Roughly one year ago I started learning japanese from zero. First learning kana and after with a beginner Anki deck along with grammar study. I remember that at that time I was one of those who thought: "why is kanji even used? there is already a syllabary and you could deduce what word is from context". Honestly I felt like it was a waste of time but today I can confidently say that I was completely humbled in a good way.
I remember that the first time I dove into native content it was extremely painful, I mined close to 100 words everyday it seemed like there was no end lol but surprisingly, as time passed and I read more and learn more words I noticed how my brain has been "adapting" to kanji. I don't know how explain it but I can see them, I can infer the meaning (and even the reading most of the time!) of words I've never seen before just because of the kanji they use. Funnily enough, I've had to delete a lot of new anki cards that appeared on my daily review because of that haha. Also there are times too that even if it's the first time I see a kanji, I can guess the reading thanks to the radical. Even radicals can give you tips of the meaning sometimes; the first time I saw 蜘蛛 it was the first time I had seen those kanji but I was 99% positive that it was some kind of bug because of the 虫 radical and it was! it's spider!
Honestly it's an amazing feeling and as I learn more, my love for the japanese language grows. It's a feeling I didn't have when I was learning english at school and I'm really enjoying the process.
So that's it, I just wanted to share that I'm really glad that I started this journey and I don't think it will ever end.
ここまで読んでくれてありがとうございました！これからも日本語学習に頑張りましょうね！
Very nice! Thanks for sharing your story! I feel the same way you feel, and I started my journey in 2009. Learning Japanese totally changed the way I think and see the world 🙏. And yes, kanji is fascinating. And I think that is the required mindset to succeed learning the language. I often see people here struggling and complaining about kanji and other stuff and I secretly think they will not get very far. The way you are thinking now already shows you are going to master Japanese :)
I love and hate kanji.
When I can not only recognize them but also read them without any effort it's great, it's like a lot of content encapsulated in just two, sometimes three characters.
It does suck how hard they are to learn though, and it does indeed add a certain degree of difficulty other languages do not have which does make it a bit frustrating at times. Then again this is what it makes it awesome when you finally recognize new words.
Yes, but I mean, I see their difficulty as just natural. Not knowing how to read some words sometime in Japanese is a normal thing, even for natives, and no matter how much you learn you'll not be able to read every book 100% anyway.
Yeah that's for sure, it's just the extra added difficulty that makes reading in Japanese as a learner a lot harder than in other languages. Like in English you find a new word, you read it, you can kind of pronounce it, you learn it's meaning and that's kind of it, with Japanese there's the added challenge of having to also learn how it's written.
Like in English you'll read a new word and it's not too hard to remember it, you look up it's meaning and you probably won't really forget it even as a learner. In Japanese you will see a new word 50 times and keep forgetting it over and over because you can't remember the kanji it's made up of. Maybe this stops (or is less of a pain) happening at some point when you know a lot of kanji/enough to be able to somewhat deduce things/make an educated guess.
I'm not even thinking about writing, like handwriting.
I love them too but I also envy chinese learners, from what I've seen hanzi are just so much more sensible (mostly monosyllabic, fewer readings, fewer meanings conflated into one character). And it makes sense, they were made by the chinese for their languages after all lol
The way Japan made them work with their language which was so ridiculously incompatible with how chinese languages worked is certainly interesting but man does it make life hard as a learner. You certainly feel the Stockholm after a while though, they're really cool.
Chinese has a lot of 多音字 but usually they have different meanings with different readings so it's more obvious from context.
Kanji as a concept is vastly and deeply rich, and learning more about it really gives you a greater appreciation.
I would suggest reading Chinese character classification as well as peruse the history. And for interesting kanji you encounter, checking out the Wiktionary page is very interesting and can lead you through winding rabbit holes. Component corruption, truncation, standardization and consolidation, all sorts of modifications that happened over thousands of years. It's totally not necessary to understanding the kanji in a modern Japanese context, but gaining an intimate familiarity with a character, its complex history of changes in both written form and meaning, is really enriching.
芸 has an interesting evolution I recommend checking out, it's pretty funny. It originally was a man planting a sapling, but the shinjitai version we use in Japanese no longer has any of the original components whatsoever. Here is a screenshot from a presentation on kanji history I gave, showing a (truncated) history. We have a man planting a sapling, which became a representation of hands and an arm next to a sapling (now with an added soil below). Then the rightmost component is replaced with 丸 when the character was standardized (even though there is a direct modern component for this that was not used). Finally, the three versions of this character, between shinjitai, traditional chinese, and simplified.
https://preview.redd.it/c5fnox0c3ecg1.jpeg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e085fc48a87b0df6c123e672b5be6d5c36c4ef4e
芸薹 moment
This is very interesting! Thanks for sharing 😊
I think most learners go through this path. At the beginning thinking "why does Japanese even use kanji when you can write everything in kana?" But then eventually realize that kanji actually make reading Japanese SO much faster. Kanji encode meaning separate from phonetic information. This is how both Chinese and Japanese people can often read the same word (even though in their respective languages it encodes for different sounds). As a result, the encoding order of kanji is different than phonetic alphabets. In a phonetic alphabet, the way your brain perceives it is something like "visual image → phonetic information → meaning" but in kanji, the brain perceives it in the opposite order, more like "visual image → meaning → phonetic information." The practical result of this is that once you get really good at reading kanji, you can effectively 'speed' through them without even subvocalizing the word. So when my brain sees 蝋燭 for example (just using this example since I learned it recently), I think "candle" before I think "ろうそく” because image → meaning is faster than image → sound → meaning. The kanji is a representation of that meaning in its truest form. Sound is just what other languages can load on top of it. As far as your brain is concerned, 蝋燭 means 🕯️ but by the way it also happens to map to the mouth-sound ろうそく。Chinese is the final and most elegant version of this. There are hundreds of Chinese dialects, but each one of them can be written exactly the same way. The sound a kanji makes is of secondary importance to its actual meaning. That's why kanji can (and should) be thought of as kind of a universal language.
Well, most kanji are originally phonetic with a minor semantic component that disambiguates the character.
蠟(lap) is something that relates to bugs (虫) and is pronounced similarly to 巤(lyep). Specifically, it's beeswax from honeybees, or wax in general.
燭(tʃyok) is something that relates to fire (火) and is pronounced similarly to 蜀(dʒyok). Specifically, it means a lamp, torch, or candle.
The fact that you see 蝋燭 and think 🕯️ is not because kanji are ideograms, but because they are visually distinct, and your primarily literary interaction them has caused you to associate them with ideas first and foremost, and sounds secondarily.
To be fair, we recognize English words by their shape too; they just don't have the same aesthetic appeal and variety that kanji have.
It's also not the case that Chinese dialects are written with all the same characters. Often, phonetic differences and etymology require different characters to be used. It is a heavy oversimplification to think that a dialect just means a different pronunciation system for some idealized set of ideograms. Such thinking also leads to the death of languages.
Fair enough... maybe it's just my own personal experience, but I did notice that over time, I actually don't subvocalize kanji much anymore when I read, specifically because as I mentioned, the pathway of image to semantic information doesn't necessarily pass through phonetic information first. I wouldn't say this is true of English though. It's impossible (at least for me) to read the word "English" and not immediately hear "ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ" in my head, because the word "English" while it does have a 'shape' to it, it is a purely phonetic construct.
I am not an expert in Chinese, but I spend a lot of time on Chinese social media and one of the things I've noticed is that virtually any kind of video content (short- or long-form) has subtitles. This isn't true of English content most of the time, so I asked a Chinese friend of mine what's the deal with the subtitles? She told me it's because people speak in all kinds of dialects and/or accents, so the subtitles make sure that you can 100% understand what the person said, which led me to the conclusion of "1 writing system = 100s of ways of sounding it out." Of course I (or my friend) might be wrong here. I'm not a linguistics professional or anything, I just notice things from personal experience.
It also may be true that, as you say, because I learned most of my Japanese vocabulary in print first, not sound, that I primarily associate kanji with meaning and secondarily with sound. Maybe a Japanese person can't help but hear ろうそく in their head when they see 蝋燭 because they learned sound-first, who knows. If any Japanese people are around here maybe they can clarify.
I was also in the "I don't like kanji" camp initially. I'm still not super fond of them, but after switching over from Duolingo to Renshuu for the majority of my casual learning and actually working on beginner kanji, there are certainly things about them I find kind of fun and interesting. It still drives me nuts that one "word" can have 4 different meanings and 3+ pronunciations (coming from an English speaker), but I like the concept of building up complex words from smaller pieces. Like subway being ground + under + car. Even the kanji themselves can sort of be like this where you can see other kanji in them (like father being in school). Some of them are just too similar to easily pick out though, especially when you squeeze them down to phone sized fonts.
That's incredible, dude. Congrats!
I'm aiming to do something like that. A year or 2 to start reading stuff without needing to search up what's something, lol
But sadly, many people think that a year is a lot and don't even start doing anything. I started for 3 months in the last year and I already managed to learn Hiragana and Katakana and some vocabs. This year that I already increased my knowledge a little, I already see that I can read some very small phrases. It's an amazing feeling :)
Please check out the Kanji kentei books!
I need someone else on this sub to gush about kanji with lol
What method are you using to learn Kanji OP?
I read Visual Novels and put the words I don't know into Anki.
You don't use wanikani/RTK etc?
No, I've never done specific kanji study. Just vocabulary cards in Anki. To distinguish similar kanji I did a kanji components deck (very short, I finished it in few weeks) which improved my recognition but what has helped me the most is just read japanese native content because I see kanji used in a lot of contexts.
I hated kanji until I saw youtube sketches from a couple guys who did japanese tongue twisters, I don't remember the details but one of them used "かえるかカイルかいる..." and basically saying kaeru ka kaeru kairu kyleru ka and other stuff using the words for go home, frog, kyle, and some other ones. After seeing that and also 母は花が好きで which in kana is ははははながすきで and unreadable. Still figuring out words and "pauses" but Ill get there one day soon I believe
Hi there, Im a compplete beginner to learning Japanese. Ive been focusing on just speaking words and learning through english phonics, but I know this isnt long term sustainable.
What resources did you find most helpful in your learning of Japanese reading?
Hi! Basically I just followed the guide in The Moe Way website (https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/#21-how-to-learn-japanese) and used the resources recommended there. In short, what a did was: first learn hiragana and katakana (never use romaji to read japanese!) -> beginner Anki deck to have a basic vocabulary -> Cure Dolly grammar series on YouTube for basic grammar (this at the same time I was doing the basic deck) -> once I finished the basic deck I created my own and started mining words with Yomitan browser extension from native japanese content (in my case I like Visual Novels and books but you should immerse in whatever you are interested in). From there is always the same, I just immerse -> mine words and review them in Anki everyday. For grammar I use this website: https://www.edewakaru.com/archives/cat\_179055.html which teaches grammar in japanese supported by pictures and examples. If you prefer explanations in english, bunpro is also good.
I have a love hate relation ship with kanji. On one hand I couldn't imagine Japanese without them anymore, on the other hand Japanese might have one of the worst writing systems ever created all around.
Don't get me wrong, the way Japanese is it seems some sort of logo graphic writing system is necessary for sure, but I think if it was designed from the ground up with Japanese in mind instead of borrowed Chinese, and a MUCH more efficient phonetic system than two long ass rule heavy writing systems it'd be a lot better.
Also not saying English is much better fyi. I know ours sucks too.
I wish I coud say and feel the same. I haven’t started my Kanji journey yet. But you are giving me hope.