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).

    • zlatiah@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Yes… Until when you’d have to pronounce it 😭 And then there’s a ridiculous amount of Japanese names that seem to follow no rules whatsoever for their pronunciations. And then there’s online JP users who would put the weirdest pronunciations for Kanjis, sometimes they are so weird that they have to annotate the pronunciation themselves

      … Anyways, Japanese is difficult

      • Oh pronunciation… forgot about that…

        But the meaning is the same, no?

        Then just mentally map a sound to the Chinese version of the sound…

        I already do that for Cantonese and Mandarin lol, remembering Japanese sounds would just be like another “dialect” isn’t it? 🤔

        I mean like if they wrote entire sentences in Kanji and not the hiragana katagana stuff, you can decipher the meaning right?

        • k0e3@lemmy.ca
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          10 hours ago

          The Japanese changed a lot of hanzi to make it easier. The Chinese reaaaally simplified their hanzi to a point that I, as a native Japanese speaker, find it hard to decipher. With traditional Chinese, even with the more complex strokes, I can sorta make sense of signs and even some snippets from a newspaper article.

          Also note that even though each character might have the same-ish meaning across languages, we might use different combinations to describe a word.

        • zlatiah@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          For the most part yeah. I think that’s unironically how I “cheated” my old JLPT exams and got way higher grades than I should. And really high-level Japanese (such as political news, debates, legal matter) are mostly Kanji, and by that point you’d fully understand all the non-Kanji parts anyways so

          But in real life you still have to actually say the words out loud…