Eh, Hebrew indicates vowels with extra markings usually below consonants (as an abjad script). Japanese has scripts with aspects comparable to Chinese logographs and abugida scripts somewhat
@@supercellodude functionally abjads and logographies are the same thing. you're memorizing what are essentially combinations of unit shapes and associating it with a sound. abjads do indicate the consonants but the vowels are basically random even though there's a pattern. kanji does have some phonetic gloss but it's also incomplete. I'd say both of these are functionally equivalent.
@@supercellodude people only use that for names with odd pronunciations and first grade learning. Mostly when reading Hebrew the letters are enough to guess what the words would sound like.
This was pretty funny XD XD However, I don't agree with eliminating all kanji. Even with spaces between words (once Japanese people agree if a particle is part or not of a word, and if some conjugations like なければなりません can be separated or not), there is still the problem with homophones given the rather simple phonetic system Japanese has. But then, there is until now soooooooo much documentation and literature (and manga and videogames) with kanji that either wouldn't be legible anymore without them, or it would be a painful job to change all the kanji without furigana into hiragana and katakana. Or at least, put furigana on them. What I would agree is with reducing the number of official kanji to less than 1000 (500 would be the minimum) or making easier kanji readings, which is what actually make Japanese writing system so complex. Buuuut, this is only my opinion. Again, this video was so fun! XD XD
You've demonstrated the reason that languages don't change easily. There's certainly a lot of inertia, and it may be easier to switch to a different language and translate everything than it would be to adapt the Japanese language. I just wonder if that means Japanese may be at risk of going extinct in the future.
I think the only way to deal with the homophone issue is to just change the words all together. This could also be used to eliminate the on/kun-yomi issue too, make an aratayomi (probably from the Kun/On-yomi) and use it universally. IE 1 would always be Ichi, and then Jin could always be hito. Ni is a particle so Futa should be used for 2. san is used as a name suffix, so use mi, but mi is just one kana, so maybe mi-san (My favorite car manufacturer, lol). Shi is unlucky so yon could be used for 4, et cetera. This would present a new issue, though; This is no longer Japanese. I mean in a world moving toward a universal language anyways, do we really need to re-hash this ancient and beautiful writing system chock full of history and tradition? Yes, because this is the internet and we're bored.
There are ways to work around homophones, like we do with accents or different spellings for words, I don't know how they could do in Japanese script, but this is not probably that difficult. But I agree completely with you that getting rid of kanji right now would be a mistake, because of cutting off the country from its history, making it difficult to read anything from the past etc
"there is still the problem with homophones" I don't believe that's necessarily too much of a problem because of 2 reasons: 1) People already deal with homophones in spoken language and it still works most of the time. Usually you can tell the right meaning from the context and people may also try to avoid ambiguity if they're not making puns. Same should work in written language. Granted, there are some near-homophones that differ only in pitch accent and would be ambiguated when written with kana. However, there isn't a huge amount of such minimal pairs. 2) The Korean language has the same issue with large number of homophones. Nonetheless, the Koreans have mostly ditched hanja for hangul long time ago and can clearly manage with it. The Japanese should be able to do the same.
@@krunkle5136 Nope, Japanese ask you to slow down if you speak Japanese that way you speak English. If you’ve taken at least a JLPT N2 examination and have listened to a Japanese person speak, you’d understand.
@@GoToMan When you gain an intuitive understanding of pitch accents you can guess what words are used by the pitch sounds of the words alone, for us foreigners we have to learn these skills but for a native it comes naturally; native Japanese speakers can guess what word it is simply based on the humming alone.
As a Japanese I admit learning kanji is hard for non-Japanese speakers. Even native Japanese speakers do not know all usage of each kanji. In Japan you can see question about kanji on school exams( from elementary school to university entrance). Ordinary Japanese people just know basic usage of hundreds of basic kanji. They needn't write them perfectly but they just know "usage" and "sound." If you learn kanji, I recommed starting from reading practice of kanji. And then, removing kanji from the Japanese writing system is not a good idea. We have many many homonyms and distinguish them by using different kanji for each words.
Homonyme are pretty comon in *other languages* too. It's very easy, either you try to figure the context or you just guess and pray to your preferred God that you are right. Edit: Apparently I was rightfull corrected I shouldn't include only my native language but also every other one I have no glue about there grammar. Yes I might be a bit disrespectful sometimes by not taking any other language serious in literature than german but I will try to be better next time.
@@justgermanpleasexcusemywri3618 In English we obviously don't have that. You don't have to look to the right to check if you write the right rite or you'll need to right your mistake, right?
Hiragana with spaces is used now in children's books. But for adult readers, it's still much easier to read 東京 (Tokyo) than とうきょう. And there are many homophones (many more than English) which are only distingushed by kanji like 直す (fix) and 治す (cure) both read as "naosu". But it is a challange to learn, especially for kanji like 生 which have a lot of differnt readings or words with unusual kanji readings like 春日 (which can be read sensibly as "harubi", meaning "spring day", but is also read "kasuga" as a place name).
I get what you mean but words get their meanings with context, is not like they are isolated or anything. So with whatever you are reading context you get the words meaning. In other languages words are written the same and is still understandable, but I get that imagine trying to read a whole book in katakana sounds like it would go from 500 pages to 1000 pages, kinda baffling
@@themondegod4014 The problem is that that without kanji, you just plain get a lot of ambiguity in Japanese, even with some context. For example, take the sentence 蚊が私のはなに着陸した。(The mosquito landed on my "hana") Did the mosquito land on my nose (hana) or my flower (hana)? If you had used 鼻 (nose) or 花 (flower) instead of はな in kana, than you would know for sure. It would also be easier to read, without the big ambiguous block of kana in the middle of the sentence. Actually, the trend in modern Japanese is to use less and less kanji and more and more kana (and even Romaji--Englash "Roman" letters) instead. If you look at a movie poster from the 1950's, it looks almost like Chinese, with huge amounts of kanji. Whereas, modern signs tend to use it rather sparingly. But reading all-kana Japanese is very tiring and difficult. The idea of reading a whole novel in it just gves me a headache.
Aside from the "kanji sucks" joke, (it's not that it's a bad joke, I just see it *so* often) it's a really good video! I like how you were able to make it funny for people who aren't and are learning Japanese while still being accurate lol
Opinions not agreed by a person must be taken as a joke so it lessens the mental damage of said person and to, therefore, disregard them. Even when it is in fact a popular opinion.
@@Ris3451 Kanji was taken from traditional chinese so it's the other way around. Japanese uses traditional chinese characters. Example: the kanji for 'love' in kanji and traditional Chinese are the same, the romanization is also the same, except the Chinese has a tone marker.
1:00 "if everything was in kana, your eyes would die" *has traumatic flashbacks to my second year of learning Japanese when I was good enough to read kanji but everything in our textbook was in kana*
Japanese is the most amusing language I'll ever learn. Children learn over 1000 Kanji by 6th grade. Ideally, you'd want to learn more than 200 Kanji a year as an adult, but there are over 3000 Kanji you probably should eventually learn, so pace what you can I guess. Don't expect to learn Japanese as fast as a Latin language or something. 10 Kanji a week should be good enough if you're not in a rush. School used to make us learn 20 vocabulary words a week, with a test on Monday to make sure we remembered them all, so you could probably apply that same method to 20 Kanji a week if you really wanted to.
I see that as an extreme drawback of Chinese and Japanese that you need to remember specific symbols for all words. In most western languages if you know how to speak a word you can most likely write it down, maybe slightly incorrect. In Chinese, you might very well know how to call an object but it gives you zero clue in how to write it down.
@@boooster101 That's exactly why I can speak a lot more Japanese than I can read or write, and I can read a lot more Kanji than I can write, since I can't imagine a lot of them in my head without looking at them, but I know them if I see them. Pretty common issue. Same goes for drawing anything from memory. Ask someone to draw the Statue of Liberty or something most people know, and they probably can't, but you'll recognize the Statue of Liberty the second you see it. That's my main issue with Kanji. Visual recall.
Edit: I just saw your response to TwoCents in this thread. It seems you already know quite a lot, and that your main issue is with writing the kanji. I’d still recommend this book for improving your kanji writing skills, even if you already know many of their meanings. Only a few months ago, writing out kanji from memory seemed impossible to me, but now it seems almost trivial for the characters I do know. The book “Remembering the Kanji” by James Heisig does a really good job of making kanji more approachable, especially if paired with a spaced repetition flash card system like Anki. The book assigns a keyword to each kanji (which is usually synonymous with one of the kanji’s common meanings, or at least a close approximation of one of the meanings), and then has you make up mnemonic stories in order to remember how to write the kanji when given the keyword (this is done by breaking down the kanji into their radicals, or even further down into “primitives”. Essentially, each part of the kanji will have some sort of name assigned to it in order to assist in creating these mnemonic stories). And since he’s grouped kanji by their physical similarity to each other, the process is very intuitive. The book essentially teaches you how to write all the base kanji from memory while recognizing at least one of their meanings. What it does not do, though, is teach you the readings. This, however, is not really an issue, as those are best learned in-context from reading material and other media (and working through this book makes that so much easier. I’ve already noticed that if I encounter a kanji I’ve seen in the book before and look up its reading, it becomes so much easier to remember it because my brain already has an index for that kanji). It might seem a little daunting at first, but I’ve managed to get about halfway through in roughly 4 months (and I’ve only been doing it in the spare time I get between university and work). Anyways, I just thought I’d just mention this book since I can’t recommend it enough.
@@magicaltank only the kanji part is fast, because most kanjis have exactly the same meaning in Japanese and chinese. Apart from that, learning kanas and Japanese grammar is also struggling for the chinese
Well, at least it's not Mandarin, where the same pronunciation can have VERY different meanings, or you end up saying the wrong thing than you intended because you pronounced the word you wanted to say SLIGHTLY different... 是 (Shì) = Yes 世 (Shì) = Lifetime 事 (Shì) = Matter 市 (Shì) = City 士 (Shì) = Warrior 室 (Shì) = Room Mandarin was offered at my middle school and I decided to take it for a quarter in the seventh grade since I've been fascinated with Chinese culture, history, and calligraphy since the 2008 Summer Olympics and thought "Why not?"...famous last words
If this video makes Japanese writing seem like a ridiculously overcomplicated system, that's because it is. To make it worse pretty much every kanji character can be pronounced at least two different ways and the written form gives you exactly zero hints as to which one you're supposed to use.
@@danielantony1882 I'm half Japanese. My Japanese family's name is 西山 (Nishiyama) which would be kunyomi despite the absence of kana and consisting of multiple kanji. Conversely, my Japanese family calls me 泰生 (Taisei) which is onyomi. Names in general are fairly inconsistent and as I mentioned, provide no clues as to how they're pronounced.
Would like to add that Katakana and Hiragana *are* based on kanji. While they are read phonetically, they actually take their appearance from aspects of kanji. Katakana is a simplified, angular adaptation of some kanji. Hiragana is the evolution of classical cursive kanji.
@@kakahass8845 Im just memeing here. But if we think with an open mind, every kana used to be a kanji at some point. Maybe there was a reason why they chose to make a hiragana look like a certain kanji and not another. Even though it doesnt have any meaning now, one can say that it evolved from something that used to have or as a matter of fact still has ふ不
you missed the worst part about invention of kanji: step one: steal from china step two: steal from china again but don’t update the writing system and simply add all of the new characters and meanings on top of the old ones so that it is completely nonsensical to chinese readers unless they know the current and outdated languages step three: repeat step two every time china updates their written script
And technically speaking you also have romaji (ローマ字) so you end up with 4 alphabets. And numbers are also mixed since Japan started using arabic numerals.
@@wiandryadiwasistio2062 It is CC-BY-SA. BY: It is called Kanji, which means "characters from Han (China)". SA: Any one can use Kanji the same way they use original Chinese characters.
“Adding spaces to pure kana” is basically what Korean does, actually. Korean used to be written totally in Chinese characters (called hanja in Korean, which is a cognate of kanji in Japanese and hanzi in Chinese), and then Sejong the Great invented hangul, which is like kana but it’s more like a phonology-obsessed conlanger made it up (which is pretty much how it actually happened). Then people mixed hanja and hangul for a while, but then they said “screw it” and wrote everything in hangul with spaces. And it stuck to this day. Nowadays, the only place you’ll see hanja is in news headlines as 1-letter abbreviations of country names. (e.g. 한일 관계 “SK-Japan relations” can be written 韓日관계 to clarify meaning and provide context)
In fact, in the case of writing hanja in news titles these days, there is nothing but writing a person's name and country. It's to reduce the number of letters rather than to clarify the meaning. ex) 인도네시아(Indonesia) = 印 프랑스(France) = 佛
Probably the same thing will end up happening to the Japanese, the native Japanese population is getting older and fewer, at some point they will be demographically replaced by foreign population and they will surely say "Kanji? I don't want to see that shit, hello spaces".
As someone who's pretty familiar with the Japanese language, I can confirm that the language is a beauty when spoken, but absolute hell when you have to read or write it.
@@jarzez my point is that you can't just objectively say that "it's hell when you have to read japanese" That just means that you haven't done it enough. Every language is hell to read in the beginning with little exposure to it.
As a person learning japanese, my main complain with kanji is the fact that there are so many. Some are indistinguishable from each other, or a very minor stroke makes it mean a very different thing. There's also the fact that some old kanjis, that barely anyone uses, will appear and i won't know what it means. Or there are other obscure kanjis that are synonyms to something and some crazy, "I wanna feel special" person, will use it and i won't know what it means.
You don't have to worry about not knowing kanji. According to a friend of mine, many Japanese people don't even know the weird obscure kanji. It's usually kanji used in every day conversation or media that you have to care about. It's something that you grow accustomed to the more you're exposed to it. It's easier if you learn hiragana/katakana first, because then you can isolate the kanji and learn what they mean.
honestly if it were like the 2000-2500 most used kanjis, but they only had one reading each it wouldn't be that great of deal but some kanji can be read up to six different way, and that just furi my gana
@@ApexGale u dont need to know how to write kanji, just try to memorize some of the common ones. if u type in hiragana it will automatically suggest u the right kanji version based off of ur hiragana sentence all u gotta do is either trust it or verify it urself by knowing some of them and u are good to go. worst case scenario u use hiragana instead and put some spaces, it looks childish but people will understand you.
As someone who’s nearly finishing their first year of Japanese class and plans on taking another year soon, the writing system is so insane. Learnt hiragana and I was like ok ok yeah this makes sense. Then I learned katakana and I was like this is a little difficult but I get why they’d need letters for foreign words. Then KANJI kicked it’s ass through the door and I started questioning why I learned the other two and I was like At… least I can understand the words better through one picture? Yeah so turns out a lot of kanji’s meaning can change based on the context of the sentence. Such as the kanji for Friday meaning Friday but also can mean gold and money when the kanji is used in a different sentence. ( correct me if I’m wrong, I’ve just recently started learning kanji like a month ago ) Anywho, if you’re someone who’s interested in learning Japanese. Please do it. I know it’s scary. I was very scared too. But honestly, when I started learning more and more I’ve never felt so self-achieved and proud of myself with something before. When you take the time to dedicate to learn certain things, it just feels so accomplishing to just know something that’s known to be difficult. It’s fun! Go learn Japanese now.
I really admire your strong desire to learn the language without being intimidated to start from zero and mulling too much over it :) As you said rightly, kanjis can change the meaning and the reading depending on the context. The most glaring example that comes to mind is the kanji 生. As kunyomi, this kanji can be read: • I-kasu (to make the best use of) *transitive verb*. For esample 知識を生かす(chishiki wo ikasu) - make the best use of the knowledge. • I-kiru (to be alive) *intransitive verb*. For example まだ生きてる (mada ikiteru) - still alive. This can be also a transitive verb sometimes, with the meaning of "to live". For example 命を生きる (inochi wo ikiru) - live the life. • I-keru (to put it in something to keep it alive) *transitive verb*. Used for example in 生け花 (ikebana) - flower arrangement; because you put the flowers in a small vase. • U-mareru (to born) *intransitive verb*. For esample 赤ちゃんが生まれる (akachan ga umareru) - a baby borns. • U-mu (to birth) *transitive verb*. For example 赤ちゃんを生む (akachan wo umu) - birth a baby. • Nama (raw) - used for esample in 生海老 (namaebi) - shrimp, or in 生放送 (namahōsō) - live broadcast. • Ha-eru (to grow) *intransitive verb*. For example 草は生える (kusa wa haeru) - the grass grows. • ha-yasu (to let grow) *transitive verb*. For example 髭を生やす (hige wo hayasu) - let the beard grow. • O-u (to grow) *intransitive verb*. Rarely used. • Ki (not mixed) *noun*. Rarely used. • Ubu (innocent, who doesn't know much) *noun and adjective*. Rarely used. • Mu-su (to grow) *intransitive verb*. Not used anymore. You can find this verb im the Japanese hymn: 苔の生すまで (koke no musu made) - until moss grows. As onyomi, this kanji can be read: Sei, shō That can be read also zei, zō, depending if the word needs the dakuten (the process of adding the two dashes on a letter - for esample た becomes だ). It can be really difficult to remember and understand which reading you need to use, but with some time I'm sure it becomes natural and it will be easier to decide :)
The kanji used in Friday is just the kanji for gold (金). It's just that in Japanese, Friday is "the day of gold" (金曜日). If you think about it, in English, Monday comes from "moon day", same as in Japanese (月曜日), where 月 is moon. Even if single Kanji can act as words, often they are combined into bigger words under some strange logic. If you combine evil (邪) with sorcery (魔), you get obstacle (邪魔). So obstacles are evil magic trying to hinder you. An "explanation" is "a theory clearing" (説明), "hibernate" is "winter drowsiness" (冬眠), "weather" is the "personality of the heavens" (天気). I find it so cool that a way of understanding our world is embedded in the language, waiting for us to decipher. がんばってね
@@hollyhockgod Very true, but i dont really agree with the first one (邪魔). 邪 has it's own kunyomi (rarely used, but can be seen in some books) that is よこしま (yokoshima), meaning "wrong", "unjust", "inaccurate". 魔 means "to hinder", "to confuse". (Used also with the meaning of "magic" because is confuses, it hinders the mind (心)) So the etymologic meaning of 邪魔 is "a wrong (bad) thing that hinders".
Although I’m not learning Japanese I can relate to that feeling of accomplishment when you advance in a skill(I’m learning drawing, piano, dancing and languages). In the case of language learning I’m currently learning 4 Turkish, Farsi, Swahili and ASL each one having their own hurdles. Turkish - the agglutination and vowel harmony Farsi - the alphabet Swahili - noun classes ASL - the facial expressions and signing etiquette. But I’m loving the challenge each one of those languages presents.
What don't we get rid of Kanji? It's something you say when you start learning, and when you learn some you totally can't believe how incredibly stupid you were at the start TLDR: Your eyes will die
well, it's actually very easy for Chinese to learn Japanese with Kanji, just saying also the people there choose to keep it, so it's not really about how easy it is for you to learn, cus it's you learning a language from a foreign culture, you are supposed to respect that. in the same sense, I could advocate for having each English alphabet sound strictly for one sound, instead of guessing the pronunciation everytime I see ough in a word
@@NicoSleepyLeen Yes we do, I started to learn Japanese recently and it’s kind of frustrating because you have a Kanji, let’s say 人 (hito in Japanese reading) and it has (most of the cases) the exact same meaning as Chinese, but you just don’t know how to pronounce it. It’s like trying to eat a cake, but you’ve got your mouth sewed.
Kanji could benefit from the bopomofo treatment, where a pronunciation guide accompanies each kanji word in smaller point. Allows all the literary benefits of continued use of logography while making the language INFINITELY more accessible to learners since now they can read Japanese just through following the pronunciation guide.
I got down 12 characters for hiragana but still practicing so I can be more natural with it. It’s just crazy how they incorporate all three together, especially Kanji. That intimidates me
We use two as well. Lowercase and Uppercase letters. R looks completely different from r, two different writing systems. It is a lot like hiragana and katakana, that is why katakana is sometimes transcribed as uppercase letters.
@@jort93z yea Im not even there yet. All I know is, for the lack of words, hiragana is for the “fill ups”, katakana for “foreign words”, and Kanji for like noun or to give a context to your word. I think once i get hiragana and katakana down, I should be good. Kanji is a different story tho. Thats a lot of combinations 🤣
Once you familiarize yourself with it, it is really not that difficult. Sure there are some difficult kanji characters but that shouldn't hinder you from being able to read a book. Once you memorized all the kanas and N5 and N4 kanji, I highly recommend you to pick up any book to read (preferably manga/light novels/magazines) and don't get yourself too intimidated by the amounts of kanji present in them, you will be amazed how fast you could learn and memorize the moonrunes just by reading an actual book.
pls i'm literally japanese why is this so relatable- japanese is like, the easiest language with the most fucked up writing system istg... but i don't say that kanji is bad they add a lot to our culture but they could just simplify it (i'm character amnesic bruh)
Also what I personally find difficult in japanese grammar is that the crazy amount of ways in which u can say the simplest things depending on the situation. For example "what's that?" in japanese can be translated as: これは何ですか? これは何でしょうか？ これ何？ これは何でこざいますか？ これは何でございましょうか？ これは何でございます？ これは何だ？ これは何だい？ これは何なんですか？ これは何であられますか？ これは何でありますか？ これ何すか？ and these all mean the same thing but depending on which one you use it and who you use it to, you can end up sounding like a complete asshole or a very polite well mannered person.
Mandarin: I'm a pretty difficult language to learn for everyone else, we are just built different- Japan, proceeding to steal: *Hold my sake* This is the History of Japan 2: Electric Boogaloo language edition that was as unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, it's a surprise to be sure but welcome.
Unless your spoken Japanese skills are already great, not knowing the kanji for a word typically means you wouldn't recognize it in kana, either. Sure, you'd know how to say it, but you'd only be reading sounds at that point. It would be like reading a sentence like "I rlewoing to the plechlinxis today." Sure, you can "read" that, but does it really matter?
@@nonplayercharacter12333 kanji in sentences is literally satan's brewing pot, 1 kanji means something, put 2 kanjis, now in DIFFERENT CONTEXTS, YOUR KANJIS MEAN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS (日 THIS KANJI SUCKS)
As someone who's still learning jp, a fun example of kanji being annoying that I like is: 人 - hito (person) 大人 - otona (adult) 大人気 - daininki (really popular) The pronunciation is totally different with each of these words 😭
Wot in pronunciation I literally just wrote a comment suggesting the adoption of a system that's just me describing Furigana without knowing what Furigana is
"No one uses it" lol that's just not true. Anything with kids in its target market typically has furigana so lots of manga and games have it (and obviously stuff like kids' books). And then even for stuff aimed at teenagers, difficult kanji will have often have furigana.
@@bobboberson8297 Still, that is just the young demographic of Japan. And Japan as a whole has the smallest Young Demographic compared to other nations.
As a Japanese, I can say that many Japanese remember Kanji characters by their images. This is because kanji are often made up of combinations. For example, 木 = tree 林 = forest (small) 森 = forest (big) 氵= parts of water 海 = sea 汗 = sweat 波 = wave 津波 = tsunami But,some kanji have no meaning by themselves. Like a 津.
somehow you'll just remember it, take it at your own pace. ..you should mentally prepare yourself for BS Katakana nonsense because i've had too many aneurysms trying to figure out what the hell it's supposed to be in english sometimes... maybe if i was better at the language.. i dunno.
@@chickennugget6684 I love and hate katakana because it's really fun to pronounce and it's decently easy so far because it's just English words, but it's so annoying memorizing a second alphabet.
A student of Japanese here (I just moved to Japan last week). Kanji makes way more sense if you learn them in context by learning words. That's the premise wanikani uses (
This is probably why a recent report on duolingo mentions that recent generations use the app for Japanese. I took 2 years of it in primary school and this is how my experience was: First year katakana and hiragana: so good so fun, straight A's s little challenging but everything is cream gravy. Second year: INTRODUCTION to Kanji... Bombed it. Yup, now here I am taking French almost a decade later in college because my transfer school requires 2 years of consistent and passing grades of a foreign language. My best advice to anyone doing Japanese, honestly I would not suggest a classroom setting. Do it at your own pace because Kanji often is a brick wall for people to learn BECAUSE of how Katakana and hiragana are treated. Because your brain is SO heavily influenced on memorizing that as "hiragana for japanese and Katakana for English" and we use (mostly) phonetic languages ourselves, the rewiring for Kanji is a pain to new learners. If you're learning the language for family, to enjoy the culture, or to "read anime", idc of the ethics you do you... but good luck and godspeed.
@@tree427 Yeah, depends on the teacher. My teacher was patient and would slow down the class to make sure we understood everything (small class), so I found it more effective than Duolingo.
I am Japanese. Then I remembered a meme, killed me. "not having an character for your language, stealing one from your neighbor and using it in the wrong way then also creating 2 new characters for your language and using all 3 at once."😇
Even Japanese people often give me a hard time reading "Kanji"! There are probably very few Japanese who can read all the kanji! As a genuine Japanese, I frequently look up kanji I don't understand, but when it comes to kanji, "Google" may know more about it than the Japanese!
You can’t imagine how much useful Kanji is. We can tweet literally ANYTHING within 140 characters. Hey I already used almost 100 characters for this short message
better than having so many words that are written the same and the only way to tell the difference is through context that sometimes might not be enough to decipher with
Don't ever wish for kanji to disappear, it will only backfire 😓 Jokes aside, with no Chinese characters, a lot of problems will arise, and the worst part will be Japanese as a whole will lose one of its major unique assets. Centuries worth of culture should never be taken for granted. Edit: Some funny redundancy
@@booaks2980 Oh right I just noticed, I should've said "Chinese characters" not "Chinese kanji" because it will be redundant. It's like saying it "Chinese Chinese character" lol
I was thinking about learning Japanese until I did some research into it and figured this out for myself; then I decided it was too difficult to be worth it!
If you think this is complicated, try reading bungo. It's basically chinese, but you read it in japanese _with annotations_ to explain in what order to read them, on top of figuring out how to pronounce each. I absolutely *love* the japanese writing system, I find it elegant, but man is it hard sometimes.
Hello from Japan! Well I feel Kanji is hard to write but easy to read or understand their meaning if I get used to them. As some say in this comment, text written only in hiragana or katakana is horrible. Very difficult to read, and unnatural to most of Japanese people, because we are customed to the sentence with kanji, hiragana mixtured. But yeah... I think learning Japanese is soooo hard... Maybe just speak Japanese is much easier, not writing or reading. Well anyway, nice video! Thanks for uploading!
I'm not anti Kanji, but I am anti Onyomi. Having the Kanji be unreliable hurts the entire point of them that is supposed to make them so helpful as logographic characters. And it's only because of historical shenanigans instead of for the benefit of the language in a vacuum. Also, I don't think adding spaces is only good for this idea of killing Kanji. I think you guys could keep Kanji and add spaces and it would even boost the economy just from helping foreigners learn it much better with a really simple change that doesn't alter the language itself aside from a minor change on paper that matches how pokemon games will present it sometimes
@@Sugarglidergirl101 I wasn't really talking about outlawing anything. I meant more like slowly phasing them out. Japanese today is wildly different than it was like some centuries ago
@@vanilla8956 I never said outlawing either but getting rid of the onyomi reading would just create an entirely new and different language at that point.
@@Sugarglidergirl101 "Outlawing" is hyperbole. I'm not talking about "getting rid of" in some big swoop but rather slowly fazing the less used ones out over time
@@Sugarglidergirl101 There are some words with on'yomi that can be replaced with actual kun'yomi based words, for example ところ instead of ばしょ. However, yeah, it would either change Japanese radically. I would rather suggest simplifying on'yomi system, though. Or reducing the official kanji list from over 2000 to 1000 or less, I think much of them are sometimes redundant and could be easily replaced with others of the same or very similar meaning.
Japanese writing is just like Hebrew but with more scribbles
Eh, Hebrew indicates vowels with extra markings usually below consonants (as an abjad script). Japanese has scripts with aspects comparable to Chinese logographs and abugida scripts somewhat
@@supercellodude functionally abjads and logographies are the same thing. you're memorizing what are essentially combinations of unit shapes and associating it with a sound.
abjads do indicate the consonants but the vowels are basically random even though there's a pattern. kanji does have some phonetic gloss but it's also incomplete. I'd say both of these are functionally equivalent.
@@gasun1274 Do abjads have unit shapes that can be pronounced in multiple ways and have multiple meanings?
כן, אבל לא.
@@supercellodude people only use that for names with odd pronunciations and first grade learning. Mostly when reading Hebrew the letters are enough to guess what the words would sound like.
japanese is easy
like
how are you? =genki? (元気？)
i'm fine =genki
and you=genki?
me too, i'm good =genki
This was pretty funny XD XD
However, I don't agree with eliminating all kanji. Even with spaces between words (once Japanese people agree if a particle is part or not of a word, and if some conjugations like なければなりません can be separated or not), there is still the problem with homophones given the rather simple phonetic system Japanese has. But then, there is until now soooooooo much documentation and literature (and manga and videogames) with kanji that either wouldn't be legible anymore without them, or it would be a painful job to change all the kanji without furigana into hiragana and katakana. Or at least, put furigana on them.
What I would agree is with reducing the number of official kanji to less than 1000 (500 would be the minimum) or making easier kanji readings, which is what actually make Japanese writing system so complex.
Buuuut, this is only my opinion. Again, this video was so fun! XD XD
You've demonstrated the reason that languages don't change easily. There's certainly a lot of inertia, and it may be easier to switch to a different language and translate everything than it would be to adapt the Japanese language.
I just wonder if that means Japanese may be at risk of going extinct in the future.
there's an extensive historical body of literature written by women entirely in kana.
I think the only way to deal with the homophone issue is to just change the words all together. This could also be used to eliminate the on/kun-yomi issue too, make an aratayomi (probably from the Kun/On-yomi) and use it universally. IE 1 would always be Ichi, and then Jin could always be hito. Ni is a particle so Futa should be used for 2. san is used as a name suffix, so use mi, but mi is just one kana, so maybe mi-san (My favorite car manufacturer, lol). Shi is unlucky so yon could be used for 4, et cetera. This would present a new issue, though; This is no longer Japanese. I mean in a world moving toward a universal language anyways, do we really need to re-hash this ancient and beautiful writing system chock full of history and tradition? Yes, because this is the internet and we're bored.
There are ways to work around homophones, like we do with accents or different spellings for words, I don't know how they could do in Japanese script, but this is not probably that difficult.
But I agree completely with you that getting rid of kanji right now would be a mistake, because of cutting off the country from its history, making it difficult to read anything from the past etc
"there is still the problem with homophones"
I don't believe that's necessarily too much of a problem because of 2 reasons:
1) People already deal with homophones in spoken language and it still works most of the time. Usually you can tell the right meaning from the context and people may also try to avoid ambiguity if they're not making puns. Same should work in written language. Granted, there are some near-homophones that differ only in pitch accent and would be ambiguated when written with kana. However, there isn't a huge amount of such minimal pairs.
2) The Korean language has the same issue with large number of homophones. Nonetheless, the Koreans have mostly ditched hanja for hangul long time ago and can clearly manage with it. The Japanese should be able to do the same.
The more complex sentences become, the more you will appreciate kanji, because they give structure to the sentence and provide visual anchor points.
Yes! average Chinese and Japanese reading speeds even for a foreigner absolutely shatter what is possible with most other languages.
@@mueezadam8438 Japanese speech very slow bro
@@GoToMan if a foreigner speaks it.
@@krunkle5136 Nope, Japanese ask you to slow down if you speak Japanese that way you speak English. If you’ve taken at least a JLPT N2 examination and have listened to a Japanese person speak, you’d understand.
@@GoToMan When you gain an intuitive understanding of pitch accents you can guess what words are used by the pitch sounds of the words alone, for us foreigners we have to learn these skills but for a native it comes naturally; native Japanese speakers can guess what word it is simply based on the humming alone.
As a Japanese I admit learning kanji is hard for non-Japanese speakers. Even native Japanese speakers do not know all usage of each kanji. In Japan you can see question about kanji on school exams( from elementary school to university entrance). Ordinary Japanese people just know basic usage of hundreds of basic kanji. They needn't write them perfectly but they just know "usage" and "sound."
If you learn kanji, I recommed starting from reading practice of kanji.
And then, removing kanji from the Japanese writing system is not a good idea. We have many many homonyms and distinguish them by using different kanji for each words.
Well, learning kanji is quite easy for the Chinese LOL
Well other languages have homonyms too but we just guess what the meaning is based on the context, which isn't really complicated.
Homonyme are pretty comon in *other languages* too. It's very easy, either you try to figure the context or you just guess and pray to your preferred God that you are right.
Edit: Apparently I was rightfull corrected I shouldn't include only my native language but also every other one I have no glue about there grammar. Yes I might be a bit disrespectful sometimes by not taking any other language serious in literature than german but I will try to be better next time.
@@justgermanpleasexcusemywri3618 In English we obviously don't have that.
You don't have to look to the right to check if you write the right rite or you'll need to right your mistake, right?
@@Videokirby of course I just found out I even used the word "right" in my sentence :D
日本人でもたまに間違えるほど日本語は難しいです笑笑
それよりも日本語について面白く、かつちゃんと説明してるのすごいと思います！
投稿者の日本語の発音上手でびっくりしたよ
@@ナッツみかん-o7y だよね
日本語って難しい()
@@ナッツみかん-o7y 日系人だからだw
@@EmperorShampoo
助詞以外完璧なのほんとすごいと思う
Hiragana with spaces is used now in children's books. But for adult readers, it's still much easier to read 東京 (Tokyo) than とうきょう. And there are many homophones (many more than English) which are only distingushed by kanji like 直す (fix) and 治す (cure) both read as "naosu". But it is a challange to learn, especially for kanji like 生 which have a lot of differnt readings or words with unusual kanji readings like 春日 (which can be read sensibly as "harubi", meaning "spring day", but is also read "kasuga" as a place name).
I get what you mean but words get their meanings with context, is not like they are isolated or anything. So with whatever you are reading context you get the words meaning. In other languages words are written the same and is still understandable, but I get that imagine trying to read a whole book in katakana sounds like it would go from 500 pages to 1000 pages, kinda baffling
@@themondegod4014 The problem is that that without kanji, you just plain get a lot of ambiguity in Japanese, even with some context. For example, take the sentence 蚊が私のはなに着陸した。(The mosquito landed on my "hana") Did the mosquito land on my nose (hana) or my flower (hana)? If you had used 鼻 (nose) or 花 (flower) instead of はな in kana, than you would know for sure. It would also be easier to read, without the big ambiguous block of kana in the middle of the sentence. Actually, the trend in modern Japanese is to use less and less kanji and more and more kana (and even Romaji--Englash "Roman" letters) instead. If you look at a movie poster from the 1950's, it looks almost like Chinese, with huge amounts of kanji. Whereas, modern signs tend to use it rather sparingly. But reading all-kana Japanese is very tiring and difficult. The idea of reading a whole novel in it just gves me a headache.
WAIT. ITS ACTUALLY TOUKYOU???
@@HenryNWhite-zp5zp Always has been
Can a single Kanji have different meaning? I'm still learning.
The Japanese writing system is like if Mandarin and English took tons of drugs and decided to have a baby, like the English part is just so painful
True, Hangeul is so much better
Aside from the "kanji sucks" joke, (it's not that it's a bad joke, I just see it *so* often) it's a really good video!
I like how you were able to make it funny for people who aren't and are learning Japanese while still being accurate lol
Joke?
Opinions not agreed by a person must be taken as a joke so it lessens the mental damage of said person and to, therefore, disregard them. Even when it is in fact a popular opinion.
@@Ris3451 Popular perhaps by the weebs who struggle to learn any language not related directly to their own.
@@zackwyvern2582 you know chinese use kanji too, right?
@@Ris3451 Kanji was taken from traditional chinese so it's the other way around. Japanese uses traditional chinese characters. Example: the kanji for 'love' in kanji and traditional Chinese are the same, the romanization is also the same, except the Chinese has a tone marker.
1:00 "if everything was in kana, your eyes would die"
*has traumatic flashbacks to my second year of learning Japanese when I was good enough to read kanji but everything in our textbook was in kana*
Japanese is the most amusing language I'll ever learn. Children learn over 1000 Kanji by 6th grade. Ideally, you'd want to learn more than 200 Kanji a year as an adult, but there are over 3000 Kanji you probably should eventually learn, so pace what you can I guess. Don't expect to learn Japanese as fast as a Latin language or something. 10 Kanji a week should be good enough if you're not in a rush. School used to make us learn 20 vocabulary words a week, with a test on Monday to make sure we remembered them all, so you could probably apply that same method to 20 Kanji a week if you really wanted to.
I see that as an extreme drawback of Chinese and Japanese that you need to remember specific symbols for all words.
In most western languages if you know how to speak a word you can most likely write it down, maybe slightly incorrect.
In Chinese, you might very well know how to call an object but it gives you zero clue in how to write it down.
wait, does it mean that those Chinese can learn Japanese insanely fast?
@@boooster101 That's exactly why I can speak a lot more Japanese than I can read or write, and I can read a lot more Kanji than I can write, since I can't imagine a lot of them in my head without looking at them, but I know them if I see them. Pretty common issue. Same goes for drawing anything from memory. Ask someone to draw the Statue of Liberty or something most people know, and they probably can't, but you'll recognize the Statue of Liberty the second you see it. That's my main issue with Kanji. Visual recall.
Edit: I just saw your response to TwoCents in this thread. It seems you already know quite a lot, and that your main issue is with writing the kanji. I’d still recommend this book for improving your kanji writing skills, even if you already know many of their meanings. Only a few months ago, writing out kanji from memory seemed impossible to me, but now it seems almost trivial for the characters I do know.
The book “Remembering the Kanji” by James Heisig does a really good job of making kanji more approachable, especially if paired with a spaced repetition flash card system like Anki. The book assigns a keyword to each kanji (which is usually synonymous with one of the kanji’s common meanings, or at least a close approximation of one of the meanings), and then has you make up mnemonic stories in order to remember how to write the kanji when given the keyword (this is done by breaking down the kanji into their radicals, or even further down into “primitives”. Essentially, each part of the kanji will have some sort of name assigned to it in order to assist in creating these mnemonic stories). And since he’s grouped kanji by their physical similarity to each other, the process is very intuitive. The book essentially teaches you how to write all the base kanji from memory while recognizing at least one of their meanings. What it does not do, though, is teach you the readings. This, however, is not really an issue, as those are best learned in-context from reading material and other media (and working through this book makes that so much easier. I’ve already noticed that if I encounter a kanji I’ve seen in the book before and look up its reading, it becomes so much easier to remember it because my brain already has an index for that kanji). It might seem a little daunting at first, but I’ve managed to get about halfway through in roughly 4 months (and I’ve only been doing it in the spare time I get between university and work). Anyways, I just thought I’d just mention this book since I can’t recommend it enough.
@@magicaltank only the kanji part is fast, because most kanjis have exactly the same meaning in Japanese and chinese. Apart from that, learning kanas and Japanese grammar is also struggling for the chinese
Well, at least it's not Mandarin, where the same pronunciation can have VERY different meanings, or you end up saying the wrong thing than you intended because you pronounced the word you wanted to say SLIGHTLY different...
是 (Shì) = Yes
世 (Shì) = Lifetime
事 (Shì) = Matter
市 (Shì) = City
士 (Shì) = Warrior
室 (Shì) = Room
Mandarin was offered at my middle school and I decided to take it for a quarter in the seventh grade since I've been fascinated with Chinese culture, history, and calligraphy since the 2008 Summer Olympics and thought "Why not?"...famous last words
Ni hao Cuban feng you
And this is why we use context and helper words :) To you the tones may seem the same but to us they are very different
There a chinese poem called lion eating poem in the stone den
If this video makes Japanese writing seem like a ridiculously overcomplicated system, that's because it is.
To make it worse pretty much every kanji character can be pronounced at least two different ways and the written form gives you exactly zero hints as to which one you're supposed to use.
Not exactly
furigana exists until one’s expert enough (sth like jlpt n3 or n2 grade) that it’ll no longer needed
That is false, if it consists of more than 1 kanji, it's usually Onyomi, if it has Kana with the Kanji, it's most likely Kunyomi.
@@danielantony1882 I'm half Japanese. My Japanese family's name is 西山 (Nishiyama) which would be kunyomi despite the absence of kana and consisting of multiple kanji. Conversely, my Japanese family calls me 泰生 (Taisei) which is onyomi. Names in general are fairly inconsistent and as I mentioned, provide no clues as to how they're pronounced.
@@connorwright7040 Names are one thing, words are another.
0:58 クロゼット✕ クローゼット〇
キモイな人✕ キモイ人〇
俺に見ているぞ✕ 俺を見ているぞ〇
あまりにも適当すぎて笑っちゃったw
Would like to add that Katakana and Hiragana *are* based on kanji. While they are read phonetically, they actually take their appearance from aspects of kanji.
Katakana is a simplified, angular adaptation of some kanji.
Hiragana is the evolution of classical cursive kanji.
hiragana is literally just ateji
@@konstiyo not really
He literally said this in the video
@@konstiyo Hiragana doesn't have a meaning associated with each character.
@@kakahass8845 Im just memeing here. But if we think with an open mind, every kana used to be a kanji at some point. Maybe there was a reason why they chose to make a hiragana look like a certain kanji and not another. Even though it doesnt have any meaning now, one can say that it evolved from something that used to have or as a matter of fact still has ふ不
Japanese is what I see when doctors write.
you missed the worst part about invention of kanji:
step one: steal from china
step two: steal from china again but don’t update the writing system and simply add all of the new characters and meanings on top of the old ones so that it is completely nonsensical to chinese readers unless they know the current and outdated languages
step three: repeat step two every time china updates their written script
And technically speaking you also have romaji (ローマ字) so you end up with 4 alphabets.
And numbers are also mixed since Japan started using arabic numerals.
There are actually a bunch of words china got from Japan
what if chinese kanji got copyrighted then?
@@wiandryadiwasistio2062 what if the Latin alphabet gets copyrighted
@@wiandryadiwasistio2062 It is CC-BY-SA.
BY: It is called Kanji, which means "characters from Han (China)".
SA: Any one can use Kanji the same way they use original Chinese characters.
“Adding spaces to pure kana” is basically what Korean does, actually.
Korean used to be written totally in Chinese characters (called hanja in Korean, which is a cognate of kanji in Japanese and hanzi in Chinese), and then Sejong the Great invented hangul, which is like kana but it’s more like a phonology-obsessed conlanger made it up (which is pretty much how it actually happened). Then people mixed hanja and hangul for a while, but then they said “screw it” and wrote everything in hangul with spaces. And it stuck to this day. Nowadays, the only place you’ll see hanja is in news headlines as 1-letter abbreviations of country names. (e.g. 한일 관계 “SK-Japan relations” can be written 韓日관계 to clarify meaning and provide context)
In fact, in the case of writing hanja in news titles these days, there is nothing but writing a person's name and country. It's to reduce the number of letters rather than to clarify the meaning.
ex) 인도네시아(Indonesia) = 印
프랑스(France) = 佛
Interesting, thanks for that piece of knowledge 🤔
Probably the same thing will end up happening to the Japanese, the native Japanese population is getting older and fewer, at some point they will be demographically replaced by foreign population and they will surely say "Kanji? I don't want to see that shit, hello spaces".
@@ttoEttoE Wow didn't know that foreign country got their own kanji.
@@クレア-p3c KUReA
Finally, 21st century humor and bill wurtz combined
the most epic combination
英語全然わかんない
21世紀に最強の組み合わせは円で支払うこと！？
As someone who's pretty familiar with the Japanese language, I can confirm that the language is a beauty when spoken, but absolute hell when you have to read or write it.
As someone who reads a lot of Japanese, I can confirm that reading Japanese is as simple as any other language, with enough practice
@@thefakedanex And that's the kicker, isn't it? It's not immediately intuitive, unlike the speech, which can be picked up as easily as Turkish.
do you seriously think that Turkish can be obtained easily when you hear it ? you must be a language brainiac
@@thefakedanex "It's easy when you know it", yes obviously.
@@jarzez my point is that you can't just objectively say that "it's hell when you have to read japanese"
That just means that you haven't done it enough. Every language is hell to read in the beginning with little exposure to it.
As a person learning japanese, my main complain with kanji is the fact that there are so many.
Some are indistinguishable from each other, or a very minor stroke makes it mean a very different thing. There's also the fact that some old kanjis, that barely anyone uses, will appear and i won't know what it means. Or there are other obscure kanjis that are synonyms to something and some crazy, "I wanna feel special" person, will use it and i won't know what it means.
You don't have to worry about not knowing kanji. According to a friend of mine, many Japanese people don't even know the weird obscure kanji. It's usually kanji used in every day conversation or media that you have to care about. It's something that you grow accustomed to the more you're exposed to it. It's easier if you learn hiragana/katakana first, because then you can isolate the kanji and learn what they mean.
You really only need to know around 2000-2500 for everyday life
Among speakers of any languages there are gonna be those who use old, obscure terms just to be ostentatious and highfalutin. Not just Japanese.
honestly if it were like the 2000-2500 most used kanjis, but they only had one reading each
it wouldn't be that great of deal
but some kanji can be read up to six different way, and that just furi my gana
@@ApexGale u dont need to know how to write kanji, just try to memorize some of the common ones.
if u type in hiragana it will automatically suggest u the right kanji version based off of ur hiragana sentence all u gotta do is either trust it or verify it urself by knowing some of them and u are good to go. worst case scenario u use hiragana instead and put some spaces, it looks childish but people will understand you.
たしかににほんごをかんじなしでかくとわけがわからなくなる
ひらがなだけでこうせいされたぶんとかまじでじごく
As someone who’s nearly finishing their first year of Japanese class and plans on taking another year soon, the writing system is so insane. Learnt hiragana and I was like ok ok yeah this makes sense. Then I learned katakana and I was like this is a little difficult but I get why they’d need letters for foreign words.
Then KANJI kicked it’s ass through the door and I started questioning why I learned the other two and I was like
At… least I can understand the words better through one picture?
Yeah so turns out a lot of kanji’s meaning can change based on the context of the sentence. Such as the kanji for Friday meaning Friday but also can mean gold and money when the kanji is used in a different sentence. ( correct me if I’m wrong, I’ve just recently started learning kanji like a month ago )
Anywho, if you’re someone who’s interested in learning Japanese. Please do it. I know it’s scary. I was very scared too. But honestly, when I started learning more and more I’ve never felt so self-achieved and proud of myself with something before. When you take the time to dedicate to learn certain things, it just feels so accomplishing to just know something that’s known to be difficult. It’s fun! Go learn Japanese now.
I really admire your strong desire to learn the language without being intimidated to start from zero and mulling too much over it :)
As you said rightly, kanjis can change the meaning and the reading depending on the context.
The most glaring example that comes to mind is the kanji 生.
As kunyomi, this kanji can be read:
• I-kasu (to make the best use of) *transitive verb*. For esample 知識を生かす(chishiki wo ikasu) - make the best use of the knowledge.
• I-kiru (to be alive) *intransitive verb*. For example まだ生きてる (mada ikiteru) - still alive. This can be also a transitive verb sometimes, with the meaning of "to live". For example 命を生きる (inochi wo ikiru) - live the life.
• I-keru (to put it in something to keep it alive) *transitive verb*. Used for example in 生け花 (ikebana) - flower arrangement; because you put the flowers in a small vase.
• U-mareru (to born) *intransitive verb*. For esample 赤ちゃんが生まれる (akachan ga umareru) - a baby borns.
• U-mu (to birth) *transitive verb*. For example 赤ちゃんを生む (akachan wo umu) - birth a baby.
• Nama (raw) - used for esample in 生海老 (namaebi) - shrimp, or in 生放送 (namahōsō) - live broadcast.
• Ha-eru (to grow) *intransitive verb*. For example 草は生える (kusa wa haeru) - the grass grows.
• ha-yasu (to let grow) *transitive verb*. For example 髭を生やす (hige wo hayasu) - let the beard grow.
• O-u (to grow) *intransitive verb*. Rarely used.
• Ki (not mixed) *noun*. Rarely used.
• Ubu (innocent, who doesn't know much) *noun and adjective*. Rarely used.
• Mu-su (to grow) *intransitive verb*. Not used anymore. You can find this verb im the Japanese hymn: 苔の生すまで (koke no musu made) - until moss grows.
As onyomi, this kanji can be read:
Sei, shō
That can be read also zei, zō, depending if the word needs the dakuten (the process of adding the two dashes on a letter - for esample た becomes だ).
It can be really difficult to remember and understand which reading you need to use, but with some time I'm sure it becomes natural and it will be easier to decide :)
The kanji used in Friday is just the kanji for gold (金). It's just that in Japanese, Friday is "the day of gold" (金曜日). If you think about it, in English, Monday comes from "moon day", same as in Japanese (月曜日), where 月 is moon.
Even if single Kanji can act as words, often they are combined into bigger words under some strange logic. If you combine evil (邪) with sorcery (魔), you get obstacle (邪魔). So obstacles are evil magic trying to hinder you. An "explanation" is "a theory clearing" (説明), "hibernate" is "winter drowsiness" (冬眠), "weather" is the "personality of the heavens" (天気). I find it so cool that a way of understanding our world is embedded in the language, waiting for us to decipher.
がんばってね
@@hollyhockgod
Very true, but i dont really agree with the first one (邪魔).
邪 has it's own kunyomi (rarely used, but can be seen in some books) that is よこしま (yokoshima), meaning "wrong", "unjust", "inaccurate".
魔 means "to hinder", "to confuse". (Used also with the meaning of "magic" because is confuses, it hinders the mind (心))
So the etymologic meaning of 邪魔 is "a wrong (bad) thing that hinders".
Although I’m not learning Japanese I can relate to that feeling of accomplishment when you advance in a skill(I’m learning drawing, piano, dancing and languages). In the case of language learning I’m currently learning 4 Turkish, Farsi, Swahili and ASL each one having their own hurdles.
Turkish - the agglutination and vowel harmony
Farsi - the alphabet
Swahili - noun classes
ASL - the facial expressions and signing etiquette.
But I’m loving the challenge each one of those languages presents.
personally, I found katakana easier to learn than hiragana lol
私は日本で日本語を勉強している日本人ですが、この動画はとてもわかりやすいです。
What don't we get rid of Kanji?
It's something you say when you start learning, and when you learn some you totally can't believe how incredibly stupid you were at the start
TLDR: Your eyes will die
well, it's actually very easy for Chinese to learn Japanese with Kanji, just saying
also the people there choose to keep it, so it's not really about how easy it is for you to learn, cus it's you learning a language from a foreign culture, you are supposed to respect that. in the same sense, I could advocate for having each English alphabet sound strictly for one sound, instead of guessing the pronunciation everytime I see ough in a word
@@dickychan8610 I wonder if chinese people have issues reading kanji in kunyomi, i'd guess they tend to read the chinese form out of habit
@@NicoSleepyLeen I can't answer you cus I don't know japanese, im just joking that I am usually able to understand the sentences with kanjis in them
@@NicoSleepyLeen onyomi is often different from Chinese, and there are many Chinese related language/accent/whatever the fuck they are.
@@NicoSleepyLeen Yes we do, I started to learn Japanese recently and it’s kind of frustrating because you have a Kanji, let’s say 人 (hito in Japanese reading) and it has (most of the cases) the exact same meaning as Chinese, but you just don’t know how to pronounce it.
It’s like trying to eat a cake, but you’ve got your mouth sewed.
Me after learning hiragana and katakana: "This isn't so hard"
Kanji: "You sure about that, buddy?"
Kanji could benefit from the bopomofo treatment, where a pronunciation guide accompanies each kanji word in smaller point. Allows all the literary benefits of continued use of logography while making the language INFINITELY more accessible to learners since now they can read Japanese just through following the pronunciation guide.
Isn't that just furigana?
Lol that's just furigana, and yes i just came here to tell you that after reading your comment
it literally does
Furigana exists; what is needed is for furigana usage to be standardized.
I'm in the slow process of learning Japanese, and while the information you presented I already knew, I still found it hilarious. Well done!
I got down 12 characters for hiragana but still practicing so I can be more natural with it. It’s just crazy how they incorporate all three together, especially Kanji. That intimidates me
We use two as well. Lowercase and Uppercase letters. R looks completely different from r, two different writing systems.
It is a lot like hiragana and katakana, that is why katakana is sometimes transcribed as uppercase letters.
@@jort93z yea Im not even there yet. All I know is, for the lack of words, hiragana is for the “fill ups”, katakana for “foreign words”, and Kanji for like noun or to give a context to your word. I think once i get hiragana and katakana down, I should be good. Kanji is a different story tho. Thats a lot of combinations 🤣
Once you familiarize yourself with it, it is really not that difficult. Sure there are some difficult kanji characters but that shouldn't hinder you from being able to read a book. Once you memorized all the kanas and N5 and N4 kanji, I highly recommend you to pick up any book to read (preferably manga/light novels/magazines) and don't get yourself too intimidated by the amounts of kanji present in them, you will be amazed how fast you could learn and memorize the moonrunes just by reading an actual book.
Lmao this is so funny, as someone who is learning Japanese this is absolutely correct and hilarious
I love this content, it kind of reminds me of Bill Wurtz
pls i'm literally japanese why is this so relatable- japanese is like, the easiest language with the most fucked up writing system istg... but i don't say that kanji is bad they add a lot to our culture but they could just simplify it (i'm character amnesic bruh)
To be completely honest; this video explains the mess in a fun way. Kinda reminds me of Bill Wurtz. I love the style of content that you have brought.
Hi I’m Japanese 👋 ur Japanese pronunciation is so good! Thank you for explain about Japan😊😭
Also what I personally find difficult in japanese grammar is that the crazy amount of ways in which u can say the simplest things depending on the situation.
For example "what's that?" in japanese can be translated as: これは何ですか?
これは何でしょうか？
これ何？
これは何でこざいますか？
これは何でございましょうか？
これは何でございます？
これは何だ？
これは何だい？
これは何なんですか？
これは何であられますか？
これは何でありますか？
これ何すか？
and these all mean the same thing but depending on which one you use it and who you use it to, you can end up sounding like a complete asshole or a very polite well mannered person.
use ‘translate to English‘ function to ensure that they are all the same
@@fpschannel2616 yeah I just used it, this is absolutely crazy
i must study
“Kore wa nani ka?”
At first glance this sounds terrible until you realize you're just adding inflections to the same word, 何 nani
What is that?
What’s that?
Tf is that?
Wtf is that?
What the hell is that?
What the heck is that?
Know what that is?
What is that thing?
Mandarin: I'm a pretty difficult language to learn for everyone else, we are just built different-
Japan, proceeding to steal: *Hold my sake*
This is the History of Japan 2: Electric Boogaloo language edition that was as unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, it's a surprise to be sure but welcome.
As someone who's in Japanese class in school, this is helpful. Thanks
You must be a beginner
@@mdahsenmirza2536 Yeah, you could say it like that.
i would absolutely LOVE spaces in japanese.
"If everything was in Kana, your eyes would die."
Me a filthy gaijin: I can't read Kanji, tho. 😭
my fellow kana 人
Unless your spoken Japanese skills are already great, not knowing the kanji for a word typically means you wouldn't recognize it in kana, either. Sure, you'd know how to say it, but you'd only be reading sounds at that point. It would be like reading a sentence like "I rlewoing to the plechlinxis today." Sure, you can "read" that, but does it really matter?
@@Hocotatium111 Shoot, you right. I can read very basic kanji's here and there. And sentences will not make sense without it.
@@nonplayercharacter12333 kanji in sentences is literally satan's brewing pot, 1 kanji means something, put 2 kanjis, now in DIFFERENT CONTEXTS, YOUR KANJIS MEAN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS (日 THIS KANJI SUCKS)
skill issue
You taught in 2 minutes what I couldn’t learn for months. Thank you.
As someone who's still learning jp, a fun example of kanji being annoying that I like is:
人 - hito (person)
大人 - otona (adult)
大人気 - daininki (really popular)
The pronunciation is totally different with each of these words 😭
As a mandarin learner, those are
人 = ren
大人 = daren
大人气 = darenqi
Mandarin is much more straighforward with the readings😅
大丈夫（all right）…
人人人
- - -
，ー
「大人気」で「おとなげ」って読むこともありますからねぇ…
I like that joke you added at the end. They always think “muh spaces” and start suggesting ‘advice’ like Japanese is some college art product 💀💀💀
You forgot about Furigana, but that is alright, no one uses it in Japan, otherwise reading would become easy.
Wot in pronunciation I literally just wrote a comment suggesting the adoption of a system that's just me describing Furigana without knowing what Furigana is
@ur dad that left you • 63 years ago
So you are admitting you are at kindergarten level.
@@nathanielmartins5930 reading disabilities are a thing
"No one uses it" lol that's just not true. Anything with kids in its target market typically has furigana so lots of manga and games have it (and obviously stuff like kids' books). And then even for stuff aimed at teenagers, difficult kanji will have often have furigana.
@@bobboberson8297
Still, that is just the young demographic of Japan. And Japan as a whole has the smallest Young Demographic compared to other nations.
as someone who’s trying to relearn Japanese and kanji past 2nd grade level, this helps *a lot*
I've been learning Japanese for 2 years now and this was hilarious
I love this editing style, it makes my brain go brrrrrrr
Keep on that grind
As a Japanese, I can say that many Japanese remember Kanji characters by their images. This is because kanji are often made up of combinations.
For example,
木 = tree
林 = forest (small)
森 = forest (big)
氵= parts of water
海 = sea
汗 = sweat
波 = wave
津波 = tsunami
But,some kanji have no meaning by themselves. Like a 津.
津 means saliva actually
maybe a wave that big enough to cross over a ferry port can be called tsunami?
@@何天佑-z9o
Where you from?
I've never seen 津 used to mean saliva.😂
Saliva is 唾液 or 唾.
@@現場猫-s7uI'm from mainland China.
津 means ford or port.
To be fair is more easy to study it than comprehend why it's the way it is lol
This is legitimately a good introduction to the language, and well edited to boot!
As someone who watches anime,This video is 100% accurate.
lmao
My ears appreciate the constant Bass boosted voice
f*cking love this video
This explination is actually great !!
Now I know what reading I would use for kanji
Even tho I probably can even read 5 of them 😆
俺が外国人なら絶対に日本語は覚えれない
クローゼットでキモい人が俺を見てるっていう謎シチュと最後のありがとうなが地味に回転してるの好き
As somebody who's learning japanese, lets just say I'm mentally preparing myself for kanji.
i have a test soon im lost :(
good luck remembering like the 2000 joyo kanji
somehow you'll just remember it, take it at your own pace.
..you should mentally prepare yourself for BS Katakana nonsense because i've had too many aneurysms trying to figure out what the hell it's supposed to be in english sometimes... maybe if i was better at the language.. i dunno.
@@chickennugget6684 I love and hate katakana because it's really fun to pronounce and it's decently easy so far because it's just English words, but it's so annoying memorizing a second alphabet.
A student of Japanese here (I just moved to Japan last week). Kanji makes way more sense if you learn them in context by learning words. That's the premise wanikani uses (
They killed him when he mentioned spacing
they did 💀
実に面白い日本語講座でした😆
Fun video, like literaly fun -
As a nisei I can say this is really well made
phonetic kanji?? that's crazy
中国から漢字来たから、中国語もなんとなく漢字だけ見て雰囲気で理解することできるよね〜！良いことやん😎
This is probably why a recent report on duolingo mentions that recent generations use the app for Japanese.
I took 2 years of it in primary school and this is how my experience was:
First year katakana and hiragana: so good so fun, straight A's s little challenging but everything is cream gravy.
Second year: INTRODUCTION to Kanji...
Bombed it.
Yup, now here I am taking French almost a decade later in college because my transfer school requires 2 years of consistent and passing grades of a foreign language.
My best advice to anyone doing Japanese, honestly I would not suggest a classroom setting. Do it at your own pace because Kanji often is a brick wall for people to learn BECAUSE of how Katakana and hiragana are treated. Because your brain is SO heavily influenced on memorizing that as "hiragana for japanese and Katakana for English" and we use (mostly) phonetic languages ourselves, the rewiring for Kanji is a pain to new learners.
If you're learning the language for family, to enjoy the culture, or to "read anime", idc of the ethics you do you... but good luck and godspeed.
Too bad Duolingo is garbage.
@@icecp4279 then looks like you need to sit in a classroom setting then. Sucks bro.
@@icecp4279 Wanikani is tha wae for kanji.
lol I would reccomend a classroom setting
@@tree427 Yeah, depends on the teacher. My teacher was patient and would slow down the class to make sure we understood everything (small class), so I found it more effective than Duolingo.
Video:Explains
My mind at 2am:I dont fucking know what hes saying but i like your style anime man
as a person who speaks japanese, i understand, say no more...
I am Japanese.
Then I remembered a meme, killed me.
"not having an character for your language, stealing one from your neighbor and using it in the wrong way then also creating 2 new characters for your language and using all 3 at once."😇
Don't worry, Japanese people who use Japanese on a regular basis also complain that it is difficult.
I'm one of them.
Even Japanese people often give me a hard time reading "Kanji"! There are probably very few Japanese who can read all the kanji! As a genuine Japanese, I frequently look up kanji I don't understand, but when it comes to kanji, "Google" may know more about it than the Japanese!
I've lost and gained so many braincells watching this. Please do more :D
言語の違いで、何を伝えたいのかはよく分からんかったけど勢い好き。
You can’t imagine how much useful Kanji is. We can tweet literally ANYTHING within 140 characters. Hey I already used almost 100 characters for this short message
yeah bozo very useful, definitely worth having 3k+ complex symbols in your writing system.
better than having so many words that are written the same and the only way to tell the difference is through context that sometimes might not be enough to decipher with
Ooh boy and then there's the "hentaigana."
This must be what it was like trying to decipher hieroglyphs.
Don't ever wish for kanji to disappear, it will only backfire 😓
Jokes aside, with no Chinese characters, a lot of problems will arise, and the worst part will be Japanese as a whole will lose one of its major unique assets. Centuries worth of culture should never be taken for granted.
Edit: Some funny redundancy
Wdym Chinese kanji? Kanji is kanji Chinese is hanzi
@@booaks2980 Oh right I just noticed, I should've said "Chinese characters" not "Chinese kanji" because it will be redundant. It's like saying it "Chinese Chinese character" lol
Can’t we just communicate by cave paintings?
I took japanese class in high school. this made me laugh
in a good way. I found it funny because it's true
I was thinking about learning Japanese until I did some research into it and figured this out for myself; then I decided it was too difficult to be worth it!
カタカナorひらがな ならカタカナを覚えた方が良いと思います。暗記するしかありません
If you think this is complicated, try reading bungo. It's basically chinese, but you read it in japanese _with annotations_ to explain in what order to read them, on top of figuring out how to pronounce each.
I absolutely *love* the japanese writing system, I find it elegant, but man is it hard sometimes.
Let's not scare the children here... LOL
すもももももももものうち
「すもも」も「桃」も桃の内
Hello from Japan!
Well I feel Kanji is hard to write but easy to read or understand their meaning if I get used to them.
As some say in this comment, text written only in hiragana or katakana is horrible. Very difficult to read, and unnatural to most of Japanese people, because we are customed to the sentence with kanji, hiragana mixtured.
But yeah... I think learning Japanese is soooo hard... Maybe just speak Japanese is much easier, not writing or reading.
Well anyway, nice video! Thanks for uploading!
Wow, that's so interesting! I understood about 5% of that!
Me as a highly motivated Japanese learner: ☹️
Kanji burns the eyes while maintaining the flame inside our heads.. like this freakin SUMMER!!!
I'm not anti Kanji, but I am anti Onyomi. Having the Kanji be unreliable hurts the entire point of them that is supposed to make them so helpful as logographic characters. And it's only because of historical shenanigans instead of for the benefit of the language in a vacuum.
Also, I don't think adding spaces is only good for this idea of killing Kanji. I think you guys could keep Kanji and add spaces and it would even boost the economy just from helping foreigners learn it much better with a really simple change that doesn't alter the language itself aside from a minor change on paper that matches how pokemon games will present it sometimes
Removing onyomi would change the entire vocabulary of Japanese though..
@@Sugarglidergirl101 I wasn't really talking about outlawing anything. I meant more like slowly phasing them out. Japanese today is wildly different than it was like some centuries ago
@@vanilla8956 I never said outlawing either but getting rid of the onyomi reading would just create an entirely new and different language at that point.
@@Sugarglidergirl101 "Outlawing" is hyperbole. I'm not talking about "getting rid of" in some big swoop but rather slowly fazing the less used ones out over time
@@Sugarglidergirl101 There are some words with on'yomi that can be replaced with actual kun'yomi based words, for example ところ instead of ばしょ. However, yeah, it would either change Japanese radically. I would rather suggest simplifying on'yomi system, though. Or reducing the official kanji list from over 2000 to 1000 or less, I think much of them are sometimes redundant and could be easily replaced with others of the same or very similar meaning.
私は日本人ですが、日本人の僕でも、「何で同じような漢字の読み方が日本語では沢山あるのか」っと毎日思います。日本人だけど日本語は難しいと毎日感じます。
I’ve never faced a more difficult challenge in my life than learning Kanji.
I’m Japanese and even I’m confused about some stuff
ただでさえ、漢字とひらがなとカタカナがあるのに、接続詞がバリエーションが多すぎるせいで、海外の人にとってはクソ難しくなるみたいだな。
ひらがなとカタカナの発音が素晴らしいです
おすすめに出てきた日本人いるか？？？
Thanks, im starting to learn japanese and now im even more confused
貴方はとても日本語が上手ですね！🎉
I am more confused now than before. Thank you.
1:17
Among us kanji
出てくる日本語めちゃくちゃで草
I'm Japanese, but it's very difficult to speak in Japanese.
I understood nothing, but got a good laugh, I love your video
海外ニキが日本語で苦しんでるのを見てニヤニヤしてる
こっちも英語で苦しんでるんだよ･･････
I just learn kanji by seeing them in new words and then eventually recognising them later down the line and I just find it easier that way.