I mean, think of it this way: it comes down to how often you come across words in any language including English (even in ENG: you may forget how to spell words correctly if you don’t use or encounter them often), kind of the same logic with Kanji: a Japanese person doesn’t know all Kanji in the same way English speakers doesn’t know every single word that exists in ENG.
There are over 5000 Kanji but only about half of that is used in Japanese or closer to 2136 while the remainder consist of ones only present within technical jargon (medicine, science, politics, etc.). or certain Kanji only has limited uses in some words (but mostly written in kana). That is also accounting for grammar being “straight forward” more than English or Euro languages.
The “real” hard part is numerous readings (depending whether it’s paired with kana or another kanji, reflected from kunyomi & onyomi plus nanori when applied in people’s names). What I hate about most online translators is that it often gets lost in translation (like words used in the wrong context but on their own it’s correct, however not right for the situation or topic at hand).
You must log in or register to comment.
I’ve been studying Japanese for almost six years now and I would say YES kanji is difficult, but it’s not insurmountable. It’s also one of the most interesting and fulfilling parts of learning the language.
There’s a certain level of “you have to know the rules before you know how to break the rules” but kanji can often be used in interesting nonstandard ways in literature & manga and just in general carry so much meaning and depth.
There’s always something new to learn. Did you know that there’s another version of 探す (to search) that has a slightly different connotation? 探す is usually used to search for something you want, but 捜す is used to search for something that’s missing.By the way, do we have a Japanese learning community on Lemmy?
There is at !japaneselanguage@sopuli.xyz but it’s not super active. Like a lot of things on the Threadiverse, it’s best to go up a category. !languagelearning@sopuli.xyz is more active, and there are many Japanese learners there.
I offered to teach in one of those communities through videogames but I haven’t been able to start a community or find the time to actually get a session going :(
I feel bad because some people seemed genuinely interested. I’ll have to try again soon.
Yes: It seems very complicated.
To counter your argument about English: English is very complicated, reportedly it’s one of the hardest languages to learn because of all the exceptions to rules and the fact that it’s actually a bunch of different languages melded together (hence the many exceptions).
English is a fairly simple language that through the years has shaved off a lot of the complexities.
No grammatical genders - In languages like French, German or Spanish, you need to know the gender of the words, and there can be multiple, depending on the language, more than 3 genders.
Fairly simple declension - I refer you to this Wikipedika article to see all the ways you can have articles and pronouns be in German, depending on the grammatical case and gender of the word. And you need to use the correct one.
Fairly simple verb conjugation - Want 3rd person? Just add an “s”. Want past tense? Just add “ed”. That’s it basically for verb forms. Sure, there are irregular forms for past tense, but even those mostly follow a similar pattern, e.g “bought”, “fought”, “thought”, “caught”.
Behold this Wikipedia article again explaining all the verb forms you can have in German (look at those tables each containing a verb form lol). Oh btw, it does have irregular forms too.
The spelling is a mess, true, like, we don’t even have enough alphabets, and the way words are written are a complete mess compared to how they are spoken.
But comparing it to Kanji where you have learn roughly one symbol for each word? Where you literally can spend years learning it? Not learning the language itself, just learning how to read it. Oh, did I mention there are also 2 other alphabet sets that Japanese does have? Don’t worry though, that’s only around like a hundred or so additional symbols.
English is easy to learn, just the spelling is nonsensical
You are the first person I’ve heard say English is easy to learn, but yeah, the spelling nonsense is in large part because English is kind of a conglomeration of languages.
Well what would be an easier language ? French? Dutch? Not German, that one looks atrocious. If it’s not relative then all foreign languages are hard to newcomers I guess. Personally I remember that learning enough English so I can somewhat communicate was quite easy because of the mass of available content to read / listen to / watch.
Spanish and Portuguese would probably be easier to learn than English, same for French. If you knew German and/or English, Dutch might actually be a little easier than you’d think!
The amount of entertaining media out there definitely works in favor of English though, I have to agree with you there.
I’m 40 years into trying to become fluent-ish in Dutch and it’s going to need another lifetime to get there unfortunately. So English to Dutch ain’t much of a passerelle.
Back in the days it is said that our Dutch speaking neighbours had an « easier » time learning English because they didn’t had much in the way of local content. Whereas as a French speaker we have all dubbed so less pressure to get introduced early to English.
I find it super funny that you position French as easier than English. In what language are you native? From my anecdotal evidence discussing with a sizeable amount of foreigners French is among the most hated / difficult western language to learn. Possibly because of all the prononciation shenanigans, it’s not like in Dutch and English where sounds are somewhat logical.
I once tried to learn to count in Japanese, but had to stop because I got an itchy knee.
The lack of phonetic information is a challenge. If you see an unfamiliar English word, you can guess the pronunciation, and usually be pretty close (sometimes you’ll get a phoneme wrong or stress the wrong syllable, but listeners will be able to infer what you meant). With kanji, as well as not knowing what it means, you have no information of how it’s pronounced. It is theoretically possible for kanji to exist which not only lack meaning but also have no pronunciation, and indeed, there are about a dozen meaningless, soundless “ghost kanji”that ended up in Unicode due to bureaucratic errors at the Japanese standards agency.
You can do this to an extent with kanji, as well, it’s just something that really only gets easier the more you study Japanese, though. When you start getting more proficient, you can usually have a pretty good shot at guessing the pronunciation and something of the meaning in context, but the difficulty is certainly really front-loaded.
Of course, then you have some kanji that just have 100 different readings and you just have to go memorize those, so there’s certainly room for improvement.
For contrast, in Finnish, you’ll know exactly how a word is pronounced if you know how it’s written. English has exceptionally nonsensical pronounciation.
You could have done that in English at one point, but then we changed all the vowels and added in a ton of words from a different language type.
I had a friend give me kanji learning cards and she had to write the pronunciation of each word for me. It had me stumped that similar kanji had no phonetic relationship.
I can sometimes read a kana word in under 30 seconds. I’m that bad. At least the symbols that look similar often sound similar too.
Depends on what you mean by “similar”. If you’re looking for the right thing, there are often a lot of phonetic hints in kanji.
For example, 矢 and 夫 sound completely different, totally unrelated. These are pretty basic kanji though; I think it’s analogous to how O and Q are totally different, or i and j.
If there’s more complex similarities though, then yeah there can be an implied phonetic relationship. Look at: 同胴洞銅恫桐粡. These can all be pronounced the same: どう (dou). Though, many of them have kunyomi readings that are totally unrelated.
With kanji, as well as not knowing what it means, you have no information of how it’s pronounced.
An impossible joke in kanji:
Kanji is easy.
(I went to school in China till 2nd grade 😉 close enough lol)
Yes, because I find hard memorizing a lot of symbols before becoming capable of minimal reading proficiency.
Is it that much harder than remembering that some emojis now map onto secondary meanings, like 🍆 meaning penis and 💀 meaning “I find this to be very funny”? Or even the primary meanings of emojis, where you’d totally understand what someone is saying when they type ✈️🇯🇵🍣🍜?
The difficulty comes from the sheer number of them, but human communication is full of things where meaning comes from non-alphabetical symbols.
I haven’t tried learning Japanese (precisely because of Kanji) but what you’re describing in English is also the hardest part of English. There are plenty of languages where you can easily spell and pronounce words you’ve never seen before.
Yes I find them hard and also not a very good writing system. Especially in Japanese where you have four writing systems. Drawing pictograms means I have to learn a spoken word, a pictogram (or worse pictogram combination) and a meaning for both. I know that English isn’t always written as it is spoken but for the most part it is. Even if I only hear a word I can have a guess at how it’s written and from the writing I have an idea how it might be spoken.
That’s the neat thing about typing Japanese when the keyboard knows. You can literally sound it out and have it turn into the character as you finish a syllable (or whatever the proper term is for Japanese)
Partially. I recently wanted to type 𰻝𰻝面 but my keyboard didn’t suggest 𰻝 even when I tried biang or biang biang. The is that there are several characters with the same syllable and then I still have to know which character is the correct one. And even though there are so many the still sometimes have several meanings. For example in Chinese the character 面 means noodle or flour or side or face (maybe even more). And I still can only sometimes infer the sound from the character. If someone were to ask me I’d ditch Kanji in Japanese and only us Romaji. Unlike English the sounds are actually standardized and it would make writing more compatible with a lot of countries. I’d also accept Hiragana or Katakana. But only one of them. I’d also start a writing reform in English so that the spoken and the written English fit together better.
I can see that. I made my comment as a barely romaji familiar level. I just think it’s neat that the complex language/writing has translated to the global era and digital era so well.
It seems simple enough that I could use it if I really needed to, but complicated enough that it would be difficult to learn without consistent reinforcement.
Very much. Takes too long to write, and can be difficult to read when hand written or is too small. My ability to listen and understand Japanese is much better than my ability to read, except with Katakana (or the rare occasions something is written out in Romaji)
Nevermind the fact that there are over 50,000 of them. Only around 2000 are used daily, and that is still many magnitudes more than the 26 total letters in Roman characters I’ve known most of my life as an English speaker.
Since I know 0 of them, yeah.
Same. I have tried a little but found it completely unmanageable.
It was hard at first. Now I’m about 600 kanji in, and while they are still hard they are starting to make sense. New ones are quite a lot easier than before because of pattern recognition, and I’m even able to sometimes guess reading/meaning. It has also massively improved my learning, I had always heard that it wasn’t necessary nowadays, and I’ve been studying on off for a long time now, but the difference on this last cycle is massive
There are over 5000 Kanji
Did you drop a zero? The number I was taught when I was studying Japanese in college decades ago was 48,902. I don’t know why it stuck in my head so hard, but it did.
I found kanji to be both difficult and fascinating. It’s tempting to just focus on them as a writing system, but I think the readings are at least as important.
Kanji aren’t really hard, there’s just a lot of them. And I can’t learn that many at a time. So it takes ages to get to the point where you can actually read stuff, just in terms of volume. At least with my limits.
That said, one issue I’m noticing is that kanji with the default internet fonts are usually too small for me to make out the differences in the more complex ones. I often need to increase the font a bit with a userstyle to actually make stuff readable.
The “real” hard part is numerous readings (depending whether it’s paired with kana or another kanji, reflected from kunyomi & onyomi plus nanori when applied in people’s names).
Just don’t learn all the readings from the start. When the kanji is used alone as a word directly, there’s just one reading used for it. Other than that, you’re dealing with vocabulary.
We learn “2” as reading “two”, not “twe”, despite that reading being used in “twenty” and “twelve”. We learn the latter two as separate vocabulary words that simply include the “2” character. The same should be applied to kanji. Learn one word for the kanji, and the rest through vocabulary that uses the kanji.
Wanikani iirc takes this approach where they usually teach you the primary onyomi with the kanji, so you can read most vocabulary words right away, while only having to learn one reading. All of ther other readings are taught through vocabulary items indirectly.
