The Hardest Writing System! - an animated rant about learning Japanese
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- Опубліковано 14 тра 2024
- Japanese really does have the most complex writing system in the world. Here I spell out its history and my struggle to learn it.
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* TLDW? *
Forget what they told you about other writing systems - writing Japanese is ridiculously hard! When I started to learn the language, they hit me with one syllabary after another: hiragana, then katakana. But those didn't set me back much.
Kanji on the other hand... See, you may have heard that kanji are symbols for words. Nope. I found out they're more like playing a game of charades with a really bad teammate who gives you vague hints combined with obscure sounds-like clues that are way out of date.
Join me next time to find out exactly what it was about kanji that really pushed me over the edge.
* CREDITS *
Art, animation and narration by Josh from NativLang.
Some music by Josh, too.
Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com):
Sneaky Snooper, Finding Movement, Our Story Begins, Path of the Goblin King v2
Music by Jason Shaw (audionautix.com):
Time Passing By, Namaste
Creative Commons and Public Domain art, fonts and sfx:
docs.google.com/document/d/1L...
Kanji is for people who want to learn something new every day... for the rest of their lives.
dlwatib yess (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉto keep our minds young!
I think I know between 20 to 30% of chinese words. Maybe less. FYI I studied Chinese literature and translation at my hometown in hong kong and I translated 3 chapters of 紅樓夢.
There are simply so many forgotten words that are not used since a thousand years ago lol
Hahaha
the most outdated writing system in the world..... complicated characters that have stroke orders that are up to 30 strokes and even more. Even Japanese and Chiense people are forgetting some of their own characters. It's just too impractical. Koreans were smart and got rid of it.
There's 50k dammit!!
Chinese: makes complicated writing system
China, Korea, Vietnam: changes it to be simple
*Japan: Makes it even more complicated*
Well not for Hongkongers because they write in Traditional
Imperial scholars in Vietnam even created a much harder and more complex characters system based on Chinese characters but it was not common for everyone and until 16th century, catholic missionaries brought Latin alphabet and 越南 became Việt Nam
@@phamnguyen6614 "an even more complicated writing system"
a) more complicated than the Chinese or the Japanese?
b) why do you East Asians love pain so much?
DelToro Perdedor the characters are much denser than Chinese ones
@Liam what? How? Why?
Everyone who is seriously studying Japanese knows, it’s not as difficult as he makes it sound. Once you have reached a certain level of language experience, you pick up new characters pretty easily.
Hell yeah brother. The cliff you have to climb to that point is excruciatingly painful though.
@@TheSonOfDumb It definitely a difficult journey. But it’s worthwhile!
After 3 weeks and pretty much mastering kana, I'm at the biggining with kanji. The worst part is remembering how to pronounce kanji, but otherwise it's super easy to remember
@@MrOrzech1 Good luck mate. The journey you just set on will take years. Or just one if you're one of those insane genius types.
@@MrOrzech1 Remembering the correct 音読み and 訓読みis difficult!
Oftentimes I can understand the words but I don’t know how to pronounce them.
I believe it would be a nightmare for non-native speakers to learn Japanese from scratch.
Even for me as a child, I hated kanji lessons so hard that I litterally cried in my bed and tried to make up some shitty reasons to skip them.
We do it with keywords and memory tricks, mostly. Every primitive and every kanji gets ONE name, usually based on a common meaning or a common word it's used in. Then we make up pictographs or stories to connect the names of the parts with the names of the kanji. More ambitious people than myself will add the onyomi and kunyomi into the story somehow, and true fanatics will try to include stroke order hints as well.
For example, 狩 is made up of "dog... guard" and is given the name "hunt." So we make up a silly story like, "there was a mix-up at the noble's mansion; a guard dog was sent with the hunting party and a hunting dog was left to guard the home."
It's time consuming and occasionally frustrating but I've dealt with far worse. Casually doing about an hour a day on average for 3-4 months, I can identify the joyo kanji by these keywords with about 90% accuracy. Of course, that itself is pretty disappointing since the result could be fairly described as 'a part of a part of an alphabet' rather than even elementary school level literacy, but the language uses the script it uses.
We cry during our sleep and spend the extra time trying to learn
most people in my high school Japanese 1 class were fluent in Spanish & English. people who spoke Spanish had an easier time with the pronunciation. but everyone struggled remembering the kanji! just an observation i made. haven’t seen a lot of people talking about japanese as a third language. most learn it as a second language after english ^^
I started studying Japanese at 16 lol. I can confirm it’s hard but kanjis are interesting so its what makes it more bearable.
@@nova4476 I agree maybe i had it easier since i already knew french English and Spanish. However you still have to learn ALL the vocabulary by heart
Him: **Japanophilia**
Everyone else: _WEEB_
No
IronSmiley Yes
@@rubyy.7374 Ness
@@chrisyin1310 Poo
dragonman9001 BFDI fan spotted!
は is only pronounced as 'wa' when used as a particle. otherwise it's pronounced as 'ha'
So, can I find a Higgs boson if I put it in a super-collider?
@@ianbunch1583 You got me there XD
はい、そですね Japanese Ian really that hard. Memorizing is fine all that is fine the real hardest part about Japanese is the grammar because it is so different from English
日本語ですか。 学校の中に日本語をならいます。
@@yutarowatanabe3273 "wa" is not "is".
wa is untranslatable.
"is" would be "desu"
I'm Japanese, but some japanese actually can't write more than 2000 kanjis. And we can't also read many words that are made of over 2 kanjis. Because there are many words in Japanese. However we can guess the meaning of some words.
So you should remember the meanings of them and be able to write about 1000 kanjis. It's also native level. Thank you for studying Japanese🙇
Can we get rid of Kanji. It looks awesome in tattoos but I can't read stuff when it has the Kanji just chilling between the hirigana.
@@karenljuarez Kanji are made up with radicals, once you be able to recognize the pattern when and where and why it show up based on context it'll be a piece of cake
@@karenljuarez Chinese be thinking the completely opposite
@@karenljuarez skill issue
@@karenljuarez Japan govt prefer to use kanji in official statements to avoid different interpretations
The reason why there is "Hiragana" is because it is hard to write only "Kanji".
The reason why there are "Kanji" is that when explaining complicated things, "Kanji" contains meaning, so it can be expressed easily.
And the reason, why there are ”Katakana”, is probably, because old-timey computers didn’t recognize ”Hiragana” 🤔.
@@PC_Simo no, it's used for foreign words
Kanji does not contain meaning. The word the kanji makes the reader think of is the part with meaning. For example, 生物学者 is a reasonably complex concept. Do we need the kanji to write it? Not at all - in English the same idea would be communicated by writing "biologist". In Korean, 생물학자 _saeng'mul'hak'ja_ is the exact same word (they just read it with _sei_ and _mono_ instead of _ikimono_ or _seibutsu_ , but the words used are essentially the same). Teacher, school? We could write 先生 and 学校 but 선갱 _seon'seng_ and 학교 _hag'gyo_ serve the same purpose, as would せんせい, _sensei_ , がっこう and _gakkou_ . Writing is just a finger pointing to the moon, it is not the moon.
@@javieralejandrotrianapaz6343 Yeah, I’ve heard of that one, too. My previous comment was a semi-joke.
Now imagine studying Chinese, where they don't even do you the courtesy of annotating the characters with pronunciation.
At least every hanzi has pretty much just one pronunciation
+Flavio Spadavecchia He may have exagerated a little when he showed one of the kanji with the most ways to pronounce, 生. Most kanji have about 2 or 3 ways to pronounce, and it's usually like if it's accompanied or stand alone. So there's not a lot of thinking about it.
yeah, 生 is kind of an exception
Flavio Spadavecchia Not true. Especially not if you're learning simplified characters--a number of characters were collapsed into one simplified form which can have two or three pronunciations. Not to mention the ones whose pronunciations change in context just because.
著 has 5 way to pronounce it
和 has 6 (1 dialectal)
的 has 3
一 has 2 (Depending on the character that comes after it)
sooo yeah most with one is true, but some do have quite a lot
If you're learning Japanese, it would be easier to create your own writing system and then teach everyone in Japan how to use it.
The underlying issue is their grammar, no simple writing system can accommodate their grammar. They should just abandon the language and create a whole new one
@@umr3179 Actually, Japanese has very similar grammar to Korean. Both languages use particles and use different sentence ending to indicate tense or politeness level. So far, Korean has had no problem with their readability since abandoning Chinese characters and using the much easier Hangeul instead.
@@cinduts I am not a native English speaker. I am a Vietnamese, and my friends said learning Chinese and Korean is much easier when they see how struggle I am learning Japanese
@@umr3179 I understand. My point is that learning ANY foreign language is never easy. The issue is when you blame the language that you find difficult to learn and say that "they should just abandon the language and create a whole new one." That is ignorant. Instead of complaining about the language, you may want to tweak your learning strategies, or even better live in Japan for a while.
@@cinduts My twin brother is living in Japan, and he still keep complaining about how absurd the language is
An important tip about learning new languages: Don’t stress yourself out over things that even native adults struggle with. More obscure Japanese kanji, hard-to-spell English words, etc are all difficult for many native writers of those languages. You don’t have to hold yourself to a higher standard than native users when you learn a new language.
The beauty of japanese is this difficulty to enter.
I was thinking that this might be the reason your average japanese is smarter than others, the language literally forces the brain to be smarter.
日本語を勉強されている方、コロナ禍が落ち着いたら是非日本に来て下さい。
To all those who study Japanese, please come to Japan: our country after this COVID disaster. I wish that you enjoy the visit.
Sincerely from Tokyo, Japan.
Be sure of that :D
I would gladly, if I had money.
どうしたの？なぜはあなたを頼んでいるみたいのか？日本に日本語勉強が良いですか？
(im still new and learning japanese pls correct me and im sorry)
@@arissyazwanaman3211
I still cannot get a good command of English, and I might have made a strange English sentence. What I wanted to do is to encourage more visits from abroad.
Why I talked to those who study Japanese is on the premise that many of those who watch this video should study Japanese or be interested in Japan. And you might as well be able to speak Japanese well if you come to Japan. That is because more people in Japan have difficulty communicating in English than other countries.
And finally your Japanese sentence might be revised as below;
どうしてあなたは(私たちに日本へ来るように)頼んでいるのですか？日本に行くなら日本語を勉強しておくといいのですか？
I’m sorry if I could not figure out what you want me to explain, and this comment is off the point.
@@kisenhakkadonoseki2054 ありがとうございます。
Now you have explained everything to me. I feel so stubborn and humiliating for asking such question with a messed up japanese sentence.
4:46
漢字は難しいです
the title of the books is 'Kanji is difficult'
lol
なぜなら漢字 “は” 難しい 😂
For me the Japanese sentence looks like "Chinese characters bla difficult blablablabla"
漢字に関しては、日本人でも難しいよ…
kanji is difficult for japanese.
Kanji wa muzukashii desu?
Right?
I love your Haibara profile pic
Hiragana: Ok, this is good.
Katakana: Yo, wait, what?
Kanji: *_AAAAAAAAAAA-_*
there's hell in the comments lmfao
Katakana is foreign words(mostly English)
Kanji makes Japanese easier... Not harder.
Kanji makes Japanese easier... Not harder.
@@DreamyAbaddon yeah of course learning 3000 different kanji makes the Japanese easier
@@tolgakurum8966 It depends upon the text you want to read. An elementary school-level knowledge (roughly 1200 of the kanji by the end of grade 6) is sufficient for most tasks. While it doesn't help much with pronunciation, splitting kanji by the "radicals" they are constructed from (roughly 200 of the first kanji taught in schools) greatly simplifies the task of memorization, and also provides context clues to the meanings of more complex characters.
Hey I'm a Japanese who just started to learn Chinese.
In Chinese I have to write everything in Kanji and I feel that's a huge tiring work that upsets me a lot.
And I am thankful I was born a Japanese because our three writing systems makes writing much easier and simpler and more flexible.
Just don't learn Japanese from the grammer and systems. Just learn daily phrases like Japanes kids would. And move on to reading Mangas.
Well at least you have a grasp on Kanji, Koreans on the other hand not so much since like Vietnam they stopped using Hanja(Hanzi/Kanji) and are more used to Hangul.
Why not just drop the kanji?
@@AngryRobot87 because "history". They are extremely proud of this shitty system that they cannot see it is clearly stupid and inefficient.
@@AngryRobot87 Because in some cases it’s difficult to express exactly without kanji
@@linderoes7832 how so? Koreans did it, why cant the japanes? As far as i know mangas already have small little hiraganas written above kanjis to make it easier to read.
I have mastered kanji upto n3. One day, I saw a very basic japanese video for kids. It was all written in hiragana. But I couldn't understand it at all. One benefit of kanji/hanzi is that u can grasp the meaning of a word instantly. Japanese has a lot of homophones which all sound the same. Example はな(hana), this can mean two things
1) flower 花
2) nose 鼻
It both were only written in hiragana, it will be very hard to understand. I feel kanji makes perfect sense
Exactly. Once you get the hang of it, you will prefer Kanji. It's way way more efficient!
The difficulty mostly isn't in homophones, it's that you're used to spotting and recognizing kanji when you're reading Japanese, and not at all used to spotting hiragana sequences for those words. When you're reading eg. English, reading phonetic script is not a problem, right? It's not a problem because you have mass exposure to phonetically written English and you're used to seeing the word shapes. With Japanese, there's no such habituation since most written material is in mixed script.
But consider Korea. The language is structurally similar, has tons of Chinese loans like Japanese, used to be written with the same kind of mixed script as Japanese is, and people made similar arguments about homophones there as they do about Chinese and Japanese today.
If we look at this:
한국어 한자 혹은 한국 한자는 한국에서 쓰이는 한자이다. 중화권에서는 조선 한자라고 부른다. 한자는 최근 발해만 랴오닝 반도 요하 문명에서 가장 오래된 유물이 출토되었는데 그보다도 더 기원이 올라갈 것으로 추정된다. 고조선에서 쓰였을 것으로 추정된다.
한국에 도입된 한자는 기본적으로 한문으로서 문어의 역할을 하였으나, 표의 문자인 한자로 한국어를 표기하는 데에는 한계가 있었기 때문에 구어 표기에는 이두, 향찰, 구결 등 차자 표기가 사용되기도 하였다. 또한, 필요에 따라 새로운 한자로 정착되거나, 새로운 뜻과 음이 더해진 것 등 한국 고유 한자가 생겼고, 이밖에도 고유 명사 표기를 위한 것, 불교 음역을 위한 것, 한국어 낱말 표기를 위한 것 등 상당수의 한국 고유 한자가 생겨났다.
It's hard to read, even if actually reading hangul isn't that hard. But the Koreans are used to it due to mass exposure and read it just as fast as Japanese people read Japanese or I read English.
Same thing with languages like Chinese - the Vietnamese language is a lot like Chinese, and tone-marked Latin script works just fine there. The Dungan muslims in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan speak a descendant of Mandarin but write it in cyrillic alphabet without even using tone markings, and it works fine.
@@Komatik_ I can speak and read Chinese and Korean. I find that reading Hanja-Hangul mixed script is much faster and easier than pure hangul.
@@Komatik_ now, yuu arent yuust tu funetiklee speld inglish. funetiklee speld inglish wud luk laik this, and it is veree difikult tuu reed, bekuz no won raits laik this or iz tot tuu reed laik this. and it wud bee eevun mor difikult if ai have ei diferent aksent then yuu doo. thee aideea ov raiting inglish funetiklee is ultimutlee ei bad won.
@@comradewindowsill4253 i read it easily tho cause seeing a phonetic laws is easy especially learned european language. Latin script have a lot of latin root just like kanji you van easily just remember the number of character and spelling of roots. International-inter(in between of multiple facets) nat(born)-->nation (where you born, your homeland) al(indication for adjective just like い in adjective in japanese. If look at this way a latin script is just as complex but the mundane of remember dense strokes is reduced thus "simplify" the phrase to read. And another thing is :) japanese should just include space between words, just like that. Don'twritewithoutanyspaceinyourphrase, it'sveryhardtoreadsometimes.
Actually "へ" is only pronounced "e" when used as a direction particle. Other than that it's pronounced "He".
@Lucky Joestar it all depends on context. Most hiragana are used for words and some are specified for particles that join the words. え isn't a particle, so i think people might just mistake it for part of the previous word (which would change the word). へ also has the meaning of "to" so is used in that context. Also, usually へ is not the final character in a word, its paired with い to become the commonly seen へい. え does not usually pair with another character, therefore seeing on its own would be confusing (more so than japanese already is lol)
@Lucky Joestar Try saying them without exaggerating the h too much
へんたい
@@invrgottomars wwww
_some_asian_baka _ wow lol
After having learned around 3000 kanjis, I can say that its way easier to understand sentences written in kanji rather than in kana. It's muscle memory in its finest. I can discern 月 easier than つき. And then when you find a new word composed of two kanji you know, you can have a rough idea of what it means, even if you don't know the composed word.
紙 = paper, 手 = hand, 手紙 = hand paper... a letter!
Of course there is also the on'yomi, kun'yomi and other pronunciations, but even if you give the on'yomi instead of kun'yomi, japanese can understand and correct you.
In Chinese 手=hand 纸=paper so join them together and you get 手纸, guess what it means? toilet paper, lol
.
unless you know chinese and you end up reading 'yue'/'yut' instead in the middle of a japanese sentence
I'm in the 2nd grade of a Japanese school, and I've done 120 kanji as of today's date. And yes, I'm starting to find sentences written in kanji easier to read than kana. I've come so far since October 2020 (the date I got into the school) hahaha
@@lapaula_fj_ Man, you need some Anki. 120 in 6 months is... not good.
@@baronvonbeandip I know, but if you want to complain, mail my academy, don't message me.
I wonder if I would've found Japanese 100x more harder if I had the background of studying as many languages as you before Japanese. To anyone starting learning, good luck! And I promise you'll get used to it! 頑張れー！
I love the fact that one second ago, I didn't know what 頑張れ was, but just by looking at it I thought: "Oh well it ends with a れ and has 2 kanji, so maybe it is 「ガンバレ」".
And I was right lol.
@@russell_w21 LMAO, SO TRUE.
You’re right. I think that’s the point many are missing. They’re dog’in him saying he’s exaggerating or spreading a stereotype. But I’m the same as him. I tackle language from the grammar… “how is it built and why does it work that way” kind of thinking. He’s not talking about just memorizing. I kept reading the comments saying oh just memorize it! It’s not that hard. But he’s talking about the structure and how the language was built. If you come at Japanese from that point of view, it’s super complicated. It’s like taking a machine apart to see how it works not just knowing that it does work. If that makes sense.
It’s a curse sometimes to think that way. But in other moments I’ve been able to learn a language fluently super quick by understanding all the details. Some languages though….like Japanese….it’s better to look at the big picture not the details. Humans are so clever with language. It’s fascinating.
@@russell_w21 as a chinese, i can tell u that 「頑張」means add-oil
@@russell_w21 we can figure out some japanese, 'cause we both use kanji XD
なんかこの動画見たら当たり前に日本語読み書きできる自分がとんでもなくすごい人のように思えてきた…
自信つきまくるよね笑笑
それなwww
ひらがなとカタカナと漢字使いこなせてる自分ってすごくね？？w
そのネイティーブ並の表現力は何だよ。。。
私の財布はクモでいっぱいです
話し言葉だけならかなり簡単みたいだけどな
My high school Japanese teacher makes Japanese feel easy. I’m happy to have a good sensei
Cuz ure prolly only learning the basic of the basics.
@@cyandeoidre2375 yeah it really does suck when all of your options suck because either way it’s going to be something you don’t like so you have to choose the lesser evil.
...y'all have Japanese in America? we barely have French Spanish here
In my university we started with a full class in the first levels.
Now at the highest levels, it's just me and 4 other people attending.
It might be easy at the start, but trust me when I say it's x5 more difficult than Mandarin.
Almost everyone switches to 'Chinese'.
@@giarose240 I ended up hating french because i was forced to study in in hight school.
bruh i'm japanese and I didn't know wi and we existed
That's hilarious
they are not used in modern language.
Cole?
same aha
Hahah omg
Japanese students:We are Japanese native, so we don’t have to try to learn such a complex language…
Kobun(Old Japanese):Hi, I am almost different language except pronunciation.
Kanbun(Old Chinese translated into Old Japanese):I’m here too.
Me:Hey, Can you read this? (大納言)
My friend:It’s Dainagon. The third rank of the noble class in old Japanese empire.
Me:Right, but Can you read this in Kobun pronunciation?
My friend:Dai……I don’t know.
Me:OOIMONOMOUSUNOTSUKASA
Is Kanbun “漢文訓読体”? but I don't know much about it
日本語難しいわ・・・
by 日本人
every japanese person i met online thinks japanese is hard
and people who claim their native language is hard never speak a second language
Yeah, even for locals.
*Anyone* who tells you japanese is easy is full of shit. It is easy to learn a couple phrases and bumble your way through a mediocre day. "Learn 有り難う and 済みません and you're good"
Those people probably don't know pitch accent, 敬語, 四字熟語, or 当て字 / 義訓 / 熟字訓 even exist... and that's not even counting useless, innumerable 外来語 and any kanji past 常用.
@@baronvonbeandip first,who writes 有り難う instead of ありがとう and 済みません instead of すみません lol... that's just plain silly and looks like nothing more than an attempt to make it seem overcomplicated
second, why stress over kanji outside the 常用? it's enough to understand the majority of contemporary japanese texts. and i don't understand why fuss over four-kanji-compounds or 敬語 (polite speech...) or 外来語 (loan words? really? like, english written in katakana?)
and if, for you, learning means becoming an expert linguist in the language... have you really tried learning a language, ever?
As a native Chinese speaker and also a Japanese speaker, please DON'T learn kanji first, ignore it until you have learnt listening and speaking A LOT.
Even put kanji to the last thing in your learning plan. Chinese speaker usually don't learn any kanji writing at first.
Good luck to every Japanese and Chinese learner.
@Seskja In my opinion cantonese is way too hard for a german and portuguese speaker
I've been in Chinese 1 for 4 years
Hey, I've learneing though. I know that 你好 means hello!
Indeed.
说的对。
When you learn it academically, and if you want to use it for work--you absolutely need to learn Kanji after you've learnt your first few hundred words and some basic grammar. Otherwise you'll never pass the tests, never be taken seriously by any native speaker. Kanji is so fundamentally important. I really struggled with it and avoided it and I would say it has done me more hindrance to avoid it than it has good.
谢谢您!**在学中文和日文**
ありがとうございます!**中国語と日本語を勉強しています**
It’s like 好 is combined with 女 and 子
It means “good” but it’s literally combining the character for “woman” with the character for “child”
@GewoonLeon I understand what you mean.
Japanese "good" basically pronounces "よい" or " いい".
And Kanji adapting variations are 良い, 善い, 佳い,好い, each one has its behind meaning.
But most modern Japanese only use 良い. And rarely use the others.
好い is too weird to use for Japanese verbal communication. Only a good example is, 好い人, means attractive person of other sex. But modern many Japanese don't notice they say いいひと as 好い人, even they notice いいひと means attractive person. Also, many Japanese can't read 好い(よい).
On the other hand, that 好い人 example doesn't show that 好い means "good" directly. Japanese 好い was changed slightly from its chinese meaning of "good". And it is being forgotten now.
好
Because people used to believe it you have a wife (woman) and a kid then you're doing great in life.
There are only a few kanji that can be broken down to understand their meanings, so beginners in Japanese should start by memorizing the basic characters and their meanings. Most of the complex kanji are combinations of simple ones, so learning simple ones will dramatically improve your understanding of kanji.
みんな日本語勉強しすぎちゃう？
最高かよ。
I am happy to know that there are so many people from outside of Japan who study Japanese very hard.
Lmao, as a japanese speaker. Japanophilia made me laugh so hard
I am not Japanese, but I surely feel annoyed when people say Nihongo is tooo hard. As a Japanese learner, I don't, not at all. Do you feel annoyed when you read such comments?
@@s888r, well, japanese can be hard. Theres words that can be hard to remember. But that goes for every language when you first learn it.
@@wi11ow8 I don't actually care about those comments which look like they are written by non-learners of Japanese or by elementary learners. I do agree that some part of it like multiple pronunciations is hard, but some people just exaggerate the hardness. I don't think that kanji should be learnt completely by looking behind the components. Yet some people do that and later complain that it is hard. Isn't memorisation much easier?
@@s888r absolutly, its good to know the conponents of a kanji, but when was the last time you used syllables to write a word. You learn them at the start which can be hard, but it should be smooth sailing from there. In other words, i agree :)
@@s888r TBH its both opinion or trolling. I mean people say any language they have no grasp hard, while they believe they have a grasp on a language they will say it is easy (in reality their level is barely basic and useless because they just know parts of it and believe they are so good). Linguist or language nerds tend to argue writing has to make sense when in fact they don't even have any clue of languages and culture behind it.
When I took Japanese in high school we spent like 2 weeks on hiragana and katakana. took a quiz, then forgot about it. Then we all collectively suffered through kanji where only the art nerds could begin to understand what the hell was happening.
Dang atleast you've got an angel and a devil on your shoulders. I just have a devil and a devil.
Oh really? I have a Sasuke and a Naruto
Then I have a Natsu and gray hanging out on my feet
Then we have Nagisa and Karma chilling in my hair
I'll see myself out now...
I have nothing...
Yeah well not everyone learning Japanese are weeaboos. I, for one, hate anime. OP's just lucky to not have a devil for each Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Kanji combination.
No one with a Tucker Carlson profile pic can ever have an angel even near them.
What are you, a fat recently divorced woman posting on Facebook?
I Japanese think that only speaking Japanese is not so difficult.
However, if you want to write perfect sentences in Japanese, it will be so hard.
Mostly cause Japanese stroke order will give you a stroke. If you write Chinese system, it's a breeze.
@@baronvonbeandip Learning stroke order isn't difficult. It might be challenging at the beginning, but after a few dozens of Kanji wrote, you'll see an improvement in your use of stroke order. It'll become easier for you. Stroke order makes your characters more beautiful.
Personally I think that stroke orders are exactly what helps you most with memorizing kanji. Sometimes I can't fully picture the right kanji for a word in my minds eye but I'll remember the first few strokes and then my hand almost writes the rest of it by itself, like from muscle memory.
i agree with you,i love watching janpanese movies animes tv series and listening to japanese pop music,so i can understand and speak a little bit japanese in our daily life but i can't write japanese except kanji, because i'm chinese,and i don't understand japanese's comments everytime when i've watched japanese videos on youtube,i really want to know what were they talking about😭😭😭they seemd so funny😁😁😁
For anyone who might be feeling discouraged. Kanji is definitely the hardest part of Japanese. Its grammar is way more simple and logical than the grammar in most European languages, although it might take you a while to get used to the word order. Also, after learning some kanji it becomes way easier and they start looking like "structures" of strokes that are not that hard to recognize. I say this because at the beginning they might look like a big mesh of lines, but they're not. Finally, don't waste time learning the pronunciations of each kanji, learning words is way easier and faster.
This is why I love Spanish. It's 100% phonetic with a few exceptions for proper names or loan words. English is hard enough with its crazy combinations that change like "ough:" dough, cough, bough, thorough, thought. In Spanish, you can learn the sounds that the letters represent and learn words by reading. It's much different than learning English or French. Japanese seems extremely daunting, at least regarding its writing.
As an English speaker who studied 4 years of Spanish in highschool, it floored me when I learned of the word "psicologíca" due to the silent p at the front. Yeah Spanish is actually written exactly as spelled most of the time which is great.
Interestingly enough, having learned Japanese and English at the same time during my childhood, I never actually thought the Japanese writing system was any more difficult than that of English.
But then I started learning some other languages later, and I realized just how bizarre and complicated it was. lol
母語なのに難しいのは何故だろう...って現国とか古典の授業のときに毎回思うよ...
to all people learning a language they have never learned before is hard
its good that i started with japanese. now that i look at other language scripts (except chinese) they all just come easily to me (like korean, arabic, etc)
Hiragana and Katakana are super easy to learn. It's what made learning Japanese so easy for me, because you can learn the entire syllabary in a day and feel very accomplished. But then i had to mentally prepare myself for the tire fire that is learning Kanji...
Mers yeah i feel you the easiest kanji was numbers and basics!
For people who knew chinese words its much more easier to learn kanji
FiveADay Kanji Kanjidamage is also a great resource if you want mnemonics that will make you laugh
Same. Learning Hiragana and Katakana was like walking through a field, while learning kanji is like climbing a cliff.
As a Chinese, we are like having skipped more than half of the cliff climbing and mostly just walking in the field. It is oddly satifying learning Japanese as Chinese along with westerner.
Exactly why I'm super stoked to continue learning this language.
Ya learn something new everyday and the challenge is never over
as Bunsuke says, 'there don't seem to be any end to them, but i love them'
just like you never felt it was difficult to learn your own lanfguage, for a Japanese it's never difficult to be able to speak and write Japanese.
But as i learned different language, like English, I learned how convenient Japanese language is.
I've been learning English for so long, but I still feel it's frustrating to read everything in one wrinting system.
when reading Japanese you can feel which words are more major or minor or supplementary or foreign at a glance because of the different writing system we have.
I’ve wondered for a while if we could sort of replicate the Japanese writing system by putting emojis in our writing. We already have italics which are comparable to katakana, so we could go further. For example the first sentence could look something like this:
I’ve 🤔ed for a 🕰🕰 if we could 🤷 ⚾️🥎 the 🗾ese ✍️🗄 by putting emojis in our 📜.
@@maxthexpfarmer3957 no, you can't. I didn't understand a thing
I'm still not very good with Japanese but I certainly appreciate it. If I'm reading Japanese and I don't recognize a character, I know that it's something I don't know and don't confuse it for homonyms I do know. It is a very clear written language. And yeah, the three writing systems make reading much easier. People see it as a needless complication but it makes Japanese sentences very readable at a glance.
I’m a Japanese girl but idk why the writing system is so complex. I never think that our Japanese is perfect even for native speakers. One of the advantage of learning Japanese is that enable you to communicate with lotta Japanese ppl, you know, we’re definitely not good at speaking in English😭 Anyway, if you are learning it, have fun!
A Quiet Life P But it’s similar to saying if you can learn Österreichisch Deutsch, du können sprechen zu viele Deutsch volks. But realistically the main reason anyone SHOULD learn a new language is it’s commercial usefulness and in market, or simply visiting their country without paying a crap ton for a translator. Like Soviet Russian, very commercially successful language, ESPECIALLY JAPANESE! But languages are harder than others. There’s no real “hardest language,” as it depends on your adaptation from your native language. Also some languages are chosen to NOT be learned either because it’s traumatizing to learn, or because it’s simply f***ing useless. Like Ungarnisch. There’s my random rant for no reason, guten tag!
@@makotoyuki2199 True i will just learn to understand some japanese no way in hell will i be trying to understand this alphabet i also study deutch and english but this is just to mutch guten tag.
In my opinion Japanese should create a modern, more efficient writing system.
*PETITION TO MAKE A REVISION OF JAPANESE LANGUAGE AND IT'S SYLLABRIES*
あ、ありがとうございます! I'm learning a lot of kanji rn, more than a kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllllllllloooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetttteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr aaaaaawaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy~~~
The Japanese are very nice people, even if you don't understand their codes. Which are difficile to get. But they are as goofy as us.
Hiragana and Katakana actually make things easier. I can't imagine studying Japanese without them. And it took me a summer vacation of casually studying them whenever I felt like it to learn them, so no big deal
Took me a couple of hours to learn them
Oh yeah, Hiragana and Katakana are a godsend for someone learning from the outside. They make it possible to read and write while learning the verbal language. Without them, you wouldn't really have any (mostly) reliable phonetic tool for writing spoken word while learning, and based on many of these comments, it sounds like the best way to learn Japanese is to do a fair bit of learning the language before doing anything with Kanji at all.
Also the Kana twins get bonus points for being arranged in a conveniently organized chart that is identical for both sets of Kana.
Oh goodness, imagine if Hiragana didn’t exist
Also Hiragana is put on top of Kanji sometimes to make it easier.
i don't understand? do people learn the language without learning the alphabet? why?
I'm looking forward for the next video. I felt so identified with it lol
I'm actually learning Japanese right now and this is all true, even though it might be tough I'm still committed to this!! 100 kanji learned already :)
Still committed?
哈 哈 哈 哈 哈 哈 哈 哈 哈 哈 哈 哈 哈
*LAUGHS IN MANDARIN*
omfg
this comment has just summarized the reaction of all the mandarin native speakers watching this video
Alizée Long Exactly. When you already mastered the most difficult part of another language without any extra study.
Xuanting Chen Now all we have to do is memorise the other way to prononce it and how the character looked like in traditional writing
Allow me the join the laughing party
"he didn't even talk about stroke order!"
on the other hand, thank you for making this video so i can show people my Pain
god help me
There's a video for stroke order
You whining baby:v
stroke order is pretty easy actually. You get used to it after practicing. Same with Hiragana.
@@gallantsteel8542 Yeah, I mean I can guess the stroke order of a Kanji.
Japanese stroke order sucks and makes no sense.
Use the Chinese stroke order instead.
i was just trying to learn japanese and stumbled upon this awesome you tube channel. Subscribed!! :)
This is why the hyperpolyglot-wannabe in me decided to pick up Mandarin first. Theory being once I know hanzi, learning the Japanese syllabaries will be my only struggle in Japanese because I'll already know the kanji. Totally worked! And the idea being I'll learn the hardest one first so every language I learn after that will seem easy. I'm only intermediate in Mandarin but it's been long enough I feel comfortable stretching my linguistic exercises out, and learned hiragana (so lazy, I could do it faster but I'm trying to keep most of my focus on Mandarin) last year. Katakana is my goal this year. So by the time I feel fluent in Mandarin I'll already have the syllabaries down in Japanese, obviously the kanji will be a piece of cake, so it'll be as easy as learning Vietnamese at that point! You know, since Vietnamese is totally different but uses the roman alphabet letters. Still tough, but at least I'll be able to read fluently, even if I won't know what the hell the words mean yet. Though the extra couple of tones in Vietnamese were a bit tough (I only learned enough to be a respectable tourist when I visited, it's just respectful to learn enough to talk basics with the locals), at least the practice with a tonal language like Mandarin prepared me for that too. Something to look forward to with Japanese - the writing may be tough, but the pronunciations are a Piece Of Cake compared to the years of hard work to figure out how to talk in non-sarcastic actual tones.
Yay languages!
it's funny, cause my chinese friends say that going to japan is mind bending. they see all these random out of context hanzi all over the place, and thanks to semantic drift half of them don't mean anything near the original chinese definition. it's like being assaulted by random words as you walk down the street; "...green..." "...water building..." "...vegetable..."
Kana is actually pretty easy after the memorization, Its when you add the Kanji that it gets painful.
Ashmole Productions 😂😂 aww man... kana means chicken in my language
I would say the hardest thing in Japanese is not actually Kanji; those are the most time-consuming part of learning Japanese, but after a while it all gets easier and easier as you know all the radicals, and that when learning new words, you already recognise all or most kanji and it makes the new kanji easier to memorise. For me, when I started learning kanji a year ago, it took me about a full week to learn 10 basic kanji. Now, I can memorise a kanji (its shape, stroke order, on'yomi and kunyomi, as well as a couple important words it is part of) in about 30 seconds. It all gets easier; it's hard at the beginning, but it gets significantly easier and more memorisable the more you learn it. What I would say is the hardest, is the grammar:
- verb declension, adjective declension (especially forms like causative, passive, causative passive, -te/-ta form...)
- different forms of speech (especially colloquial forms of speech), particles (の, は, が, に, を, から...), especially end particles like (よ, わ, ね, な, のに, ぞ, ぜ, さ, く...), and words with many uses such as ところ, ほど, わけ... which take time to get used to and to be able to use fluently in daily colloquial conversation
- onomatopeias (there's a lot of them)
- a lot of short (Japanese origin) words with a lot of meanings, and a lot of spellings (for example つく "tsuku" has a lot of meanings, and a lot of spellings); a lot of Chinese origin words which are synonyms, because of the relatively short amount of sound combinations in Japanese to form words from Middle Chinese, which had a lot more sounds
- the different order (S-O-V) with subordinate clauses going in front of the noun, which makes it hard to easily think of how to say big chunks of clauses, since the order is completely reversed, like in a mirror
- absence of personal pronouns (I, you, he...) which makes it harder to understand.
There are other things I forgot to mention but I'd say grammar is in my opinion the biggest difficulty to learning Japanese, at least for me :)
Although what I would say for Kanji is that the main difficulty with them is writing names, that's a very difficult part of kanji as some have special readings for names, different ways to write names, and they can be on'yomi or kunyomi based on the name.
lucky to learn mandarin in school :D
This seems to be true. There's a couple levels to knowing a kanji (recognising it on sight, being able to write it with the correct stroke order, and then knowing how to pronounce it depending on the context) and all of this is fairly basic and doable as long as you find it interesting. Grammar seems really eerie and scary on the other hand, though in the end it isn't entirely illogical, but still very hard.
As a Filipino, learning Japanese is easy for me when it comes to speaking and grammar. I think Tagalog and nihonggo are similar the way the verbs and nouns are used. The hardest will always be kanji.
For me verb conjugation isn't that much of a problem, because it is very regular. There are, like, 3 irregular verbs(行く, 来る, する) and after that you just have to memorize those 3 or so common verbs that end with -eru/-iru but conjugate like the ones that end with -u (like 帰る), other than those, you can conclude all verbal forms from just the dictionary entry. And particles are like case endings except that they stand by themselves next to the phrase instead of being horribly and unrecognisably mangled to the end of the word.
Note: Declension is changing of nouns through cases, conjugation is changing of verbs through tenses, aspects, moods, persons, etc.
It's definitely not the same for me. Coming from Portuguese as a mother language I don't really have much trouble with the grammar. On the other hand Portuguese does have a fair correspondence between the letters you write and the sounds you pronounce and English was the farthest from that I had gone by the time I started learning Japanese (German has such an easier pronounciation than even some Romance languages for me but let's just not talk about grammatical cases). It is quite fun though. Tears. of. joy :')
For a native Chinese speaker, when I traveled to Japan, I could recognize stations and roads by kanjis. I can also recognize something by its “English” pronunciation, like hot, American coffee, bus. And the last tip is to write Chinese characters to communicate.
Writing Japanese is actually pretty easy IMO since I’m part Japanese. I don’t know all kanji meanings and the translations, I only know a few kanjis and meaning.
The kanas (hiragana/katakana letters) are easy to transliterate though to me, and I can figure out the meaning of some words by transliterating katakana words that sound alike to English words (like Lion is raion ライオン)
I’d say that Japanese is one of the most interesting languages
Btw I’d hug that poor struggling girl
"I'm part Japanese"
That's cheating !!
Are you serious
@@hristina24 Not really, it actually depends on his language experience that he had, not all biracials got that advantage.
Just because you're part japanese doesn't make it easier, if you said you grew up in Japan or one of your parents was teaching you at a young age then yeah. It's like saying a Russian that grew up in the US with no exposure to the Russian language at all would have an advantage in learning Russian even though they'd be as oblivious as everybody else that doesn't know it.
@@Kumorini Exactly 💯
Korea was smart... they made it simple. I mean, very simple.
Hangul for the win.
Korean writing is very ugly though. Japanese and Chinese writing is Gorgeous
Will Gao Hangul is beautiful! No other writing system can come close to embodying the brilliance of Hangul orthography!
@@user-yb6on2sh4r they are not ugly but rather less cool esthetics than Chinese characters.
Who care about beauty as long as it's practical
just a cheeki breeker
that’s what I meant by the ‘brilliance’ of Hangul orthography. It’s just more efficient.
thai is slowly draining my lifeforce. THERE ARE NO SPACES BETWEEN WORDS BUT I DON'T EVEN RECOGNIZE WORDS YET AND THE SOUNDS AREN'T IN ORDER (help me!)
verifiedmartian
I’ll pray for you
ภาษาไทยมันง่ายมาก
Thai language is very easy, as long as you can prounounce them
Ugh, I tried to learn the alphabet many times and kept failing. The letters themselves aren't that bad, but it's the tonal spelling that drives me insane.
Another use for kanji, it helps break up the sentence into 'chunks' like spaces do.
they don't use spaces because they dont need to, if you are reading a newspaper for example, most of the words will be in kanji, so its like a made a text like this: "theCATisWATCHingtheMOUSE" the uppercase text is what would be in kanji, you see that there is no space but you can still get it?
On top of that, kanji is just for writing, you don't need to learn kanji to know the words, its better to do the reverse: learn the word and see how its written.
And the main topic of japanese, 50.000 kanjis, well, there are actually those many, but only 2.000 are considered daily use(or in other words: "important") seems like a lot? actually only 20%(500 kanjis) cover up 80% of the content, if you are able to learn the other 1500, you will cover 99%.
And the remaining 1% are just complex words that will have Furigana with them, furigana is text at the side of the kanji written in hiragana so you know how to pronounce it.
I'm learning japanese right now, in more or less 2 weeks of actual work i already know hiragana and katakana, recently i have stopped working so hard but im still learning basic kanjis and the basic of the language.
Japanese can be hard, just search the right materials and you will be good, the same way many people are over analysing japanese, no one talks about how many english letter have different pronounciations and hundreds of ways of putting those letters togheter.
edit: also no one keeps saying english has 90 or so irregular verbs when japanese has only 2 lol
This video made me even more anxious about trying to learn Japanese. I was trying to find a hint or a tip to learning and this only better explained the complications I'm having. Good video though!
This video is poison to potential learners, if you guys wanna learn to read Japanese it’s really not that hard, it sounds like a lot but I have learned how to read basic manga after just 3 years, I do like RTK for learning kanji but I don’t think any book or program is necessary. I just learned hiragana and katakana and used those furigana scripts to teach me to pronounce the kanji when reviewing my anki cards and/or reading manga! Your brain does all the work for you at some point you just remember with no real effort.
That's still pretty insane given that in most languages it's possible learn the entire alphabet in days and read and write a basic version of the language in a few months...
@@peglor He's just lazy, it's totally possible to become proficient way faster than that without crazy amounts of effort. It's just about consistency in taking in the language - AKA reading and listening. The method it sounds like he's copying - the "Mass Immersion Approach" the guy has basically become indistinguishable from a native speaker in 5 years, and was most of the way there in 2. Don't listen to bitch-made mother fuckers who can't commit telling you things are harder than they are.
>basic
>3 years
Hummm something is off
This comment is poisons to those that have been trying to learn it for 15 years. "but you should try harder" THAT"S THE DAMN POINTTTT
@@orangestapler8729 I obviously haven't study it hard enough, meaning the language demands an effort I am not willing to put. Meaning I find the language too hard, but not in a way that it makes sense, it is just hard for the sake of being hard, ideograms are a garbage system. That's why hHangul
is vastly superior.
Meanwhile some American children struggle to learn how to write cursive AND print lol.
Imagine Japanese having cursive as well and being obligatory to learn
Indeed there are various Japanese cursive scripts which pupils learn in 書道 (Japanese calligraphy) class.
Thanks for reminding me to cringe at every little spelling mistake I see now. Grammar Nazi mode has been permanently turned on. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
David I'm struggling to write cursive. Lmao.
That`s why they should move to cyrilic, we write mostly cursive.
That coming from an English speaker, a language where you basically have to learn every word by heart, despite the fact, that it supposedly uses phonetical letters, because it has forgotten what that means and just pronounces letters differently in every word.
Here is what that should be written as: That komming from an Inglish spiker, a languij wer yu baysikali haf to lörn eweri wörd bai hart, despait the fakt, that it suposedli yuses fonetikal letters, bekoss it has forgotten wat that mihns and just pronaunses letters differentli in eweri wörd.
the problem with that is that if you write words exactly phonetically, you end up having words being spelt different by different dialects making it hard to read other dialects - i found it slightly tougher to read your second sentence for example. having the language like this gives you an idea of how to pronounce a new word and reminds you how to pronounce it after you've learnt it already.
@autarchprinceps
_"That coming from an English speaker, a language where you basically have to learn every word by heart"_
...Except you don't. We do have literary rules for a reason, and anyone learning English would be taught about phonetics and consonants and vowels. Also, English is... hardly... alone in having differences like this - Japanese has a ton of them as well (and if you don't believe me, take a look at the International Phonetic Alphabet and the examples of use of various vowels and consonants among the world's languages for similar differences). The problem is that English is the lingua franca of the world and thus gets more examination and scrutiny - easily because of ESL speakers seeing the issues (although conveniently overlooking the difficulty of their own native tongues, often more than not). Also, your example is a false dichotomy. If you write "komming" instead of "coming," I as an english speaker can still understand and know what you're saying. (Also so won't most German-derived language speakers.) That doesn't really hold true with Japanese and kanji where changing even a minor brush stroke can make it an entirely different kanji. And considering how many kanji look incredibly similar to one another and how even grown adult Japanese have difficulty with them... Well... Something tells me that English is not anywhere even NEAR the level that Japanese is on as far as this insanity goes. Namely because English is not as dependent on being so asininely correct as Japanese is.
Also also:
"Spiker" is wrong as an example as per your previous examples given in your sentence. A more correct example would be something like "Speekar."
"Differentli" also doesn't make sense. "Diffurentli" is more fitting. Although I'm not sure why you settled on "-li" instead of "-lee" because that sounds more phonetically closer.
"Eweri" is also questionable. The "V" in every is very much what most beginners would associate the sound of "V" with. Why "w"? It doesn't make sense and doesn't fit.
"Pronaunses" - again questionable. Many beginning speakers would likely see a traditional "w" sound in there. "Pronownsez" seems more logical.
"Mihns"? Nope. Perhaps "Muheens."
What's more questionable is why you think the use of the "e" [⟨ɛ⟩] vowel in "fonetikal" for "phonetical"/and "eweri" for "every" is fine but seem against using other vowel phonemes for "e" like the case of "Inglish" for "english." Not consistent.
yes I wish they would reform English spelling so words actually are spelled the way they sound. Of course that would lose history and culture, but it would make life a lot easier for many English learners. With advent of computer/internet though, it's not really necessary to memorize spelling anymore, computer will auto-fix it for you anyway
Disagree, most of these words follow some sort of pattern that isn't that hard to grasp once you face plently of words with the same pattern and if you're unsure you can quickly check. Stop whining
No you are wrong. English's spellings can be tricky at times, but for the most part, it is pretty consistent. You can read about English phonics, where the rules about english spelling are explained quite well. The language only becomes more complicated when the suffixes are thrown into the mix. For example, let's take the word "consistent", it consists of "con", "sist" and "ent"
Basically, the root "sist" means "go", and according to phonics rules, it is pronounced /sist/
The prefix "con" means "to make"
The suffix "ent" is an adjective converter.
=> consistent means "constantly going forward"
the problem is that from what I know, the affixation system is not taught at school when you learn the language, probably because even native speakers don't know much about word etymology. They know what the whole word means and sounds, but have no clue what each component means.
This is a really, really good video. Congratulations.
me as a japanese: * reading all the comments arguing about japanese
do you get offended?
@@ryuk9414 not at all :))) more like realizing how Japanese was actually hard
When i learned Japanese. It was crazy
then I met Chinese.
then I found traditional Chinese
then I found Cantonese.
Come on Cantonese is easy and fun. Maybe not to learn though, but once you know it’s simple.
And it was a complete walk in the park.
Why do people think Japanese is easier?
@Seskja Nah language that has the pronunciation of Danish and Thai mixed. Has the writing system of Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese mixed. As well as has the words loaned fro basque is going to be the hardest language
can we hit 90000 subs with no videos russian isn’t hard
can we hit 90000 subs with no videos well for me.
japanese is actually very easy...if your native lanaguage is chinese when you know all the kanji already
xojaymi you cant be serious. I dont think its possible to memorise every single kanji
@@servantofaeie1569 I'm pretty sure you can. (Yea not you Albert Einstein!)
@@gabano1311 No you can't. You can't know all of it. Not even native Japanese people know all the Kanji. There's too much.
lol if u use traditional instead of simplified writing system youll hv to learn cuz in japanese when they use kanji they use simplified chinese..
Angie Wong Nope .if you actually learned Japanese , Kanji is written by mixing traditional and simplified Chinese characters. With also their own way of writing the character. For example, 厳(きび)しい。
Traditional Chinese is written as 嚴
While Simplified Chinese is written as 严。
Without mentioning that Japanese also has characters not exist in Chinese. For example 凧(いかのぼり) (which means kite) or 峠 （とうげ) (which means mountain crest) don’t exist in Chinese. Chinese will be （風箏）and (山頂）.
I've only watched the first 3 minutes, and I am impressed how you studied in such depth. To know about けふ.
字幕もしっかりしてるし日本人でも死ぬほどわかりやすい日本語の解説ですごく参考になったぜ、ありがとう！！！
ぽまえすき
You're wrong.
The hardest language to understand is doctor language, seriously, it's almost impossible to understand their signatures.
raviolimaster69 “is it a b? Or an s? What? IT’S AN A WHAT- HOW?”
true XD
What’s funny is that pharmacists can understand them without effort... they have learnt to decipher their scribbles.
what about the scriblings for a drug prescription written by a japanese doctor? :D
lol.
Me learning grade 3 kanji:
Laughs at the hiragana at the katakana
Me seeing the kanji:
Oh shit,here we go again
How I hear the laughing: ひひひひひ
1:56 ok I'm native Japanese and I was so confused by the ツ゜thing then I realized you wrote ゛/゜ (dakuten/handakuten)
grade... 3?
Did you start last month or something?
@@baronvonbeandip i think hes talking about JLPT n3, its pretty common to just call them grades :>
The memories... Oh, the memories...! This video made me laugh a lot XD
My personal story of learning japanese dates back to around 10 years ago (I am currently in a master course in Japan). Once we get used to it, any language is not so hard, but in japanese, even native speakers don't understand some kanji, or cannot read them or write them... I wouldn't say that the most frequently used kanji are super difficult, but the amount of existing kanji is, for sure, what makes it more confusing when we start.
Also, kanji (or chinese characters) work more like drawings than alphabet words, so, muscular memory from writing them helps a lot. On the other hand, if we don't write them by hand, we may know the kanji (it's meaning and reading), but we will probably forget how to write them. That happens a lot nowadays even among japanese people, because everyone writes on their computers and smartphones.
Nonetheless, I would say that kanji is beautiful and fun to learn and, eventho there are guides to many levels or kanji, please do not stick only with the guides. The guides are not always organized by the level of frequency of a kanji, or by how much you will actually need that kanji in your daily life. Do not ignore new kanji that you may come across just because "it is not in your level's guide". If it is not in the guide, learn it by yourself. Find its meaning and reading and look for some examples of how to use it. =)
When you get to higher levels (or when you come to Japan ) you will find it there and think "Oh, wait a moment, I know this one!" .
I already knew about how this worked and I was still laughing my head off. Mad respect for anyone who learns it.
漢字を全部覚えようと思ったら、日本人でも相当時間かかる。高校生でも2500しか分からない
Amai (the two asian maidens in red shirts) said, "It would take a long time for even Japanese people to learn all the kanji. Even high school students only know 2500 of them."
The hardest part in reading Japanese is when words are pronounced a strange or irregular way and there's no furigana or other indication how to read them. For example, the Japanese word for "boundary, border" is /sakai/. The Chinese character with this meaning is 境, which is also pronounced /kyoo/ in some compounds, because this is how the Japanese assimilated the Chinese word for this character when it was borrowed centuries ago. When this character occurs by itself, one usually assumes that it is to be read as /sakai/, but in most compound words, it would be /kyoo/: 国境 /kokkyoo/ "national border". Another character, 内, means "within" and is usually pronounced in compounds as /nai/. (The native Japanese word for "the inner part" or "the area within" is /uchi/). Now if you see 境内 you might expect to read it as /kyoonai/ and understand it as "within the borders" or "inside the boundary," a perfectly logical assumption, but at least in a discussion of shrines or temples you'd be wrong. In this context, you simply have to already know that 境内 means "temple grounds" and that the word for this is /keedai/, not /kyoonai/. Run across this sort of hurdle twenty times a page and then you understand why Finnish is actually a very easy language to learn compared to Japanese.
That’s true.
I think if I didn’t see real temple, I can’t understand and use mean of “Keidai”(境内)
ありがとうございます世宗大王！
என்னடா கோழி கிறுக்குன மாதிரி இருக்கு..... எப்படி தான் எழுதுகிறார்களொ!.....
それな。けど、日常生活送るぶんには小中学校で習う漢字、だいたい2000語を網羅してたら楽勝でしょう
1:56 ok I'm native Japanese and I was so confused by the ツ゜thing then I realized you wrote ゛/゜ (dakuten/handakuten)
lol I thought it was only me
How do u guys learn this language I'm American and it's hard very hard I can't get pass intermediate level
@@forestreflection2066 I'm a beginner. What did you do to get to intermediate? Also do you know what NX level test you would be able to pass?
変なツﾟがあると思ったらそういう事かw
@@forestreflection2066 is it that hard for american I wonder?
Totally agree. They have not one, but two phonetic writing systems, and the one they choose to use primarily is an ideographic writing system from a culture they historically didn't even get along with.
I have had some success with a book titled "A guide to Remembering the Japanese Characters" by Kenneth G Henshall. It's basically an etymology dictionary, which is pretty important since this writing system was developed in an entirely different world. The character for journey, for example, is a composition of a person holding a halberd with a banner flying in the wind because in those days someone in the military was much more likely to "go on a journey"
The hardest writing system in Japanese: history textbooks which tell the truth.
@@thelastdefenderofcamelot5623 No?
3000 characters are just cherry on the top compare to the 25 hundred of the most common characters used in Chinese.
Yeah, and you can't forget the "dialects" xD
+Árón de Siún What i mean by dialects is simple, if lets say a modern chineese went into a obscure rural province of china the they would only be able to communicate via writing so it would make communication awkward
+Árón de Siún Also i can understand cantoneese just fine but manderain is like completely foreign to me
+Árón de Siún Although I can see your point but normal japaneese people can just talk to each other on a daily basis right? Well we chineese have to either, 1)understand each others dialect 2) written communicaton or 3) use a diffrent language like say english. Athough in most places there is one de facto dialect so most people can talk just fine.
+Gordon Leung Defacto dalect of the region i ment
Writing Japanese really isn't THAT complicated. Katakana for foreign words (primarily). Kanji for words which you know the kanji for. Hiragana for grammar stuff and words you don't know the kanji for.
Although memorizing all those kanji does take up a LOT of time. And learning the stroke order for writing kanji does too. Chinese has that same problem, and it has a lot more characters to memorize, so using that excuse isn't very convincing. Memorizing hiragana and katakana is the same as remembering any regular alphabet/syllabary.
But from someone without any experience with Japanese's point of view, it may seem very scary and over the top difficult.
(Although I personally feel like reading Japanese is made WAY easier because of these 3 systems mixed together.)
For me I think less of stroke order, more on radicals. It gets so much easier if you focus on radicals! :D
You're right. Radicals are indeed very useful, simply because you have one half less to remember xD. But for the dictionaries (electronic and paper) I'd say stroke order is still a must. (less for paper dictionaries though)
You're absolutely right. I noticed the same when I was actually in Japan, but the general outline is still like I described.
Switching between the three systems is done with a certain aim in mind. Switching to katakana, for example, makes text stand out more or look stronger. Kanji looks educated, and hiragana blends in rather well.
But you are right. It isn't a black and white system, where you can only use hiragana for grammar, or katakana only for foreign words. But that also adds to my liking of this writing system, I'd say.
I think it's best to ignore radicals and readings entirely and just learn actual words. It's faster and is immediately applicable.
How do you mean? Learn the meaning of kanji without all of the readings and stuff, or what?
Oh, and some verb kanji have completely different pronunciations based on context as well.
Sometimes what the book says is just the infinitive form-
Like 好 being part of 好き or 見 being part of 見る.
Oh, and there are different verb conjugation groups.
Oh, and there’s a conjugation order based on what tense you’re speaking in.
And yeah, particles? In casual conversation, they’re just dropped completely.
What, you thought バ meant “ba”?
No, it’s “va”.
Oh, but va is also ヴァ。
But バ is also “ba”.
Why does the h column have two different dakuten? Who knows?
Want to not use the onyomi reading of half the stuff you studied for?
What about just not using any of the kunyomi ones, either?
Wanna learn how to say “eight”?
But eight has different forms depending on what you’re using it for.
And there’s exceptions.
Wanna know what a “counter” means?
Why use 1 2 and 3, when you can use the native versions of... 1, 2 and 3...?
Want to read 人？Too bad, there’s no context.
Why don’t they teach it in stroke order format? I’d think it’d be easier to memorize stuff without 15 strokes.
Wanna know what a “radical” is?
Some radicals mean their own thing.
Sometimes, they’re just filler in a kanji.
Wanna learn 100 four-corner kanji?
Wanna learn why 五 is in the top right corner of 語, but they’re pronounced the same?
How many readings are there to 日、really?
I could go on.
I’m probably wrong about half of this stuff, anyway.
Finally, someone preaches the holy word. Motherfuckers finish Rosetta Stone or Duolingo and think they've mastered Japanese when, really, they've only barely achieved 上手.
Very interesting ! The best way to learn kanji is learn each word one by one. A kanji complex alone is the horror :(
Thanks for the french traduction :) I can read english but not understand prononciation.
0:33 you misspelled "weeb"
Lmao 😂
I'm guessing that he's one of those people that doesn't like being called a weeb.
@@tideghost u probably right haha
Weeb means wanting to become Japanese rather than liking Japanese media if I'm not mistaken
@@adecentdelinquent8986 www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=weeb according to definition 2 that's a weeaboo. i didn't even know there was a difference lol
...I'm going back to my calculus cave thank you very much...
Tbh, I'd rather have to learn all 50000 Kanji. Slow, tedious and frustrating though it may be, in the end it's just a matter of memorizing them. Stare at them long enough and you'll eventually get them into your head. Meanwhile in math there are problems thousands of people have stared at for decades, sometimes even centuries and still nobody has understood the first thing about them.
Tulkas is right, ya know. Take quantum mechanics for example. You're better of believing that all that is true than understanding how all of that is true.
+Tulkas Astaldo Math has the added advantage of being purely logical. If you know how to use math symbols, you don't have to look in a math book every 2 seconds. The equation is always solvable, even if it takes a long time.
Love the "foclóir" detail ❤
the best writing system in the world is indian one which is alphasyllabary and is the most powerful, logical system and its absolutely phonetic too and no other system comes even close in terms of how good it is because u can write much much more sounds phonetically with it with a limited set of vowel, consonant letters and attachable vowel symbols.
"They are not just Kanji. They a bunch of problems all mixed together." 😂😂😂 I am dead.
I really love learning japanese, I think it’s beautiful and artistic 😊
It sounds good
Traditional Chinese is beautiful, too!
I agree but not really practical
@@awake6009 yes
I know ha! It's so beautiful 💜
Also, apart from ”kokuji”, in most kanji, the ”sounds like” -hint sounds like that in Old Chinese, not Modern Japanese; and while, yes, Japanese has a crap-ton of loanwords from Chinese, they sound completely different, like: ”Kuó” -> ”Koku”.
国koku事实上是中古汉语的入声残留
Oh the book you showed in the first was really easy. I learned Japanese for like 5 months and then gave up because it was too hard for me but when I saw "morden japanese" book you showed, it kind of made sense. I have learned hiragana and katakana and these are all hiragana characters like ALL the characters and I really like that book
katakana is for foreign spellings like english names
Anna Hunjan not really... i mean for foreign words yes but it can be also used in a couple more cases
like emphasizing somethings, imitating sounds, replacing words that have negative nuance when written in kanji···
@@sanlee6328 also it's used for some animals (even though they're not foreign words) and some scientifical terms as well, and in old Meïji jidai official texts like laws and stuff, hiragana weren't used, there were only kanjis and katakanas (with no dakuten)
it's used for onomatopea and burrowed words, not really that hard to know when to use them
There are Japanese that like using katakana and hiragana for their own names too.
I'm watching this video with tears in my eyes... I did this to myself.... I could have learned Portuguese instead 😭
I can help you with Portuguese
Koe meno 😹😹
why wouldn't you learn something actually useful like mandarin
@GettingHighOffHelium of course it's dependent on what you're doing and where. I just meant that in the long run mandarin will be dominant language and it's the most spoken in the world
@@naruinoemporium320 I wont really say Mandarin would be a dominant languange tbh, mandarin is number 1 spoken is because of China's population. Compare the amount of countries who speaks mandarin versus countries who speaks english. English will still be the international languange imo.
no problem.
the more time you spend to learn kanji, the more you love it.
when you get kanji, you can feel culture because you can read old and new Japanese novel.
I agree
Kanji gives us so many nuances such as 早い and 速い , 計る、図る、諮る and other things that you simply could not hear. Its such a beautiful way to express a written language and in my opinion its worth the incredibly long time it takes to learn
Korean may take under a week to learn how to read, but its tradeoff is how vague the writing system is
I personally find japanese writing system to be very organized and easy to read (if you know kanji and the letters). Using kanji for contexts and hiraganas for the grammars and suffixes really makes it easier to understand where is where and whats going on
For someone who has never learned a single bit of Japanese and knows nothing of the language, thiss video was absolute gibberish to me. Lol.
I just let the video play while I scrolled through the comments
When I speak to other people who are also learning Japanese, they also usually complain that kanji is the most difficult task in learning Japanese for them. To be perfectly honest, I'm glad kanji are there and I disagree with them.
Have fun reading Japanese purely in Hiragana. There are so many basic words when conjugated that could sound just like other basic and frequently used words, that having kanji to distinguish the meaning makes things easier. Take 行った、 言った、要った all pronounced itta. These three words are extremely common (they mean "to go", "to say", and "to want" respectively). Once you know the kanji, you could decifer the meaning instantly even when the context might not be that clear. But if you wrote it all in hiragana, then you better hope the context is clear. Its for this reason that I actually find listening to Japanese harder than reading it.
I know what you mean. I started learning kanji 1 and a half years ago and I never realised how useful it had become to me until recently. I've been going over everything I know grammar wise, right from beginner level stuff, in preparation for a trip to Japan, and I actually found it difficult reading some of the beginner level example sentences that are completely in hiragana. If they didn't put spaces in (and I understand why they did that now) I sometimes couldn't separate words, and I looked up a lot of words only to find I know them I just had trouble recognising them without the kanji. I actually stumbled over わたし for a good 30 seconds because I'm so used to seeing 私.
It's the time it takes for Kanji and the multiple readings. I personally hit a wall with Kanji as it didn't take the two days Hiragana and Katakana took to learn as well as the characters being more complex although the worst part was the multiple readings. Memorizing this thing is this is easy, but when its 1,2,3,4, or 5 its hard.
Kanji is time-consuming and has many nuances, but at the same time, it does make things easier too. If it were all transcribed only in hiragana, (katakana isn't that hard to figure out...)
Japanese would be so hard to read. Besides punctuation marks, Japanese has no spaces between characters, so it's hard to tell where words start or end without some kanjiz
Homonyms are no more of a problem in Japanese than they are in English. Context is EVERYTHING in languages. Spoken Japanese is not made more difficult by the homonyms, because the context tells you immediately, each time, which word is intended. I know what I'm talking about. I have lived in Japan for 40 years, and have made a living as a translator of Japanese to English for over 30 years. This video GROSSLY exaggerates the difficulty of the Japanese language, quite apart from the many mistakes which have been pointed out by other posters.
DieFlabbergast I will agree with you that once you know conversational Japanese decently well and are used to it, the homophones cease to be much of a problem. But when you are first learning the language, even figuring out the context can be difficult. Because of how frequent homophones are, you could easily misinterpret the context by thinking somebody said one thing when they really said another. Of course, if you have been living in Japan for 40 years like you claim, I'm sure you've long forgotten what it was like when you were first learning.
Man, beck when I was studying Japanese, and before my worst break downs that left me diminished.... the kana were just one more couple of alphabets to learn, and they went in like a sword in its sheath... the kanji, that's the horror.
Did you quit? Are you still learning it?
@@youknowkbbaby Had to stop... real life demanded I do othet things...
Hiragana and Kanji are m a i n l y used for basic words in the Japanese language. Katakana is used for loan words, like foreign words that might not be said the same in japanese.
My friend who is learning Japanese at the moment is the most confused when she happens upon kanji since it looks like Chinese (which she is literate in) but usually means something completely different.
FiveADay Kanji Well they can have a different meaning so she has to pause whenever she's reading :/
They sometimes do, actually.
Definitely not usually, I can speak and read in both Chinese and Japanese, and I will say only about 30% or less of the kanji either has completely different meaning or varies a lot from the corresponded Chinese character.
Chinese and Japanese have the same meaning when written, a japanese and Chinese person could communicate just by writing on paper, but spoken the knaguages have completely different meanings, it's extremely weird but if you know one the other is extremely easy.
Sometimes the same meaning. But there are more characters in Mandarin, and many words sre made of multiple characters.
I thought this was gonna scare me out of learning japanese but then I was like: "this is actually kinda easy".
English can be and usually is a context based language however japanese is almost all context based. You get accustomed to the sentence structure which pretty quickly and you will pick up hiragana/katakana pretty quickly. Kanji is mainly difficult because there's a symbol for most things but once you learn a few you can pretty comfortably understand the language. Always remember that the subject is implied and if it's not explicitly stated then the subject is "I" most of the time.
For example: once you learn mizu (水) which is water you probably won't forget that. When you learn hi (日) for day or moku (木) for wood you'll always recognize them. If you play Tekken you probably know 木人 (mokujin) which means wood person or 鉄人 (tetsujin) which means iron person. Once you start learning kanji you will recognize more and more and it'll become easy. Continuing with the Tekken example, the kanji that's always on the cover is iron fist/鉄拳. One more thing: if you write the kanji you basically etch it into your memory. Don't worry, it's not hard.
Yep, they are quite easy...
You have 水 - water ('mizu' or 'sui'), and you have 母 - mother ('haha' or 'bo'). Now you have a word like 水母 (jellyfish) and of course you know that it should be read as... 'kurage'. Why? Because it's Japanese.
Ok, may be we should stick to more usefuleveryday words. Now you have 明 (akarui) and 日 (hi), and when you combine them together you get... ashita. なぜ？？
My favorite one. There's a nice bird 'japanese green woodpecker'
緑啄木鳥 - aokera
first kanji means 'green' and it's reading is... midori or ryoku. Why 'ao'? Because they used the sound of another kanji 青 which means blue, but it's used as 'green' as well. Though they don't write that kanji in the name of that bird. Why? Because. Just keep in mind: you write one kanji and pronounce it as another.
So, what about other 3 kanji? Their reading is 'kera', meaning 'woodpecker'. Yep, three kanji, two syllables. Huh? You did think that one kanji represents at least one syllable? Silly you. It's Japanese.
And there are a lot of stuff like this. So... yes, kanji are simple... kinda...
For many people it's still hard but probably easier than you'd expect. Now the thing is when people want to learn Kanji, what they should know is that it's not at all phonetic-based so people shouldn't come in expecting to put sounds together, you put meanings together. for example 今 means _ima_ (now) and 日 is _hi_ (sun) or _nichi_ (day), probably better use nichi as hi would refer to the sun, nichi normally refers to day, refers to sun on Sunday. And so when you 今 and 日 together, you get 今日 which is _kyou_ (today), it isn't called imanichi I know but we can see it means today because 今 (ima) means now or synonymously current, and 日 (nichi) being day, put it together and you get _current day_ and what is the word for current day? _kyou_ (today).
Of course some words you can just put together but the important part is you put the meanings together.
Kevin Jong Then there’s those kanji that make no sense.
Am Japanese, can confirm. As do the many other Japanese here.
@@wannabehistorian371 yeah true
@@gypsytabor1675 Those are known as irregular pronunciations due to the adaptation of the Chinese writing system to the Japanese spoken system. Most of the times they adapted the Chinese words with the Chinese pronunciation and attaching the Japanese one as well. Other times they kept just the Japanese one. English pronunciation instead, is irregular in itself, there are no rules to pronounce any word in English as the phonemes are not represented by the lexemes. Basically, that is the reason why many Japanese and other nationalities find very hard learning to pronounce English, you need to know how to pronounce every single word one by one, not to talk about proper names. Every language has its difficulties. Grammar instead, is really simple in Japanese compared to the irregular English one, not to talk about French, Spanish or German grammar...
I come back to this video every so often so I know I'm not the only one frustrated by this language, even 8 years later
It's not worth having unrealistic expectations. Kanji isn't for everyone. Just read furigana for the rest of your life. That's what I plan on doing.
You can learn to read japanese without learning kanji. You still have to be able to read words made up of kanji when you seem them, but that doesn't mean you have to learn the kanji themselves. It's kind of like learning how to pronounce throughout or though or tough in english. In english you have to not only learn the pronunciation and the meaning of words, but what they look like as well. The way they look and the way they're pronounced, isn't the same in english either. There's even words where the exact same word has multiple pronounciations, for example "I just [read] a book" and "I will [read] a book". It's the exact same thing in japanese. Kanji is what the word looks like. Just like english has a spelling bee, japanese has a kanji bee. When you learn a word in japanese, it will be made up of characters you don't recognize. But you will memorize that word and it's kanji anyway. You don't need to worry about the meaning, the sound, the way its written, or any of that for kanji. Just being able to recognize words in their kanji form is enough. It's not an alphabet, it's just weird symbols that make up words. Memorize the words as a whole, not the symbols that make them up.
Actually you can only go so far without learning Kanji, unless your goal is strictly for speaking. But even then, it helps to know some Kanji. Trust me, it's not that hard. It's so efficient. It's the way to go.
@@cinduts I can read Japanese without furigana and I haven't learned many individual kanji. The thing is you learn to read the words themselves, even if you haven't learned the individual characters they're composed of. It's sort of like memorizing kanji, but instead you're just memorizing words made up of kanji. Even if you learned the individual kanji, you'd still have to memorize the words, so memorizing the kanji doesn't help THAT much. The meaning and sounds of kanji vary from word to word too. Rather than spending hours learning 2k kanji, I could use the same amount of time to learn 2k words and be that much more capable in japanese. I'm not saying that kanji aren't helpful to know, I'm just saying that your time is better spent elsewhere.
Hiragana: Used for Native Japanese words
Katakana: Used for Japanese words, Foreign words and Sound effects
Kanji: Used to replace Hiragana words to create spaces in sentences
Kanji is easy to learn if you know the radicals. (For example: 木 = Tree 林 = Woods 森 = Forest) In the example, the radical is Tree (木) put two trees side by side and you get woods. Put another tree on top of those two and you get Forest. It's hard to explain how radicals work but it's something like this.
It wasn't always like that, they used to use katakana just like hiragana, just look for some pre war and war time newspapers and posters and they are all in katakana.
In the history of Japanese writing, katakana and hiragana both developed from kanji. The difference is that katakana was mainly used by men and became used for official documents, and the hiragana was used by women. That's probably why a lot of older documents are written in katakana.
I mean that works fine and well until you get to the weirder words like "鬱" (Depression), made primarily of the radical "鬯" (Herbs or Sacrificial Wine, apparently) and a lot of other stuff...
I mean I wish it were always that simple. But unfortunately it's very different.
Try telling a Japanese highschool student that Kanji is easy. They'll beat you within an inch of your life with a 5kg Kanji textbook.
Can you do the same with "ship" -> "fleet" ?
は is only pronounced as “wa” when it’s used as a particle. For example, in the sentence “子猫は綺麗です” (The kitten is beautiful) は is pronounced as “wa” but in the word “はい” (yes) it is pronounced as “ha”.
小猫很/漂亮=绮丽 in fact ,Japanese kinji is more like ancient Chinese古文。always one 汉字，one meanings.however,mordern Chinese tends to use 2 or more 汉字 to express one meanings.
Breaking kanji down into bushu makes it easier to expand your kanji familiarity, but it's not a reliable guide to meaning, and no guide at all to pronunciation(s).
I started learning Japanese this last week, not quite a compelling video to keep studying it hahah but it is pretty interesting
確かに「生」は読み方ありすぎなwww
私は35まで数えなさい >_
なま、せい、、、しょう、、これだけ？？🙄🙄
一年生、一生、生魚、生娘、一日、生憎、生花、生業、生い立ち、生きる、生える、羽生…どうかしてるぜ！w
いつぞやネットで見た受け売りだが、
「生」とは反対の「死」は意味も読みもひとつしかないんよな
「日 」もよwww
今日、明日、昨日、明後日、一昨日、日常、日本、日、本日、曜日、一日、二日。もっと例が知っている？
"It called my name, it said IKIMASHOU"
Had me dead
Lol that's exactly how I feel 😆
Anyway you have to say that yes, you can eventually learn all of that weird stuff if you only have the right motivation 💪
The oar and board thing reminds me of my days in elementary school learning how to write Chinese. I spent almost 5 or even 6 years to memorize the characters I was supposed to know and it was really difficult. Finally, I became a novelist after I got my aha moment. Before that I was just like: cHarActErS juSt MakE nO SEnSe!
I am a native Taiwanese. Kanji is really hard even for natives I promise. And I started learning and using Japanese when I was 11 years old. I am so happy I have learned Traditional Chinese writing system before that.