The True Reason Why Japanese Uses Three Different Characters
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- Опубліковано 28 кві 2024
- The biggest obstacle that every student studying Japanese will face… The three Japanese characters, right? Even we Japanese study kanji throughout the nine years of compulsory education, and we still sometimes misuse them.
How did Japan end up using three characters?
So today, I will talk about the history of Japanese characters. I will then explain how the three characters are each used today. Finally, I will share the images the three types of characters hold and the usages that no one hardly talks about.
By watching this video, I hope you will be able to enjoy studying Japanese even more. If there’s anything else you’d like to know more about the Japanese language, please let me know in the comments.
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[Timecodes]
0:00 Let's START!
1:36 The History of Japanese Characters
5:08 How to Use the Three Characters
8:55 Today's Conclusion
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#hiragana #katakana #kanji - Розваги
I just finished learning hiragana and katakana but kanji is still tough for me 😅 it’s nice to know the importance behind each writing form. Gives me a bit of appreciation for them
I saw someone on a another video comenting how you are everywhere to find in comment sections and its true I guess the Internet is small🤣
I swear you always in Shogo’s comments 😂🙌🏾
@@LOVEBABY138 exactly😂
Same...
where are you learning the characters?
You mentioned the crucial purpose of kanji- which is to avoid homonym confusion. But there is another factor: katakana hints at foreign words, while hiragana hints at grammatical structures. Since Japanese uses no spacing, three writing systems help readers differentiate parts of the sentence in their mind. This reasoning isn't mine, but I agree with it.
BTW, a small correction: "character" in this context should mean a single kanji. The whole set of them, or the whole set of any other symbols used in writing is called a "writing system".
we learned it with spacing I guess
@@bered4894 which is about the only feasible way of changing Japanese to make it easier to learn. Adding spaces that is.
I often wondered. Why not introduce spacing to resolve it.
@@GeographRick it would make most texts substantially longer in page count for one.
I prefer the term character sets, but that’s more of a computer definition. And it might include extra characters not used on paper.
As a mandarin speaker, I actually learned kana by learning their origin.
Cool!
Way cool!
Same
Same
Saaame, I even use the Hiragana derivatives for some characters when I wanna write fast in Mandarin xD
The only thing that bothers me about Kanji is how that a single Kanji can be read in multiple different ways depending on the Kanji that came before it or after it or the context that it is used in. So it's not only memorizing how to write the Kanji and learning its meaning/definition but also learning how to read it the way it is meant to be under different circumstances.
Honestly that's a pretty tedious way of learning kanji. I've been supplementing my studies by using Wanikani, and their model of learning is basically: 1. you don't need to care about writing the kanji (unless you know it will help you remember them) 2. instead of using all of the sounds the kanji has when you learn it, just learn the different ways its pronounced by learning the different contexts its in.
@@Jhud69 yeah it's way easier this way
Kanji as a whole is more like learning words in the dictionary than learning the letters of the alphabet. I think it can be difficult as a foreign learner because Kanji is linked to vocabulary. You really don't need to worry about learning every detail about each kanji at once, just start with one or two things and build up context. It will be easier to look up new meanings and reading once you have built up a familiarity. I also used Wanikani to do this, but you can also make your own flashcards from books like the Remembering The Kanji series.
I remember hearing about this before I started learning and being scared, but it turned out to be not so bad at all. I get a chuckle from people who think Japanese should be hiragana only.
Been studying Japanese for a few years and I’d say the grammar structure was my biggest problem. I’ve heard people say Kanji was hard to learn, and it is, but the sentence structure is pretty well backwards from English. Great work Shogo!
What I used to help me with sentence structure is the verb is always at the end of a sentence or clause. So whenever I look at a sentence in Japanese and get lost, I remember that the verb is at the end and that helps me bring some order to the sentence. You likely already knew that, but maybe someone here didn't, so this may help them too.
I feel like the grammar is a lot more logical than English, but maybe that's just because I've done more formal studies of Japanese. If you check out the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (and the Intermediate/Advanced books) they really break things down systematically very well.
As much as I fear starting kanji lessons, as someone who is learning hiragana and katakana right now I can certainly appreciate having the 3 different writing systems to make things easier to read and distinguish between the different words
Smartphone keyboards are also VERY helpful and assist in the spelling practice as well!
@@jiukumite which smartphone keyboard should i use for hiragana?
@@hitmansharma282 It depends on which device and OS you're using, but simply search for it and MOST if not ALL of them will direct you to a download from a legitimate source.
For example, on a Samsung device, it's an option under "General Management + Language Input". Follow the instructions to add additional keyboards, and then voila! A simple left/right swipe on the spacebar and I'm typing in Japanese!
Pixels will do the same, except it's a little 🌏 button and you swap that way.
You basically spell out the gana/kana/ji out in Romanji format and the keyboard will present as many options as it can for what was input.
For example, typing out A-I-SHI-TE-I-MA-SU will give you all three options for what you want typed!
I'm normally a fan of computer keyboards, but in this case, smartphones make it WAAAAAY easier! Lemme know how it goes!!! Hope all is well! 😄
@@jiukumite Ah i have redmi Note 7 pro..and i am confused af
@@hitmansharma282 why don't use just gboard?
Well, to be fair, in spoken language you’ve got no kanji either to easily determine the meaning, which makes it very important to pay attention to the context of a conversation.
But Koreans have stopped using hanja as well and are facing the exact same problem with homonyms in written language, apart from the fact that texts that are just written in kana or hangul require more characters and get longer in general.
Also if Japan simplified its writing system by either abandoning kanji or even changing to Latin letters (like e.g. Turks did), future generations might be unable to read the Japanese script altogether, the knowledge could get lost, not to mention that every existing written work would need to be converted or become inaccessible to the majority of the Japanese population.
In addition, the usage of kanji makes it possible to spell names in a huge variety of ways (I think there are about 200 ways just to spell the name “Akira”) and with very different meanings (and makes it easy to determine the meaning of any name immediately), and that’s a cultural peculiarity that would just disappear as well if kanji were abandoned.
The product of culture, right?😄
look into meijij era script reform and genbun itchi I think it will be quite interesting to you
ah yes, why make something simple when it could be difficult instead, the classic japanese approach
That problem is happening in the US this very day with Cursive. Most people younger than about 24 may very well have never even learned it.
@@ckwi2245 if people are still communicating effectively , is it a problem? At the end the purpose of language is communication and languages evolve and change with time. I find it’s also interesting how younger people are “losing” the ability to write formal correspondence, preferring instead to use a very informal language for all writing.
I'm learning Japanese now, this video really helps and I really enjoy the video, educational yet entertaining
Same here!
I've been learning the Japanese language since the beginning of the year and have Hiragana ans Katakana memorised quite well and are learning Kanji- although it is really tough sometimes I always love to admire a certain beauty in each character of each of the three- I find that they're often very elegant in appearance and the fact that a lot of Kanji in particular are representative of the things they mean is always fascinating especially the little nuances between similar ones and the reasoning behind them (for example- the Kanji for Bird 鳥 and that of Crow 烏). I find this all gives me a huge appreciation for the language and now learning more about the history and each ones significance from this video enhances that feeling of appreciation even more so.
Hiragana is the body, Kanji the soul and Kartagana the cosmetic that make Japanese text comes alive.
After two years of Japanese study, I can confirm that once you really know the kanji for a given word, that word will be instantly recognizable - much faster than reading the hiragana. Actually something similar applies to English - we see words as whole units, not strings of letters from left to right. It's the only way we can fluently read English, which is only a halfway phonetic language at best. Through, though, thought, tough, thorough - we can only read such words as complete units, and it's basically the same with kanji.
Excellent video. I appreciate you sharing your views online.👍
After studying Japanese for 3 years, I can confirm that reading a text only in ひらがな is pretty difficult and unclear. 漢字 are very difficult at the beginning, but once you’ve learned them they’ll make reading Japanese so much easier.
皆さん、頑張って下さい。
Part of the ease is that you get used to them. We don't feel the need for kanji in English, for example, because we're trained to spot the shapes of sets of Latin letters when reading English. Koreans made the exact same arguments in favour of the hanja-hangeul mixed script but seem to read their language with hangeul only without issue. Why? They're used to it because everything is hangeul. It would be the exact same thing with Japanese. Mixed script feels nice and clear because as you learn Japanese, 99% of your input becomes mixed script. You get used to it.
You can make space !
@@Komatik_ Technically, English words are "Kanji" in a way.
1) You can never write English words/Kanji by listening to the pronunciation alone. English is not phonetically consistent. If it was, English spelling tests will not be necessary. You need to learn the English pronunciation, then learn to spell the English word. Same for Kanji, you need to learn the Kanji pronunciation, then learn the Kanji stroke order.
2) People actually read English words as whole units, not letter-by-letter (as you have stated), similar to how people recognize Kanji as a whole, not stroke-by-stroke. Writing, however, is another problem altogether, either for English words or for Kanji.
@@tanhql Fun fact: There was a time when English words didn't really have specific spellings. This is one of the reasons spelling is such a mess. That and people are opposed to changing the spelling of loan words to fit English's spelling rules.
@@foxymetroidand there was a time when English was phonetically consistent, or at least very close to it.
Another interesting use of katakana: when I was playing "ryuusei no rockman" (Megaman starforce) when talking to a robot the text in the textbox was completely in katakana to convey "robotic speech"
Sadly this got lost in translation
They could've just used a different font. Problem solved.
@@Komatik_ Yep, since now hiragana and katakana have basically the same sounds they are like different fonts of each other.
@@Komatik_ OR WRITE LIKE THIS
I've seen it done in one piece when the pacifistas are speaking they use katakana to indicate robotic speech.
I feel that knowing the origin and how the Japanese characters (all three sets) came about makes it easier for me to remember them... Thanks you Shogo! this is quite informative
You do realize that English, and all the rest, have 4 character sets: upper and lower case in both print and cursive, along with arcane rules to say when each must or should be used. I too wondered about the hiragana katakana thing when trying to learn Japanese. The whole number counting thing too. But, after some reflection on the upper/lower case bit, monoplanes and unicycles, and the whole idea of driving on the parkway while parking in a driveway... I've no right to complain.
Upper and lower cases, as well as print and cursive, are generally part of the same character set. Upper cases are treated like modified lower cases (despite existing for far longer) to increase readability. They denote the start or a new sentence as well as nouns that refer to a specific "proper" person, place, thing, or idea, ie "Jeff" instead of person or "New York" instead of just "state".
As for print and cursive, they have different reasons for existing. Cursive existed to speed up writing as well as to reduce the stress put on old timey pens. Print predated cursive and continued to exist after the invention of cursive because they were easier to make letter blocks for when the printing press was invented.
Parkway and driveway make sense. Parkways were initially called that because they were roads through parks. As for driveways, you drove on them when you drove from the street to your parking spot.
@@foxymetroid Yes, upper and lower case represent the same sounds and are used to denote various things, like hiragana and katakana. Yes, cursive evolved for various reasons and is now often used to denote personal rather than business writing. Yes, there are historical reasons English wording is absurdly inconsistent at times. All this seems perfectly reasonable to native English speakers. Japanese is the same.
I was really curious about this! Thank you, Shogo!
Japanese has a huge number of homonyms. Without kanji, it would be really easy to get confused when reading, especially since there is no writing system to relay pitch accent.
It depends on context. Many languages have this problem too.
I really, really love how furigana work. I love that I can see kanji and, right next to it, be instructed to read it in (an approximation of) English. I can read 薔薇棘鞭刃 as ローズ•ウィップ and that's the magic of Japanese.
Can’t wait to hear more about your Japanese teaching. That’s very exciting and something I’ll definitely be following you on your journey.
Thank you, for the information today.
すごい! I love your breakdowns in your videos and that way of teaching would be super useful. ありがとう
Thank you for the interesting video! When I started learning Japanese I whined about learning kanji being too complicated, but once I'd learned even
Exactly! I've had a very similar experience while learning my first few Kanji characters from JLPT N5 :)
i really like 残念 (zan nen), expressing sadness through the image: that something wasn't meant to become reality, hence only the idea remains.
here 残 is remaining, and 念 is "idea"
Arigatō gozaimas’. A very nice and clear summary. 🙏
Thank you very much for this episode! It was very helpful.
Trying to write those words absolutely help me to learn!
動画ありがとうございます！
Very informative! Thank you for sharing, Shogo-san~😆
i started to learn japanese since january this year. it's not very difficult to learn to read hiragana and katakana but now i try to use more kanji and this is where the trouble starts 😆
some kanji look similar except for a little line next to it.
And than the same kanji has different pronunciation...
But it's easier to distinguish the words and particles in a sentence.
i'll hang on... it's a lot of fun 😊
I'm mostly growing psychotic due to having a bunch of Anki cards I wouldn't ever need if the language was written in a saner way. I *know* 'basho' really well. Reading 場所, ehh...
The same can be said for English though. You can never write English words/Kanji by listening to the pronunciation alone. English is not phonetically consistent. If it was, English spelling tests will not be necessary. You need to learn the English pronunciation, then learn to spell the English word. Same for Kanji, you need to learn the Kanji pronunciation, then learn the Kanji stroke order.
People actually read English words as whole units, not letter-by-letter, similar to how people recognize Kanji as a whole, not stroke-by-stroke. Writing, however, is another problem altogether, either for English words or for Kanji.
Some English words are confusing enough too:
-read/read (past/present tense)
-desert/dessert
-lose/loose
-coarse/course
etc etc.
I always wondered about this! Thanks!
THANKS :) so helpful!
Yay, learning 🙌🏻☺️ Thanks Shogo and Co. ✌🏻😄
Just discovered your channel! You are so informative, interesting and kind! Much love from Australia!
I really like how you break down your video into parts.
Thank you, Shogo. That was the clearest explanation of the Japanese writing system I've ever heard. As a non-speaker/learner of Japanese, it was a mystery as to why Japanese required 3 separate systems. Now I know!
Kanji isn't hard, just somewhat time consuming. Kanji makes it much easier to learn new words.
very interested video, thank you. ☆
the part about hiragana conveying familiarity and softness in names interested me. it always seemed to me like a way a parent named their child lazily, showing a character's mommy/daddy issues
but that explanation makes so much more sense, because that notion I had in my head definitely confused me with some characters more than it should've
I love your videos homie, you do a great job at giving us a peek into Japanese culture while also being very entertaining
Thanks!
Awesome video
Thank you so much for your video. I'm studying Japanese and this really helped clear allot of things up.
Awesome video!
I wish you the best. Thank you for your videos.
Shogo, nice work! I'm also late to this post but think it may be interesting to document (via UA-cam) your own journey in becoming a teacher of the Japanese language. Hope to see more - not just of you teaching us, but discussing your own learnings and experience with language teaching.
Funny this video drops! Just started my self learning process!
I started learning japanese 1,5 months ago and I am still on the hiragana only. It's difficult but also very rewarding - your channel actually motivated me to try Learning it :)
I quite enjoy watching your videos before I go to school ( such as right now)!!!! :P I also appreciate the captions, I understand that it takes a lot of time to add them!
This was so much fun since I happened to be brushing up on my Japanese! Thank you so much, Shogo sempai!
Awesome video!
.
Domo arigato gozaimashita!
Great video though !
As usual.
👍
6:26 Does that read My mom likes flowers?
You got it
Thank you for adding your japanese greatings to the subtitles!
I really like your video, please do more, I really interested to learn 🥰
You are awesome!
I did a study abroad in Japan for a year and learning kanji was fun and painful😅 breaking down radicals and kanji within kanji was really interesting for deriving meaning. When I got back I worked on a game to make learning the Japanese writing systems less intimidating for new learners. I love helping lead others to the beautiful rabbit hole that the Japanese language is.❤️
This is a brilliant video. I always wondered why the sutras at Buddhist temples were all in katakana. Learning how the systems came to be was really interesting!
Omg, YES!!
I am starting to learn Japanese and I have been definitely inspired by you!
My dream is to sound as natural, as you do in English, in Japanese.
Thank you for this, Shogo. Planning to work in Japan soon. Keep making videos! I love Japan and it's culture! When I go to Kyoto, I hope to see you there! From the Philippines by the way.
Looking forward to your future japanese teaching videos!!
Very interesting and informational video. Think the writing systems makes it an interesting language as well. Even though it has been about 25 years since I started learning Japanese, never had anyone explained or talked about this. Still far from fluency and memorising/ learning to use kanji is a challenge, especially as they aren't a part of my daily life. 😵💫
I've never seen a video request that I speed it up before. Very interesting.
I am excited about it, too
Love your videos Shogo!! It's so interesting to learn more about the Japanese culture, it's fascinating ✨ I've been trying to learn how to read Japanese too. I'll try my best with Kanji now that I've learned Hiragana and Katakana 💞
Although I am not actively learning Japanese, I really enjoyed this video. Thank you Shogo. It would be nice to see further talks on hiragana, katakana and kanji, every month or so.
You're amazing
Thank you for providing a background for these character sets. As I understand it, Japanese students also all learn the Roman alphabet, giving them 4 sets of characters with which they are familiar.
I am looking forward to your lessons. Id love to hear your eventual input on kansai-ben verse kanto. Also the distict attidudes between kansai verse kanto in regrads to humor ect. I found my time in Kyoto Osaka ans Okayama (where i studied abroad) far easier to relate to japanese ppl than my time in Mishima or Tokyo.
Nice goal. I am just getting started. Best wishes from my family to yours.
I really like the way you talk with your hands. It gives much more emphasis to the things you say.
Wow I would love to learn the Japanese language through your channel! Amazing video as always! Thank you so much
Fascinating video, clever and made sense, I found years ago that the 3 written forms were a nightmare to comprehend so I ended up giving up on it. These days I use Google translate. Well thought out explanation of written Japanese. 👀😊👍
For English words like row/row and bear/bear (not to mention bare), we rely entirely on context. In this sense hiragana-only could work. But kanji really do make a text clearer. They also help us know where words start. (I admit I sometimes really wish Japanese would use spaces between words!)
Thank you, Shogo-san for this explanation. It was very interesting. 🙏 It's exciting that you are studying to become a Japanese language instructor along with everything else you are doing.
Thanks, i've been wondering about this for a long time. I'd love to get some Japanese lessons from you.
An high context culture translates into an high context language. The way of the implicit.
hi Shogo. really interesting video. I have recently started studying the Japanese language and culture. initially hiragana and katakana seemed very difficult. with the passage of time and lessons, they are less difficult. the kanji that I have learned so far are few, 木 、 本 、 日 、 and the kanji of numbers. ありがとうございます しょごせんせい🙏
As someone who knows Mandarin, I take learning kanji as a whack dialect since sometimes the words sound similar. But since it's still got a different sound, I still agree katakana and hirigana are easier.
It actually all make sense having all three writing systems together.
There is a reason why there are three systems: The end result is anything but sensible, as evidenced by just about every other language in the world.
Level up, bro!
Regarding choosing between Japanese words written in kanji or English loanwords written in katakana to appear formal or casual respectively, I find this quite similar to how other languages practice code-switching. Filipinos tend to code-switch between their native languages and English for such reasons -- a lot of the time English loanwords are more understood by Filipinos than native terms and can be seen as more approachable, while the use of native words and terms derived from native words may appear too formal, academic, and literary, with many having forgotten terms that were more commonplace before the mid-20th century. In the Philippines, written code-switching appears more often in national news media, advertising, and pop music, whereas native terms or loanwords from languages other than English are more preferred in more local media, novels and poems, and in legal, medical, and religious contexts.
And this is why I'm subscribed to your channel. Another video with awesome and educational content. ^_^
Love your content. What ever you do I will always support you.
This explained me a lot!
Totemo omoshiroi desu yo!
BTW, kanji is easier to remember than katakana.
Interesting.
I think you're getting better at making these videos.
Have you done a video on writing direction? I'd be interested to learn about why there's differences based on orientation of the text and such.
Today I can differentiate 3 of them, where to use them. Thanks you made it clear. I didn't know that katakana was made for reading Sutra.
I did know that Kanji was Hanzi but with some modifications, but I have no idea of the origin of Katagana and Hiragana, this was so interesting, thanks a lot. Actually I'm learning mandarin and I consume many Japanese entertainment so I've been able to recognize some characters, I hope soon star to learning Japanese and use this information to learn better :)
The simplification only came after Meiji era. I think many Japanese can still read old kanji.
As a linguist and a multilingual, where I am currently learning my 8th, I find your explanation very interesting and educational… Domo arigato… 🙏
I am happy to have learned this distinction, i was not told this about the writing in my Japanese Language class. I was taught something completely different.
Great video! I have memorized hiragana. I still have katakana and kanji left!
Extremely informative and interesting, thank you!
Another thing....
I suspect there's a ton of japanese-speaking students that are learning english
...and a ton of english-speaking students that are learning japanese
Books and apps only go so far. They're basically just about memorizing rules and vocabulary. The human brain can only memorize so much. It takes practice to truly learn a language.
With that in mind, is there a venue in which these two group of learners can practice speaking with each other?
Very interesting video! I noticed that some kanji looked like they had katakana in them when I started learning Japanese, so I assumed that those parts of the kanji were constructed from the katakana for some reason or another, but it seems like the opposite.
Very Important video to learn japanese ... thanks and all the best in life ... to you and relatives !!!
The history of them is very interesting.
Pretty interesting I’d like to see more videos like this one about the Japanese language
This is honestly my favorite part of learning Japanese. I practice them to relax. I am still learning my hiragana and katakana. I found kanji intimidating at first, but now I'm excited for getting there. :)
Very interesting.
Peace from 🇮🇩
I am in nowhere of learning kanji or hiragana or katakana or Japanese , and reading comments about people learning or learnt these makes me feel lost haha. I just cant interrupt or reply to any comment now, these people are so cool and dont know how to get into the conversation.
But acknowledging the beauty of language and writings, as well as its evolution really fascinates me. Its how the social changes and improves to adapts as time changes
Always been intimidated by kanji, but after learning abit of them they're actually fun to learn and use
They are not impossible at all, just much more work than saner writing systems.
Hentaigana always interested me, and the process the government went through to select the modern hiragana set. Alternative or old hiragana still are used for advertising, I’m aware, such as in soba shop signage. Beautiful!