Apologies for the long wait, life has been hectic. Anyways, next video will not take as long, haha. support on ko-fi, we are also starting a Japanese Bookclub!: ko-fi.com/lazyfluency checkout our eng/jpn podcast: www.youtube.com/@lazyfluencypodcast
Thank you! I have been learning Cantonese and standard written Chinese for a while now, and Japanese onnyomi actually resembles Cantonese quite a lot. E.g 冇 *門題* (mou5 *man6 tai4* (pitches: low-rising, low, low-falling)) becomes *問題* ない ( *mondai* nai), with very similar prononciations for 問題. 山 is pronounced saan1 (long vowel, high-pitch tone) in Cantonese.
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.
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 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?
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.
Nice try but pokémon doesn’t have kanji apart from the occasional 円. The only games that have kanji were global releases so no playing one year in advance.
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
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.
ネイティブ日本語話者として、一から漢字を勉強した人はこんなところでつまづくんだ〜とか、ここは言われてみれば確かに容赦ない初見殺しだな！って色んなところで感じられてめちゃおもろかったです。 I bet you devote a serious amount of time and effort into making these nice videos, and I understand it might be difficult to create and post more videos at a high rate, but i’m honestly extremely excited for the next video man!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
i don’t think so, japanese children learn like 80 kanji in grade 1, since they have way more time learning japanese slowly, and having impactful memories with words, it is easier to learn as a native speaker. since you can just ask your mom, what a thing is or what it’s kanji is, and she’ll show you. The Japanese use like 2000 kanji in daily life, and you live for 6570 - 1825 = 4745 days (5 years before first grade) before turning 18 and graduating high school. So if you learn one kanji every other day you’ll be ahead of the curve. Some say that they know even fewer kanji. Like more obscure words you don’t use as often; maybe a scholar would know, or someone who sees a word regularly.
Another thing to add is that Native Japanese speakers learn words by osmosis before learning the kanji associated with it. So they have all of the context of a word and only have to learn how to write it. A non-native learner would have to learn the kanji, it’s stroke order, handwriting, in addition to all of the pronunciations (and when to use them!) and the actual meaning of a word.
@@rezazazuIn Japan, students start learning kanji from 1st grade, with around 1,000 characters taught in elementary school and another 1,000 in middle school. By the time they finish, they know about 2,000 kanji used in daily life. High school focuses more on using kanji in context. Kids also practice at home with drills and tests to reinforce what they’ve learned in class.
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 :')
@@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.
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 ❤
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
sometimes i'm trying to copy down something in my notebook and most of the sentence looks all neat and nice and then there's the kanji from hell sticking out underneath the line because i can't physically fit it into the lines on my copybook
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.
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
1:45 - 漢 or 汉 doesn't mean Chinese, it means Han (or Kan in Japanese) Chinese. Sure, because they're predominant in China means that you can almost equate "Kan" to "Chinese", but that's also not accurate and can be misleading, especially considering that MANY different words can designate China and its people.
I personally don't see this as a meaningful distinction for the vast majority of cases. In Japanese, which is the focus of the video (not Chinese), 漢 is commonly understood to bear connotations of China. Now I could have written "China character", but that is being in my opinion overly pedantic as native English speakers would say "Chinese character." Not "China character." My goal for the video was to be fun and sufficiently educational, not maximally correct. Hope you can understand
@@lazyfluency Sure, I understood that you wanted to be concise. I'm talking from the perspective of someone with a linguistic and Chinese language background. In China, 汉语 is used to distinguish Standard Mandarin from other Chinese languages, but I get that it is commonly translated as "the Chinese language". It just feels like a political statement to talk of Mandarin as being "the" Chinese language, though it is the only one used officially in China. Anyway, my purpose was to only add accuracy, the statement isn't wrong per se. Also, the word "Chinese" conflates a lot of different concepts into a single word, which itself is problematic. Thanks for the reply!
ah, I see. Interesting. Thankfully I don't believe the average Japanese/English speaking person think of the word Chinese to be representative of any specific region of china even if in a Chinese language context 漢 may be used to represent Mandarin. In fact, no dialect of Mandarin or Mandarin in itself contain 漢 in Japanese as far as I know. Appreciate the information!
@@lazyfluency You're correct, my association between 漢语 and Mandarin was a hasty one. 漢 refers to the Han (or Kan) people, whose identity dates back to the Han Dynasty (when most definig traits of Chinese identity have been established following the first unification of China). 漢语 is the Han language and its descendants, one of which is Mandarin (which is called 普通话 or "common language"), which is what most people in China speak nowaday (often as a second language). Plus, the 漢 people represent 90% of China's population and 17.5% of the world's population, which goes to explain why 漢 can somewhat adequately (though not comprehensively) be translated as "Chinese", though as I've said, there is at least a dozen words that all translate as "Chinese" with different meanings. Don't know if I made this more confusing than it already was 😜
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.
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.
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😂
in english theres also multiple roots that have the same meaning but come from different origins (latin, germanic origins, greek...). an example for english speakers to understand the onyomi-kunyomi readings: imagine we took ”水” with the meaning of "water" we would have: -"水" (read as "water") -"水tic" (read as "aquatic") -"水ulic" (read as "hydraulic") three readings for the same character, one coming from an english root, other from a latin root and other from a greek one. but natives would still somehow manage to read those😵💫😵💫😵💫
Another tip is to simply learn whole words instead of individual kanji. That way you can look at 日本 (nihon) and tell the difference between it and 日曜日 (nichiyoubi). You don't need to know that 日 in the first word is read as "ni", "nichi" and "bi" in the second, just learn 日本 and 日曜日 as individual whole words. This is why you understand completely jumbled sentences in English, because you get the meaning based on the content you see rather than the sounds of the individual letters. Example: I wtach fnuny vdieos on ytouube
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This popped up in my recommended as a Chinese learner and I spent most of this video appreciating how I don't have to deal with these problems, until you got to 四字熟語, and I realized those are just 成語. From what I can gather, though, 成語 in Chinese are considerably more common than 四字熟語 are in Japanese. Some of these issues, especially things like the names, are down to the way people use 漢字 today, but you can definitely blame 四字熟語 on ancient China.
@@macurvello Another one I just learned recently: 遡る, or "go uptream". Its kunyomi is sakanoboru, which is a mouthful until you realize it's literally 坂登る.
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😂
13:33 you CAN use “you” just depends on who your using it with. Like maybe friends and family. I understand that in Japanese social dynamics, it can be a little impolite being direct.
I’m in love with this video! I’m a student of Japanese philology and all what I want to do is cry But this video is an amazing work: the montage and your way of explaining the information is absolutely stunning!!! Thank you from Ukraine!!!
I suppose that if your goal is to learn all kanji, it's basically equivalent to someone learning the entire English dictionary. You just don't, and if you somehow still think you will, you'd better hope you're a native speaker of the language
Although I think this analogy has a lot of truth to it, I believe a more accurate analogy specifically for Japanese would be "memorizing your entire alphabet." This is because kanji are very commonly just pieces you use to make words as opposed to words in themselves. Even with college level fluency, a lot of the problems I mention in the video still persist, people just learn to live with them, haha.
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
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.
This video perfectly encapsulates the qualms I have with Kanji as a writing system in a comedic and compact manner. You sir, have just earned a like(only reserved for videos that have earned a spot in my heart) Good job.
But as bad as it is systematically, the whole guessing game of Kanji can fill me a temporary sense of fulfillment(albeit a quite shallow one) and if I guess incorrectly, I can just shrug it off as being unlucky. Videos critiquing Japanese writing system will never get old when executed correctly, another video of similar motif that I enjoy is Katakana 2 by ヘルスカ.
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.
"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!
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
According to everything I have looked at there are no consistent rules. There are some that work sometimes but not highly reliable. If you know a universal rule though, I wanna hear it!
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.
6:09 I’m six minutes into this and I love it! I was going to saying this 3 minutes ago. I’ve been in love with the Japanese language since I was 5, I’m 38 now. I always struggled with Kanji but always found it very interesting and your video is teaching me a lot
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”
As someone who has studied Japanese extensively and is studying to pass the JLPT 2 currently, this video reinforced my hatred of Kanji. You have earned my subscription sir. Great video!
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.
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.
i havent watched the anime but the text at 6:32 says 「究極メカ丸絶対形態装甲傀儡究極メカ丸試作0号」 edit: the example for cursive writing at 19:36 was actually pretty easy to read and is quite a bit more legible compared to some writing ive seen before. though the fact that its also one of the most notable classical japanese literary works may also have contributed to that (夏目漱石 吾輩は猫である)
Doing the lords work, haha. I should have probably put the clearer text myself for those who are interested in what was actually written😂 I will say that cursive hiragana isn't too bad, it is cursive kanji, especially when the kanji has a completely different stroke count that cursive kanji becomes impossible to read.
@@lazyfluency very true lol. similarly hentaigana are quite a pain to read. those along with manyougana or stamps could be some additions to this iceberg 😁
Yeah, realistically there was a lot of info that I didn't cover, haha. I tried to mainly focus on introducing types of problems as opposed to covering every variant of kind of problem (with exceptions of course). I also barely mentioned Hiragana and Katakana, as I feel like that would have opened a whole floodgates of deep dives😂
For those interested, the phenomenon of phonetic shift mentioned at 10:19 is called rendaku (where a consonant of the second morpheme of a compound word becomes voiced if it is unvoiced). Some phoneticists believe that rendaku is limited by Lyman's law, which states that if there's already a voiced consonant in a morpheme, rendaku will not occur (e.g. harukaze has the voiced consonant Z, so K does not turn into G). Another "rule" for rendaku is that it usually occurs in Japanese compound words and not Chinese, but there are exceptions to this one so I tend to ignore it. Also I could really relate to the name problem mentioned at 14:15. All my life in America, no one pronounced my name correctly, and I thought this would change when I went to Japan. Unfortunately my name is very uncommon and I was a fool.
@@lazyfluency yep, kanji causes all the problems... Apparently the 2nd character in my surname has a lot of different pronunciations (at least 10) and no one knows which one they're actually supposed to use... so they just guess lol
Off topic - Damn you got all big 3 mangas BASED. hope you able to finish the collection one day instead of just having 4 volumes of each. Also great video!
In a world where kanji just ane 1 kun'yomi and 1 on'yomi reading and follow the rules of multiple characters in a word... that actually makes japanese as a whole quite a simple language, and we could learn and memorize vocab much faster
Fun fact, even back in the day when Koreans were still using a mixed script, they pretty quickly started to only use hanja for the Chinese loanwords, and wrote native words in hangeul, which starkly limited the possible readings for a character. Of course, afterwards the attitude developed moreso towards one where you had the choice of writing the Sinitic word with a character or in hangeul and people tried to use hangeul where they could. Japan's route was the opposite where if you could write the word with a character, you almost should, especially if it was part of the government "short"list. And so we have the hellish mess we have today, while the Koreans write with an alphabet. It's one of the tragedies of East Asia.
@@Komatik_Funny that you call it a tragedy, but I remember reading a study which looked into the effect of Hangul vs Kanji usage, and while it appears that the usage of a fully phonetic alphabet aids with literacy on the surface level, when they looked deeper they find that Korea has a higher level of functional illiteracy in spite of having greater general literacy. There's also been similar findings with other fully phonetic scripts around the world as compared to, for example, English's semi-phonetic script which we often view as being a tragic mess as well.
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😂
The only nice thing I have to say about name readings is that manga seemingly (almost) always give you furigana (reading) to names. (at least at introduction)
Haven’t finished the video yet, but as someone who has studied both Japanese and Chinese with English as my first language, Kanji is both my saving Grace and worst enemy becauee soemtimes it’s overly tedious and complicated, but reading straight hiragana feels like words soup and makes my eyes bleed.
15:35 any reason why the first row of old kanjis is missing? it is slightly disturbing. The new kanjis are actually below their respective old kanji. That image is easily misunderstandable, if you don't know a few old kanjis.
The kunyomi reading of 本 is もと which has the meaning of origin. It may be that books are the origin of knowledge or something along those lines, im not entirely sure!
I knew for sure when he would appear, I was screaming its name when I knew you were about to mention it, and you delivered. Fucking 大 man. If you read this as だい, then youre wrong. I meant おお. Absolutely a masterpiece of a video. I found myself screaming and hyping up for nothing when seeing all the struggles of my past 5 years summarized into a beautiful narrative. It was sure worth the watch. Sometimes I feel like a god of kanji because I could carry a conversation smoothly, but then reality hits me again. Sometimes I remember difficult kanji readings and meanings, sometimes I forget N5 kanji readings. Sometimes I just laugh and wave when japanese friends mention words that I don't know, until they are are ん？ and then I realized it was a question for me. So many moments, and yet I dont regret a single moment since the day I decided I'd learn japanese. It gave me wonderful moments that Ill never forget, such as reading a manga completely in japanese for the first time, or watching Vinland Saga season 2 without subs when at the time season 1 was being released, I was watching it with subs. Its been 5 years and I still feel like I know nothing, and god how it was relatable when you mentioned names. Still, I continue to strive for the day that I have no struggles reading a newspaper, or knowing enough to the point words to use become second nature. Wonderful video!
By the way, the thing about kanjis changing their reading based on their position in the word while also having no concrete rules of it's occurrence is something called Rendaku れんだく (連濁) In my experience, the best theory I developed for when they appear is just with the goal is making the pronunciation more convenient. For example: 人々 ひとびと Hitobito Rendaku happens with the second ひ becoming び. Why does it happen? Well, because pronouncing ひとびと is more convenient for your mouth than ひとひと. Take notes that I said convenient, not easier Another example: 誕生日 たんじょうび Tanjyoubi, the final ひ becomes び because, you guessed it, たんじょうび is more convenient for your mouth. The more you're exposed to it, the more you are able to predict when it happens, I've had a few occasions surprisingly! But as always, the best tip to learn kanji is to accept it as is. I've learned from a japanese friend that Kanji is only learned after memorizing, which means it can't be constructed by a set of rules, it just is.
I'd have started studying Japanese seriously long ago if it wasn't for kanji, ****ing monsters. My brain just rails against unnecessary bullshit, and kanji are pure, intravenous unnecessary bullshit. Nothing like not being able to read words you've known for years. (and then easily spotting them in written _Korean_ because their writing system isn't colossally fucked up)
Apologies for the long wait, life has been hectic. Anyways, next video will not take as long, haha.
support on ko-fi, we are also starting a Japanese Bookclub!: ko-fi.com/lazyfluency
checkout our eng/jpn podcast: www.youtube.com/@lazyfluencypodcast
it already did
Thank you! I have been learning Cantonese and standard written Chinese for a while now, and Japanese onnyomi actually resembles Cantonese quite a lot. E.g 冇 *門題* (mou5 *man6 tai4* (pitches: low-rising, low, low-falling)) becomes *問題* ない ( *mondai* nai), with very similar prononciations for 問題. 山 is pronounced saan1 (long vowel, high-pitch tone) in Cantonese.
“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".
Root of the sun, bro.
Peggy Hill-sensei
@@atomic_wait That makes sense since I often read on the toilet
The Tonalamatl, Book of the Days,
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
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
@@Deibi078 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
Kanji activates my fight or flight response.
Nah only math does it to me.
Same. That's the part when I dropped it on Duolingo. Only one I could remember is Jin because it's so incredibly simple.
I’m pretty sure “stroke order” refers to the fact that in order to read and write kanji, the first order of business is to have a stroke
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!
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.
Nice try but pokémon doesn’t have kanji apart from the occasional 円.
The only games that have kanji were global releases so no playing one year in advance.
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".
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!
There are plenty of inaccuracies tho this is really boggling when you actually know what is talked about.
its still well made
ネイティブ日本語話者として、一から漢字を勉強した人はこんなところでつまづくんだ〜とか、ここは言われてみれば確かに容赦ない初見殺しだな！って色んなところで感じられてめちゃおもろかったです。
I bet you devote a serious amount of time and effort into making these nice videos, and I understand it might be difficult to create and post more videos at a high rate, but i’m honestly extremely excited for the next video man!
優しい言葉をありがとうございます！
次の動画の結構時間かかってるんですけど面白い動画になってると思うので期待しててください笑
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.
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😂
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
I'm just glad the verbs you've taught me doesn't have any complex irregularities.
"We all Suck at Kanji"
The shown calligraphy is very simple as long as you remember how to write "clouds" and "dragon" and mash them up together
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
youtube algorithm has blessed me once again, subbed!
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
How do you beat learning your alphabet at school. This must take almost all of your time throughout the primary school.
i don’t think so, japanese children learn like 80 kanji in grade 1, since they have way more time learning japanese slowly, and having impactful memories with words, it is easier to learn as a native speaker. since you can just ask your mom, what a thing is or what it’s kanji is, and she’ll show you.
The Japanese use like 2000 kanji in daily life, and you live for 6570 - 1825 = 4745 days (5 years before first grade) before turning 18 and graduating high school. So if you learn one kanji every other day you’ll be ahead of the curve. Some say that they know even fewer kanji.
Like more obscure words you don’t use as often; maybe a scholar would know, or someone who sees a word regularly.
Another thing to add is that Native Japanese speakers learn words by osmosis before learning the kanji associated with it. So they have all of the context of a word and only have to learn how to write it.
A non-native learner would have to learn the kanji, it’s stroke order, handwriting, in addition to all of the pronunciations (and when to use them!) and the actual meaning of a word.
@@rezazazuIn Japan, students start learning kanji from 1st grade, with around 1,000 characters taught in elementary school and another 1,000 in middle school. By the time they finish, they know about 2,000 kanji used in daily life. High school focuses more on using kanji in context. Kids also practice at home with drills and tests to reinforce what they’ve learned in class.
Kaname Naito says don't try to learn kanji because you can't. He says "learn vocabulary"
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 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😮
@@andyyang5234 isnt a good thing that from start I was like "nah its going to take a lot of time to learn the right way to write"
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😂
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😂
sometimes i'm trying to copy down something in my notebook and most of the sentence looks all neat and nice and then there's the kanji from hell sticking out underneath the line because i can't physically fit it into the lines on my copybook
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.
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!
1:45 - 漢 or 汉 doesn't mean Chinese, it means Han (or Kan in Japanese) Chinese. Sure, because they're predominant in China means that you can almost equate "Kan" to "Chinese", but that's also not accurate and can be misleading, especially considering that MANY different words can designate China and its people.
I personally don't see this as a meaningful distinction for the vast majority of cases. In Japanese, which is the focus of the video (not Chinese), 漢 is commonly understood to bear connotations of China. Now I could have written "China character", but that is being in my opinion overly pedantic as native English speakers would say "Chinese character." Not "China character." My goal for the video was to be fun and sufficiently educational, not maximally correct. Hope you can understand
@@lazyfluency Sure, I understood that you wanted to be concise. I'm talking from the perspective of someone with a linguistic and Chinese language background. In China, 汉语 is used to distinguish Standard Mandarin from other Chinese languages, but I get that it is commonly translated as "the Chinese language".
It just feels like a political statement to talk of Mandarin as being "the" Chinese language, though it is the only one used officially in China.
Anyway, my purpose was to only add accuracy, the statement isn't wrong per se. Also, the word "Chinese" conflates a lot of different concepts into a single word, which itself is problematic.
Thanks for the reply!
ah, I see. Interesting. Thankfully I don't believe the average Japanese/English speaking person think of the word Chinese to be representative of any specific region of china even if in a Chinese language context 漢 may be used to represent Mandarin. In fact, no dialect of Mandarin or Mandarin in itself contain 漢 in Japanese as far as I know. Appreciate the information!
@@lazyfluency You're correct, my association between 漢语 and Mandarin was a hasty one. 漢 refers to the Han (or Kan) people, whose identity dates back to the Han Dynasty (when most definig traits of Chinese identity have been established following the first unification of China).
漢语 is the Han language and its descendants, one of which is Mandarin (which is called 普通话 or "common language"), which is what most people in China speak nowaday (often as a second language). Plus, the 漢 people represent 90% of China's population and 17.5% of the world's population, which goes to explain why 漢 can somewhat adequately (though not comprehensively) be translated as "Chinese", though as I've said, there is at least a dozen words that all translate as "Chinese" with different meanings.
Don't know if I made this more confusing than it already was 😜
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.
holy hell, this is my favourite yt channel about japanese language, like- you're so charismatic and i'm here for the vibes
Appreiciate the support!
"Pestka" sounds like a Polish word.. Are you perhaps a Pole?
@goansichishig yes! born and raised, still living in this hellhole 🫶
@@pestkaislearning Oh, well.. I'm living in Poland as well, but I'm not Polish 🥲
This is gooodd. I really love the fact that you added frequency and frustation bars 😂
best editing and most effort i have seen in a video in a long time. subscribed just for effort if anything
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!
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😂
in english theres also multiple roots that have the same meaning but come from different origins (latin, germanic origins, greek...).
an example for english speakers to understand the onyomi-kunyomi readings:
imagine we took ”水” with the meaning of "water"
we would have:
-"水" (read as "water")
-"水tic" (read as "aquatic")
-"水ulic" (read as "hydraulic")
three readings for the same character, one coming from an english root, other from a latin root and other from a greek one. but natives would still somehow manage to read those😵💫😵💫😵💫
Another tip is to simply learn whole words instead of individual kanji.
That way you can look at 日本 (nihon) and tell the difference between it and 日曜日 (nichiyoubi). You don't need to know that 日 in the first word is read as "ni", "nichi" and "bi" in the second, just learn 日本 and 日曜日 as individual whole words.
This is why you understand completely jumbled sentences in English, because you get the meaning based on the content you see rather than the sounds of the individual letters. Example:
I wtach fnuny vdieos on ytouube
This unlocked something in my head. Thank you.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
This popped up in my recommended as a Chinese learner and I spent most of this video appreciating how I don't have to deal with these problems, until you got to 四字熟語, and I realized those are just 成語. From what I can gather, though, 成語 in Chinese are considerably more common than 四字熟語 are in Japanese. Some of these issues, especially things like the names, are down to the way people use 漢字 today, but you can definitely blame 四字熟語 on ancient China.
In Japanese there are also just regular compound words (熟語), they just aren't anywhere near as annoying as 四字熟語😂
17:52 腺 and 搾 exist in Chinese with similar meanings to what is showed here.
18:05 Idioms. If you speak Chinese, this is easily learned.
Holy, how much work must have went into this video...
Great job!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Missed the oppurtunity to talk about Kanji with colorfully descriptive kunyomi.
E.g.: 雷's kunyomi is kaminari, which is literally 神鳴り.
OMG!! MIND BLOWN!!
This kind of stuff is so awesome about kanji!
@@macurvello Another one I just learned recently: 遡る, or "go uptream". Its kunyomi is sakanoboru, which is a mouthful until you realize it's literally 坂登る.
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!
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😂
13:33 you CAN use “you” just depends on who your using it with. Like maybe friends and family. I understand that in Japanese social dynamics, it can be a little impolite being direct.
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😂
I’m in love with this video! I’m a student of Japanese philology and all what I want to do is cry
But this video is an amazing work: the montage and your way of explaining the information is absolutely stunning!!! Thank you from Ukraine!!!
OMG, fellow Ukrainian! Hello (≧▽≦)
great video, informative and presented in an entertaining way. keep it up!
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.
Thank god I was not the only one scratching my head over 山手 line😅. Thanks for the video!
Really feels like if old english and modern english were both used at the same time.
Im in japanese major and this is such a good video lmao this frustration never leavesssss
Fellow Japanese major here😂
Your name sounds slavic-like, where are you from?
my favorite 四字熟語 is "承認欲求", hope someone recognized it
I suppose that if your goal is to learn all kanji, it's basically equivalent to someone learning the entire English dictionary. You just don't, and if you somehow still think you will, you'd better hope you're a native speaker of the language
Although I think this analogy has a lot of truth to it, I believe a more accurate analogy specifically for Japanese would be "memorizing your entire alphabet." This is because kanji are very commonly just pieces you use to make words as opposed to words in themselves. Even with college level fluency, a lot of the problems I mention in the video still persist, people just learn to live with them, haha.
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
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.
This video perfectly encapsulates the qualms I have with Kanji as a writing system in a comedic and compact manner. You sir, have just earned a like(only reserved for videos that have earned a spot in my heart) Good job.
But as bad as it is systematically, the whole guessing game of Kanji can fill me a temporary sense of fulfillment(albeit a quite shallow one) and if I guess incorrectly, I can just shrug it off as being unlucky. Videos critiquing Japanese writing system will never get old when executed correctly, another video of similar motif that I enjoy is Katakana 2 by ヘルスカ.
Glad you enjoyed it!
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!
Your video was super informative and relatable 😂 I understand the pent up rage. Thanks for making this video!
Thank you for the effort
I thought I was just bad, but now I know there will be no end to this journey.
20:56 "who is stealing the nos?"
it's all of us who've been going "got your nose!!" to babies, duh
"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!
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!
10:10 rendaku DOES have a rule, but it only truly becomes clear once you know linguistics
According to everything I have looked at there are no consistent rules. There are some that work sometimes but not highly reliable. If you know a universal rule though, I wanna hear it!
I normally see the patterns for dakuten and handakuten. Took me 1 exact year to learn all 常用漢字
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.
おそらく、漢字は自分の一番大好き日本語の一部。語彙は自分の最大の弱点。日本語をひらがなだけ。。。だめだめ。難しい。
日本語勉強以来2019年。
2009年に遡り、六十つ漢字学びです。漢字はおなじみ感じ。ひらがなやカタカナだけ。。。地獄よ。
この動画いいよね。。。よく研究されている。乙、レジフルエンシさん。見る楽しかった草ww。
いいねボタンを押しました。
6:09 I’m six minutes into this and I love it! I was going to saying this 3 minutes ago. I’ve been in love with the Japanese language since I was 5, I’m 38 now. I always struggled with Kanji but always found it very interesting and your video is teaching me a lot
Appreciate the kind words!
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
Lool I do the same XDD
As someone who has studied Japanese extensively and is studying to pass the JLPT 2 currently, this video reinforced my hatred of Kanji. You have earned my subscription sir. Great video!
Great video! Just wanted to let you know you misspelled "origin"
Well shoot. That makes two typos I've noticed. Its almost impossible not to make a mistake or two with all the graphics😂
nah, he just wrote it in spanish
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.
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.
Really neat video condensing a lot of information in a short timespan!
i havent watched the anime but the text at 6:32 says 「究極メカ丸絶対形態装甲傀儡究極メカ丸試作0号」
edit: the example for cursive writing at 19:36 was actually pretty easy to read and is quite a bit more legible compared to some writing ive seen before. though the fact that its also one of the most notable classical japanese literary works may also have contributed to that (夏目漱石 吾輩は猫である)
Doing the lords work, haha. I should have probably put the clearer text myself for those who are interested in what was actually written😂
I will say that cursive hiragana isn't too bad, it is cursive kanji, especially when the kanji has a completely different stroke count that cursive kanji becomes impossible to read.
@@lazyfluency very true lol. similarly hentaigana are quite a pain to read. those along with manyougana or stamps could be some additions to this iceberg 😁
Yeah, realistically there was a lot of info that I didn't cover, haha. I tried to mainly focus on introducing types of problems as opposed to covering every variant of kind of problem (with exceptions of course). I also barely mentioned Hiragana and Katakana, as I feel like that would have opened a whole floodgates of deep dives😂
For those interested, the phenomenon of phonetic shift mentioned at 10:19 is called rendaku (where a consonant of the second morpheme of a compound word becomes voiced if it is unvoiced). Some phoneticists believe that rendaku is limited by Lyman's law, which states that if there's already a voiced consonant in a morpheme, rendaku will not occur (e.g. harukaze has the voiced consonant Z, so K does not turn into G). Another "rule" for rendaku is that it usually occurs in Japanese compound words and not Chinese, but there are exceptions to this one so I tend to ignore it.
Also I could really relate to the name problem mentioned at 14:15. All my life in America, no one pronounced my name correctly, and I thought this would change when I went to Japan. Unfortunately my name is very uncommon and I was a fool.
haha, I assume in Japan your name mispronunciation was because of the kanji in your name?
@@lazyfluency yep, kanji causes all the problems... Apparently the 2nd character in my surname has a lot of different pronunciations (at least 10) and no one knows which one they're actually supposed to use... so they just guess lol
Me sitting around 1200 kanji learned 🥹
ファイト！！！
Off topic - Damn you got all big 3 mangas BASED. hope you able to finish the collection one day instead of just having 4 volumes of each.
Also great video!
For space reasons, I only picked up one!
In a world where kanji just ane 1 kun'yomi and 1 on'yomi reading and follow the rules of multiple characters in a word... that actually makes japanese as a whole quite a simple language, and we could learn and memorize vocab much faster
This 100 percent!
Fun fact, even back in the day when Koreans were still using a mixed script, they pretty quickly started to only use hanja for the Chinese loanwords, and wrote native words in hangeul, which starkly limited the possible readings for a character.
Of course, afterwards the attitude developed moreso towards one where you had the choice of writing the Sinitic word with a character or in hangeul and people tried to use hangeul where they could. Japan's route was the opposite where if you could write the word with a character, you almost should, especially if it was part of the government "short"list. And so we have the hellish mess we have today, while the Koreans write with an alphabet. It's one of the tragedies of East Asia.
@@Komatik_Funny that you call it a tragedy, but I remember reading a study which looked into the effect of Hangul vs Kanji usage, and while it appears that the usage of a fully phonetic alphabet aids with literacy on the surface level, when they looked deeper they find that Korea has a higher level of functional illiteracy in spite of having greater general literacy. There's also been similar findings with other fully phonetic scripts around the world as compared to, for example, English's semi-phonetic script which we often view as being a tragic mess as well.
This video made me realize that Japanese is actually much harder than Chinese despite Chinese having tonal pronunciation.
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😂
The only nice thing I have to say about name readings is that manga seemingly (almost) always give you furigana (reading) to names. (at least at introduction)
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!
I've recently been reading 吾輩は猫である and recognized the cursive text (19:35), but it's hard to read even while knowing what it's about.
Haven’t finished the video yet, but as someone who has studied both Japanese and Chinese with English as my first language, Kanji is both my saving Grace and worst enemy becauee soemtimes it’s overly tedious and complicated, but reading straight hiragana feels like words soup and makes my eyes bleed.
Tis the paradox of Japanese😂
15:35 any reason why the first row of old kanjis is missing? it is slightly disturbing.
The new kanjis are actually below their respective old kanji.
That image is easily misunderstandable, if you don't know a few old kanjis.
No reason. Just chose a visual aid at the time that I thought worked
tfw your mother tongue is chinese and during that one trip to japan you could sort of deduce what the signs were trying to say
I felt true despair when the writing for "myutsuu" popped up
I just learned that 本 is book, so can someone explain to me how that is also origin 🤔 pls
The kunyomi reading of 本 is もと which has the meaning of origin. It may be that books are the origin of knowledge or something along those lines, im not entirely sure!
8:07
it's not meigoku? which sounds like a"me"rica?
if everybody sucks at kanji ... nobody does
exactly!!
There is a station on my local train line whose name drives me crazy. How the hell is 百舌鳥 read as もず??
Damn that is brutal. Just brutal, lol
I knew for sure when he would appear, I was screaming its name when I knew you were about to mention it, and you delivered.
Fucking 大 man. If you read this as だい, then youre wrong. I meant おお.
Absolutely a masterpiece of a video. I found myself screaming and hyping up for nothing when seeing all the struggles of my past 5 years summarized into a beautiful narrative. It was sure worth the watch.
Sometimes I feel like a god of kanji because I could carry a conversation smoothly, but then reality hits me again.
Sometimes I remember difficult kanji readings and meanings, sometimes I forget N5 kanji readings.
Sometimes I just laugh and wave when japanese friends mention words that I don't know, until they are are ん？ and then I realized it was a question for me.
So many moments, and yet I dont regret a single moment since the day I decided I'd learn japanese. It gave me wonderful moments that Ill never forget, such as reading a manga completely in japanese for the first time, or watching Vinland Saga season 2 without subs when at the time season 1 was being released, I was watching it with subs.
Its been 5 years and I still feel like I know nothing, and god how it was relatable when you mentioned names.
Still, I continue to strive for the day that I have no struggles reading a newspaper, or knowing enough to the point words to use become second nature.
Wonderful video!
What a nice relatable comment! Thanks for all the kind words!
By the way, the thing about kanjis changing their reading based on their position in the word while also having no concrete rules of it's occurrence is something called Rendaku れんだく (連濁)
In my experience, the best theory I developed for when they appear is just with the goal is making the pronunciation more convenient.
For example: 人々 ひとびと Hitobito
Rendaku happens with the second ひ becoming び. Why does it happen? Well, because pronouncing ひとびと is more convenient for your mouth than ひとひと. Take notes that I said convenient, not easier
Another example: 誕生日 たんじょうび Tanjyoubi, the final ひ becomes び because, you guessed it, たんじょうび is more convenient for your mouth.
The more you're exposed to it, the more you are able to predict when it happens, I've had a few occasions surprisingly!
But as always, the best tip to learn kanji is to accept it as is. I've learned from a japanese friend that Kanji is only learned after memorizing, which means it can't be constructed by a set of rules, it just is.
I'd have started studying Japanese seriously long ago if it wasn't for kanji, ****ing monsters. My brain just rails against unnecessary bullshit, and kanji are pure, intravenous unnecessary bullshit. Nothing like not being able to read words you've known for years. (and then easily spotting them in written _Korean_ because their writing system isn't colossally fucked up)
I also hate katakana. Every time I read it, it's like my mind just pauses mid-word.