What I hate most about learning Japanese is kanji, or in other words the Chinese alphabet (though quite different in Japan). When I first decided to take up Japanese, I thought learning kanji would be the best thing ever; the characters looked absolutely amazing. It wasn't until I started actually learning kanji that I realized what a pain it was.
The amount of characters you need to memorize is many, many times greater than the amount of characters one needs to master in the English language. They say to be proficient enough to read a Japanese newspaper, you need to be able to read 2,000 characters (though there are many more). Not only that, the great majority of characters can be read more than one way, which makes it even more confusing. Some kanji are easy to read and write, but some can be quite difficult.
But sometimes... just some times... I have fun studying kanji. I didn't notice it until quite recently, but at times I tend to get pulled into the details revolving around a kanji. Kanji do not only tell you the readings and meanings of a character, but can also clearly portray the reasoning behind why a character was created.
For instance, the character for "open" is 開. Might be a little hard to see so here's a picture:
The two parts on the outside, 門, form the character for "gate." This kanji is pretty self-explanatory. The character in the middle represents a human with his arms spread out, in essence "opening" the gate. Clever, huh?
Just as you can have multiple characters to form a single kanji, you can have multiple kanji to form a single word. Some of these can be really quite intriguing.
I was recently fascinated by the word 流行 (read as "ryuukou" or "hayari"), which means "trend/fad/craze." The first character, 流, portrays "flow." It is most often used in the context of water "flowing" and the like. The second character, 行, means "to go." So basically, the word "trend" was created by putting two characters together that meant "to go with the flow." Even more clever than the first example!
Kanji can also give certain details of the history and background of when it was created. Here are two examples:
The kanji 安 has the character 女 at its core. 女 is the kanji for "female" or "woman." Take a guess at what 安 means?
You can assume how women were looked upon when this alphabet was created. Poor women (pun intended).
Another example is 怒, meaning "angry." As you can see once again, the character for women (女）is included in the character. The other two characters, 又 and 心, mean "again" and "heart/mind/spirit" respectively. Piece it together and you can see that women during this time were seen as emotional. That stereotype still remains to the present, though.
Discovering things like these really amuses me when I'm studying kanji. What also makes me feel good when studying kanji is when, randomly, I write a character and it looks amazing. My handwriting is pretty bad most of the time, kanji or not, so when I write something that looks good I really take notice. It happened today and I just took a picture of it to share with you all! Call me dorky but it was a proud moment.
I included some of the other kanji that I wrote just so you could compare my usual writing to it. It is quite the beauty, don't you think? Coincidentally, that word 感動 (read: "kandou"), means "being moved emotionally" (for instance, being moved to tears when watching a really sad movie). A very fitting word for that moment!
While we're on the topic of Japanese, I'd like to share another photo. Recently my Japanese teacher had all of us in class write some words of encouragement for the victims of the recent earthquake in Japan. She posted it up in one of the school buildings and I thought it looked cute so I took a picture of it. Here it is!
My message was a haiku in Japanese. It went like this:
日本はきっと 乗り越えるはず。 大丈夫です。
Read as:
nihon wa kitto norikoeru hazu daijoubu desu
Which means:
Japan will surely overcome this disaster. All will be okay.
Nothing really fancy but the teacher only gave us a few minutes in class. On that note, I'm glad everything in Japan seems to be getting better. My study abroad program was resumed so I am stoked. More to come on that.
I read a feminist perspective that suggested that sexism was evidenced by the Japanese language... made some points kind of what like you are making here.
Those characters mean a lot of the same things in Chinese, though, and the meanings carried over - I mean to say it is not exactly Japanese history being represented in the etymology here.
Though I'd thought the etymology for 安全-type uses of 安 is not talking about women in general, it is "woman in a house". The alternate use of 安い for cheap I believe is uniquely Japanese, so I'd be interested to know where that came from. I don't think it was "women are cheap", somehow
If you're at understanding onyomi/kunyomi maybe you'll have fun trying to pick up similarities in onyomi for similar characters...even more noticeable if you know Chinese.
On April 30 2011 09:46 Turbovolver wrote: I read a feminist perspective that suggested that sexism was evidenced by the Japanese language... made some points kind of what like you are making here.
Those characters mean a lot of the same things in Chinese, though, and the meanings carried over - I mean to say it is not exactly Japanese history being represented in the etymology here.
Though I'd thought the etymology for 安全-type uses of 安 is not talking about women in general, it is "woman in a house". The alternate use of 安い for cheap I believe is uniquely Japanese, so I'd be interested to know where that came from. I don't think it was "women are cheap", somehow
There are also a lot of reverse introduction of Kanji combo words into the Chinese language. Some combo words like trend I suspect is in fact made up by Japan and reverse introduced to China.
On April 30 2011 08:50 Souma wrote:They say to be proficient enough to read a Japanese newspaper, you need to be able to read 2,000 characters (though there are many more). Not only that, the great majority of characters can be read more than one way, which makes it even more confusing. Some kanji are easy to read and write, but some can be quite difficult.
I know about 1100 and can roughly read the newspaper... There are a lot of times I can read something but don't know the word. There's also a lot of names of cities/prefectures/people that have unique readings.
Nowadays when I pick up vocabulary, it's much easier to learn it with the kanji than just by kana, it's really useful once you get into the flow of it. Learning words that have no kanji or where kanji is hardly used is much harder for me.
For some reason I really like writing the characters. I thought this series was eye-opening.
I read a feminist perspective that suggested that sexism was evidenced by the Japanese language... made some points kind of what like you are making here.
Those characters mean a lot of the same things in Chinese, though, and the meanings carried over - I mean to say it is not exactly Japanese history being represented in the etymology here.
Though I'd thought the etymology for 安全-type uses of 安 is not talking about women in general, it is "woman in a house". The alternate use of 安い for cheap I believe is uniquely Japanese, so I'd be interested to know where that came from. I don't think it was "women are cheap", somehow
Yeah, I realize that most characters don't actually represent Japanese history but rather Chinese history. I'm really curious myself how 安 came to be known as "cheap" in Japan. xD
On April 30 2011 09:46 kodansha wrote: If you're at understanding onyomi/kunyomi maybe you'll have fun trying to pick up similarities in onyomi for similar characters...even more noticeable if you know Chinese.
がんばって
I am terrible with onyomi/kunyomi readings. There are so many that it absolutely flies over my head. I'm only able to remember onyomi/kunyomi when I see the character used frequently.
On April 30 2011 08:50 Souma wrote:They say to be proficient enough to read a Japanese newspaper, you need to be able to read 2,000 characters (though there are many more). Not only that, the great majority of characters can be read more than one way, which makes it even more confusing. Some kanji are easy to read and write, but some can be quite difficult.
I know about 1100 and can roughly read the newspaper... There are a lot of times I can read something but don't know the word. There's also a lot of names of cities/prefectures/people that have unique readings.
Nowadays when I pick up vocabulary, it's much easier to learn it with the kanji than just by kana, it's really useful once you get into the flow of it. Learning words that have no kanji or where kanji is hardly used is much harder for me.
For some reason I really like writing the characters. I thought this series was eye-opening.
That video was pretty interesting, thanks. I'm gonna start trying that now. =o I've noticed that my teacher tends to write things a bit slanted up towards the right, and now I know why!
P.S. - Today I noticed on one of my handouts that my teacher spelled "wrestler" as "restrar." Just found it pretty funny.
So how does written Japanese work? I know that there's Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Are they all comboed together in writings or are they used in different written mediums?
They're used together. Typically speaking, Kanji is generally used for nouns/verb roots/adjective roots, though there are plenty of exceptions. Hiragana is used for particles/verb & adjective endings/words that don't have kanji. Katakana is used for foreign words.
Example: 私はアメリカに住んでいます (read: watashi wa amerika ni sundeimasu).
Bolded = kanji Underlined = katakana Rest = hiragana
Which means, "I am living in America."
That's just generally how you would formally write, anyway. When people are chatting online they do all sorts of crazy stuff.
On April 30 2011 09:38 Kamille wrote: The characters themselves are quite suggestive. Look at man and woman and tell me you don't see it.
Hm... o.o 男 女. I guess I'm missing something because I don't really see it. Maybe my mind is not dirty enough yet. Must meditate.
the one for man is made from 田 (field) and 力 (strength). well cuz if you're a man you gotta use your strength and work in the fields. the one for woman is supposed to look like a kneeling woman.
chinese characters usually are built up of simpler ones, and combine two or more of the following: 1. a radical for meaning 2. a radical or simpler character for 'borrowed sound' (sound similar) 3. radical or simpler character that looks like its meaning
On April 30 2011 16:01 The_LiNk wrote: Oh my, that looks so damn confusing and complicated. Chinese looks much simpler now suddenly...
chinese is a lot more complicated actually, because you guys only have Kanji and japanese can if they want substitute every kanji with the respective Hiragana syllabees. So in the end you dont have to know any kanji to write perfectly fine japanese though of course there are quite a bunch of words that are written the same when you use hiragana so in the end for easier understanding you gotta use kanji anyway
I personally think kanji are hard, but not that far beyond the level of english spelling for the purposes of writing (what the hell is with that, seriously, "cough"?). The main problem is that you can't read them until you start to learn meanings and join them to words (but that's what you have furigana for!).
I'm curious to see if the use of chinese characters decreases because it takes a lot of time to teach to children which could be used for other things. Same thing applies for spelling.
What I hated most about learning Japanese was colloquial speech, slang, regional dialects, and just the everyday way people talk because you can't easily look that stuff up in a dictionary. I took 2 years of Japanese in college before doing study abroad, and when I got to Japan, I found that my classroom Japanese woefully under-prepared me for actually living there. I said things like 「私はジェイです」 and everyone sniggered at me. No one speaks like that, especially not 20 year-old college students. No one's ever going to ask you anything resembling 「どこからいらしゃいましたか？」 either. Simple examples, but you get the point. I don't know of any good resources for these kinds of things, but if you're doing study abroad, I'd emphatically suggest trying to find some before you go there.
Been learning Kanji for a while now, unlike most, I learn Kanji by going through the Japanese school grades list and learn all readings/meanings my book tells me to. I think it'll make learning new vocabs easier in the future.
On April 30 2011 21:50 DNB wrote: So a 4-gate in Japanese is 四門?
yeah pretty much. But it might be possible that warpgates are written differently in the japanese version. Maybe some combination of electricity and gate
EPT
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(pun intended). 
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