I mean, think of it this way: it comes down to how often you come across words in any language including English (even in ENG: you may forget how to spell words correctly if you don’t use or encounter them often), kind of the same logic with Kanji: a Japanese person doesn’t know all Kanji in the same way English speakers doesn’t know every single word that exists in ENG.
There are over 5000 Kanji but only about half of that is used in Japanese or closer to 2136 while the remainder consist of ones only present within technical jargon (medicine, science, politics, etc.). or certain Kanji only has limited uses in some words (but mostly written in kana). That is also accounting for grammar being “straight forward” more than English or Euro languages.
The “real” hard part is numerous readings (depending whether it’s paired with kana or another kanji, reflected from kunyomi & onyomi plus nanori when applied in people’s names). What I hate about most online translators is that it often gets lost in translation (like words used in the wrong context but on their own it’s correct, however not right for the situation or topic at hand).
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Kanji aren’t really hard, there’s just a lot of them. And I can’t learn that many at a time. So it takes ages to get to the point where you can actually read stuff, just in terms of volume. At least with my limits.
That said, one issue I’m noticing is that kanji with the default internet fonts are usually too small for me to make out the differences in the more complex ones. I often need to increase the font a bit with a userstyle to actually make stuff readable.
The “real” hard part is numerous readings (depending whether it’s paired with kana or another kanji, reflected from kunyomi & onyomi plus nanori when applied in people’s names).
Just don’t learn all the readings from the start. When the kanji is used alone as a word directly, there’s just one reading used for it. Other than that, you’re dealing with vocabulary.
We learn “2” as reading “two”, not “twe”, despite that reading being used in “twenty” and “twelve”. We learn the latter two as separate vocabulary words that simply include the “2” character. The same should be applied to kanji. Learn one word for the kanji, and the rest through vocabulary that uses the kanji.
Wanikani iirc takes this approach where they usually teach you the primary onyomi with the kanji, so you can read most vocabulary words right away, while only having to learn one reading. All of ther other readings are taught through vocabulary items indirectly.
Yes I find them hard and also not a very good writing system. Especially in Japanese where you have four writing systems. Drawing pictograms means I have to learn a spoken word, a pictogram (or worse pictogram combination) and a meaning for both. I know that English isn’t always written as it is spoken but for the most part it is. Even if I only hear a word I can have a guess at how it’s written and from the writing I have an idea how it might be spoken.
That’s the neat thing about typing Japanese when the keyboard knows. You can literally sound it out and have it turn into the character as you finish a syllable (or whatever the proper term is for Japanese)
Partially. I recently wanted to type 𰻝𰻝面 but my keyboard didn’t suggest 𰻝 even when I tried biang or biang biang. The is that there are several characters with the same syllable and then I still have to know which character is the correct one. And even though there are so many the still sometimes have several meanings. For example in Chinese the character 面 means noodle or flour or side or face (maybe even more). And I still can only sometimes infer the sound from the character. If someone were to ask me I’d ditch Kanji in Japanese and only us Romaji. Unlike English the sounds are actually standardized and it would make writing more compatible with a lot of countries. I’d also accept Hiragana or Katakana. But only one of them. I’d also start a writing reform in English so that the spoken and the written English fit together better.
Yes, because I find hard memorizing a lot of symbols before becoming capable of minimal reading proficiency.
I successfully read one recently! I was watching sumo, and they show the wrestlers names first in kanji, than add the romaji later, and I saw that trident looking one at the end of a name and I thought -i know that one, that’s mountain, so could be -yama, or maybe -zan, at the end of the guy’s name, and tried to guess who was coming out next. Turned out it was Kinbozan, so i was right, but also meh.
romaji
Relying too much on romanji is bad, try to read using furigana (which is a hiragana transliteration on top of Kanji).
No. Studying it was entertaining. I remember plastering my walls at home - the whole apartment - with kanji, it’s readings and an example sentence. Every time I went by such a paper, I made it a rule to read it out loud. I also remember filling out whole notebooks with kanji. I also remember learning calligraphy, not because I wanted to learn calligraphy, but because writing kanji with a brush gives you a deeper understanding of why they are written in the way they are. Since I wasn’t living in Japan at the time, I needed a way to immerse myself. This was my way.
Have you ever read subtitles (日本語字幕) without pausing? Whenever I watch a non-Japanese movie, I just enable JP subs and you need a very good grasp on reading Kanji in real time since you’re reading translated dialog, and sometimes you can notice translation mistakes if you know where to look based on visual context within the scene. For Japanese movies: I sometimes enable closed captions to understand clearly what they’re saying.
Once you learn the 2000-ish necessary ones, kanji will actually be easier to read than kana and even the roman alphabet, because kanji are ideograms and pictograms, meaning, you won’t have to actually read it out loud in your head, you’ll just see an idea or a picture of something. It’s like reading “car” versus seeing “🚗”.
There are over 5000 Kanji
Did you drop a zero? The number I was taught when I was studying Japanese in college decades ago was 48,902. I don’t know why it stuck in my head so hard, but it did.
I found kanji to be both difficult and fascinating. It’s tempting to just focus on them as a writing system, but I think the readings are at least as important.
I haven’t tried learning Japanese (precisely because of Kanji) but what you’re describing in English is also the hardest part of English. There are plenty of languages where you can easily spell and pronounce words you’ve never seen before.
Since I know 0 of them, yeah.
Same. I have tried a little but found it completely unmanageable.
Very much. Takes too long to write, and can be difficult to read when hand written or is too small. My ability to listen and understand Japanese is much better than my ability to read, except with Katakana (or the rare occasions something is written out in Romaji)
Nevermind the fact that there are over 50,000 of them. Only around 2000 are used daily, and that is still many magnitudes more than the 26 total letters in Roman characters I’ve known most of my life as an English speaker.
Yes: It seems very complicated.
To counter your argument about English: English is very complicated, reportedly it’s one of the hardest languages to learn because of all the exceptions to rules and the fact that it’s actually a bunch of different languages melded together (hence the many exceptions).
English is easy to learn, just the spelling is nonsensical
You are the first person I’ve heard say English is easy to learn, but yeah, the spelling nonsense is in large part because English is kind of a conglomeration of languages.
Well what would be an easier language ? French? Dutch? Not German, that one looks atrocious. If it’s not relative then all foreign languages are hard to newcomers I guess. Personally I remember that learning enough English so I can somewhat communicate was quite easy because of the mass of available content to read / listen to / watch.
Spanish and Portuguese would probably be easier to learn than English, same for French. If you knew German and/or English, Dutch might actually be a little easier than you’d think!
The amount of entertaining media out there definitely works in favor of English though, I have to agree with you there.
I’m 40 years into trying to become fluent-ish in Dutch and it’s going to need another lifetime to get there unfortunately. So English to Dutch ain’t much of a passerelle.
Back in the days it is said that our Dutch speaking neighbours had an « easier » time learning English because they didn’t had much in the way of local content. Whereas as a French speaker we have all dubbed so less pressure to get introduced early to English.
I find it super funny that you position French as easier than English. In what language are you native? From my anecdotal evidence discussing with a sizeable amount of foreigners French is among the most hated / difficult western language to learn. Possibly because of all the prononciation shenanigans, it’s not like in Dutch and English where sounds are somewhat logical.
English is a fairly simple language that through the years has shaved off a lot of the complexities.
No grammatical genders - In languages like French, German or Spanish, you need to know the gender of the words, and there can be multiple, depending on the language, more than 3 genders.
Fairly simple declension - I refer you to this Wikipedika article to see all the ways you can have articles and pronouns be in German, depending on the grammatical case and gender of the word. And you need to use the correct one.
Fairly simple verb conjugation - Want 3rd person? Just add an “s”. Want past tense? Just add “ed”. That’s it basically for verb forms. Sure, there are irregular forms for past tense, but even those mostly follow a similar pattern, e.g “bought”, “fought”, “thought”, “caught”.
Behold this Wikipedia article again explaining all the verb forms you can have in German. Oh btw, it does have irregular forms too.
The spelling is a mess, true, like, we don’t even have enough alphabets, and the way words are written are a complete mess compared to how they are spoken.
But comparing it to Kanji where you have learn roughly one symbol for each word? Where you literally can spend years learning it? Not learning the language itself, just learning how to read it. Oh, did I mention there are also 2 other alphabet sets that Japanese does have? Don’t worry though, that’s only around like a hundred or so additional symbols.
it’s difficult for us Westerners, because the concept is weird to us at first, but when you get hang of it it’s not that hard, it’s a similar concept to how we don’t read words letter by letter but we just see them and know the meaning
Imo numbers are the best comparison, because just like with kanji, a number has multiple readings and a meaning.
A “2” can be read as “two”, “twe” or “seco” depending on how it’s used (2 vs 12/20 vs 2nd). Just off the top of my head.
Is it that much harder than remembering that some emojis now map onto secondary meanings, like 🍆 meaning penis and 💀 meaning “I find this to be very funny”? Or even the primary meanings of emojis, where you’d totally understand what someone is saying when they type ✈️🇯🇵🍣🍜?
The difficulty comes from the sheer number of them, but human communication is full of things where meaning comes from non-alphabetical symbols.
Kanji is easy.
(I went to school in China till 2nd grade 😉 close enough lol)
And you consider Japanese Kanji easy (context of the post)? What I heard from Chinese friends is that it’s just a chaotic mess
Yes. I’m not sure if it’s because I have aphantasia or I’m not a very visual person to begin with, but kanji learning sucks for me. I also have backslid on writing since the only thing I ever write by hand these days is my address. I don’t even mind the many readings; it’s the physical forms I have issue remembering.
It was hard at first. Now I’m about 600 kanji in, and while they are still hard they are starting to make sense. New ones are quite a lot easier than before because of pattern recognition, and I’m even able to sometimes guess reading/meaning. It has also massively improved my learning, I had always heard that it wasn’t necessary nowadays, and I’ve been studying on off for a long time now, but the difference on this last cycle is massive
