people just take it for granted that I can perform X task, and assume that all people that have ever studied Japanese can also do so, haha.
Great video!
Really neat video condensing a lot of information in a short timespan!
Amazing video! I'm genuinely surprised you have so low subscribers. I really love to dig deeper into the history and culture of languages so I was sure I would not come across anything here I didn't already know about, but there were quite a few things I heard for the first time! And the way you interject the jokes and animation with the explanations make learning about them so much more fun and interesting. I'm sure you will blow up soon with this quality of videos.
Appreciate the kind words!
Great video man
Holy, how much work must have went into this video...
Great job!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great video! Learned a lot!
This is a great video with great editing. There was a lot of kanji trivia that I didn't know before, and it's nice to know I'm not alone in my love/hate relationship with kanji.
Misery loves company!
Honestly subscribed after 20 seconds and seeing the channel name. Thank u 🎉❤😂😅😊 ready to enjoy the rest of the video
In a way, this was very reassuring 😂 totally stellar video!
reassuring in an if everyone fails the test then no one fails the test kinda way😂
Love the video.
Kaname Naito says don't try to learn kanji because you can't. He says "learn vocabulary"
Great video! I went to Japan last summer and didn’t know as much kanji as I do now. These topics are good to understand.
Based on the title, I expected this video to be all about odd/rare kanji phenomena like "ghost kanji" and stuff, but it ended up being super interesting and informative anyway! Great video with lots of valuable perspective on the struggles of learning kanji
I also loved seeing Monster and 20th CB on your shelf in the back :D
haha, you might enjoy the Book Off video on this channel😂
half am hour and only 2 comments and 11 views? wtf? this video was awesome btw, i guess i don't have to feel bad for not knowing how to read kanji, at least until I have to read one lol
One does not simply read kanji. One can only simply try to and inevitably fail, haha. Appreciate the comment!
Subscribed! Dude I loved this video. Entertaining, funny and informative... It also shows how much you have dedicated yourself to studying this language, props to you! And although it may seem weird, it strangely shows how much you LOVE kanji. I'm not saying this sarcastically at all, you wouldn't know so much about the topic only from "mandatory schooling" or such, it definitely required self study driven by your own interests. Yes, we can love something and be equally frustrated by it, in fact I'd say you can't be frustrated by something you don't at least care about.
Correct, haha! It is for sure a love hate relationship!
Thank god I was not the only one scratching my head over 山手 line😅. Thanks for the video!
ive been waiting for this type of vid to come out subscribed!!
I love the fact that 月 can be read as Runa/Luna (because it means moon in latin and spanish). Also in death note, Light is called 月 to the point that Misa, using Shinigami eyes read "Yagami Tsuki" instead of "Yagami light"
Incredible video! You know, there’s actually a lot of similarities between my struggle learning literary Tibetan and learning kanji. For one thing, you have the ancient vs. modern vocabulary problem, then you have cursive. I’m sure it’s similar with Chinese too
Not sure if this is making want to learn Tibetan because I like Japanese or if this is making me not want to learn Tibetan as Japanese is a pain in the ass😂
Great video thank you!!!!
No matter how many kanji I learn I will never not have a breakdown trying to read plant/animal names or place names. All japanese learners have this kind of shared trauma of having to deal with things like guessing character names in books. You'll think you finally know all kanji that are commonly used only to find some random jinmeiyou kanji in someones name that youve never seen before.
What a great video, the animations and your enthusiasm had me watching til the end!
I’ve lived in Japan for almost 15 years. I’m doing pretty well and can read a lot and regularly type and communicate in Japanese, but I swear I have some sort of disability/dyslexia because I can’t for the life of me write even the simplest kanji like 赤 and my 2nd grade daughter thinks that’s hilarious. I just can’t visualize the kanji in my head at all.
Ps I feel so validated that someone else had pointed out 井上 - where is the の！？ Also I cannot for the life of me type out “atmosphere” in Japanese. 風に気 封印機 ふういニキ 雰囲気 oh yay I finally got it!
Although kanji visualization might be how some people write kanji my feeling is that it is mostly muscle memory. Unlike your daughter, you probably don't have any reason to write Japanese on a day to day basis!
remarkable job
In the first part of the "Danganronpa" trilogy, there was a conversation about names which obviously makes no sense for users of European languages until you know even a little about Japanese:
Naegi: what are you doing?
Asahina: if you want to remember someone's name, you need to write it on your palm three times… Oh, wait, how do you write your name?
It's not an exact quote from the game, but the sense is kept (PS sorry if I wrote something in a weird way, that's just me not being a native speaker of English).
A magical video that bucks to want for learning japanese. Perfect. I hope you do this type of videos more,❤🎉
What a nice comment!
"i suck at kanji. you suck at kanji. we all suck at kanji" man its kind of messed up that those words kind of made me feel better about my frustration with learning kanji LOL! great video!
As a calligrapher I just wanna say that jujutsu kaisen is not written in bone oracle script (亀甲獣骨文字 or what you called hieroglyphics) but is instead written in a faux version of the seal script (篆書)
Oh and so people don't doubt my credibility
The cursive text you showed was 吾輩は猫である in 草書 (well not an accurate representation of it but it's still legible)
Ahh, I appreciate the correction! I looked into caligraphy and noticed a bunch of the writing styles, but decided it was probably too much of a deep dive as my main point is that you see Japanese written in a bunch of different styles, and for many learners it just makes Kanji even harder to recognize.
@@lazyfluency hahaha, it's fine man, I just thought calling seal script as hieroglyphics is slightly misleading as seal script doesn't function the same way as oracle bone script
And even then oracle bone script aren't hieroglyphics by definition which is why I just wanted to provide more accurate information for other viewers
Great video btw! Super informative!
@@liuzh1han When I was editing I actually was unsure about what style the Jujutsu Kaisen script was written in, so at that point I should have made sure I was referencing the correct style as I have seen actual hieroglyphic Japanese text on store signs before in Japan. The more you know ✨️
@@lazyfluency oh and again just a slight correction
They're not hieroglyphics they're logograms
Sorry for being so pedantic but this is a topic that I'm genuinely passionate about
When I say hieroglyphics I am referring to 象形文字. The English translation of this phrase is hieroglyph. Are we referring to the same thing? Also no worries at all. One of the difficulties I had with the script is that all my experience and research was in Japanese, so when I translated back to English I was not entirely sure what terminology was technically correct😂
I normally see the patterns for dakuten and handakuten. Took me 1 exact year to learn all 常用漢字
0:54 I am already looking forward to hearing all the rage.
calligraphy is actually a breath of fresh air from blocky fonts if you have learned the stroke order and recognize kanji as combination of strokes not as a picture
This explains a lot of my confusion as a half arsed nihongo learner, like calligraphy being so hard to read.
Though in my few semesters we didn't learn beikoku. Just used katakanized versions of country names.
Hey man great video, insightful and you clearly put a lot of effort into making it. I randomly stumbled upon this video and subscribed! I study Chinese myself by the way, not Japanese
Appreciate the kind words!
This video made me realize that Japanese is actually much harder than Chinese despite Chinese having tonal pronunciation.
17:47
Writing 口口 as a horizontal 日 is very common in East Asia, not only in Japan. And it is the reason why simplified Chinese character 临 (originally 臨) has the radical.
well that was entertaining, glad I decided to focus on kanji study this year, so rewarding 😂
my favorite 四字熟語 is "承認欲求", hope someone recognized it
I was feeling like a badass for learning basic grammer, vocabulary, ,speech and passing level 10 on wanikani. I can just barely watch anime with japanese subtitles alone. Thanks for curve stomping my ego. Very excited to spend the rest of my life learning japanese.❤😢💀
i love the paper mario sound effects! great video lol
A precelebration for the upcoming remake!
@@lazyfluency there's gonna be a remake? of the original? opening google right now...
@@macurvello Paper Mario Thousand Year Door HD remake for the switch coming out this year!
Im in japanese major and this is such a good video lmao this frustration never leavesssss
Fellow Japanese major here😂
I thought I was just bad, but now I know there will be no end to this journey.
This was a great video with easy to understand topics :D I'm gonna hide in a corner now then pick up learning after I'm done sulking 😭
I began my Kanji journey in 1975, at Sophia University's summer intensive language program, and one of the first jukugo we learned was 結構--and I can't even begin to count the number of times I've relearned it--still can't write it two days later. Trying to explain why I still suck at Kanji 50 years later is not easy, but I now have a video I can refer them to.
How am I only now just realising that there is kanji with more than one commonly used stroke order…I’ve sometimes done a couple of strokes in the opposite order while still producing the same result and wondered if my teacher would be able to tell I did it the wrong way lmao. This is a huge relief for me.
haha, If you do caligraphy stroke order is very important as it affects how the character looks but with pencil it is much harder to tell.
I felt true despair when the writing for "myutsuu" popped up
I love that the part about names the example newspaper article he gave was a person I recognized and knew their name ...Hamada-san.... from Downtown!!
Bro, just found ur channel. U funny af ngl
Thankyou
Beautiful video 😂
I just learned more about Kanji in 20 minutes than I've been trying for the past month
Thanks for the like bro
I'm a speaker of Japanese and use it in my daily life and I can say to anyone learning; Kanji will end up being your limiting factor if your goal is to COMMUNICATE in Japanese. Lots of people obsess over Kanji because it's something finite, tangible and easy to memorise in a rote way, but those who actually use the language daily and focus on learning it to speak to others will almost always end up letting their Kanji lag, myself included.
But that said; don't obsess over it, even if you live in Japan you'll need it far less than speaking ability. It's also easier to learn/memorise/recall Kanji if you understand the word's that it is used in. The first 100 or so N5 Kanji are the ones you should learn directly alongside the early Japanese you'll learn, after that I suggest focusing on learning how to speak with confidence and utilise context learning over rote learning for acquiring words and phrases and then on the side try to learn the Kanji for the vocabulary you already know; the other way around is far less effective.
I meet a lot of people with "N1" or "N2" Japanese who do seem to know a lot of kanji and vocabulary but struggle to communicate in Japanese and spend most of their time speaking with other people trying to maximally utilise their vocabulary instead of having an interesting conversation (often overly punctuating with なんか。。。). I never make friends with such people as they see you as either a teacher or competition, both are not fun. Incidentally these people often have few to no actual friends who are native in Japanese. I won't speculate as to why.
These experiences I've had are in both Japan, London and in online language communities.
20:56 "who is stealing the nos?"
it's all of us who've been going "got your nose!!" to babies, duh
Any thoughts on kanji with a completely different stroke order than what you would expect? Take 必 for instance, which seems so simple to write as it's literally a 心 with a line down the middle, yet the stroke order dictates otherwise. Great video btw 👍
In once sense, pattern breaking is super annoying with stroke order as stroke order is determined in a top down governmnent sense (for the most part, ie it seems like complete standardization is possible). On the other hand, as a laymen learning kanji as opposed to a caligrapher, it ultimately doesn't matter if you follow proper stroke order or not😂
I can understand when Chinese characters entered Japan, the ancient people also imported the original pronunciation, which is called onyomi. Now you have the word 麥酒, but assigned the English pronunciation 'beer' to it as the onyomi? What the heck, guys? It's the next f**king level.😂😂😂
if everybody sucks at kanji ... nobody does
exactly!!
This video is a good showcase of why you should just learn kanji through vocabulary instead of learning the readings in isolation.
3:23 actually, it's yaMA. By the way, fantastically edited video. It was on point.
I picked up my Genki textbooks again a week or so ago. Was going to refresh, but I don’t have any place to really use it. I just want to not lose it all.
The "that's a good question" (3:02) hit.
I was going to practice writing today, but on second thought 💀.