This is my first video of my slightly updated style! Basically the backgrounds are no longer pure white and I’ve drawn my character in more silly poses. Hope you enjoy!
Kanji being pronounced in completely different ways depending on if it's by itself or within a word, and what word it's in is actually a minor plot point in Spirited Away: the character Chihiro is renamed "Sen" by magically removing all but one Kanji from her name when written down. It's symbolic as well. Chihiro means "a thousand questions/fathoms" whereas Sen just means "one thousand", effectively reducing her to just a number
Chi 千 is a native japanese pronunciation of a thousand, while sen 千 is from middle chinese So basically even numbers in japanese are borrowed, when languages usually don’t borrow numbers from other languages
@@akakksskk exactly, the kunyomi and onyomi pronunciations. And of course it's not like Japanese borrowed numbers from Chinese after it already existed, Japanese started as an offshoot of Chinese when Chinese people emigrated to the islands of Japan. So it's just as natural as all the languages descended from proto-Indo-European having similar numbers as each other.
Radicals can help clue in on what a kanji means. For example, the kanji for "bright" 明 contains the radicals for "sun" and "moon," because the sun and moon are both bright. Another example is the kanji for "rest" 休 containing the radicals for "person" and "tree." A person rests by a tree.
Before Tokyo became the capital, Kyoto had been the capital for many centuries. Kyoto (京都) literally means Capital City. Then Tokyo became the capital (it used to be called Edo). Tokyo (東京) means Eastern Capital (To = east, Kyo = capital). Note that Tokyo is located to the east of Kyoto, so the name makes sense.
It should be worth noting that pronunciation and spelling wise, it's not Tokyo and Kyoto in Japanese, it's Toukyou and Kyouto, or Tōkyō and Kyōto if you prefer the macron diacritic. Vowel length matters in Japanese, because it changes the meaning of the word, just like in Latin.
@@JamesDavy2009“Oh” is incorrect orthography. In English, “Oh” simply makes the “O” phonetic. That doesn’t work in any other language, not to mention, the difference is not about which is phonetic and which isn’t. 氷 is Kōri (Ko-orí), not Kohri. The difference between Kōri and Kori is the vowel length, and it’s indicated by the macron. Vowel length changes the meaning of the word in Japanese, just like in Latin.
Japanese here. This video looks so niche for me😅 but I want to add a trivia just for FYI😃 Furigana is also used in translated novels from other language to Japanese. For example if the original word in the English novel was blue devil, the Japanese translation would be 青い悪魔 (aoi akuma) but sometimes furigana such as ブルーデビル (buruu debiru) would be put on. It's one of the translation technique to let the readers know both the translated words and original words simultaneously.
That technique is also called “Transliteration” in the west. The concept of keeping the word as it sounds in the original language. It's the reason why some translators of JP to EN still keep honorifics like 君, ちゃん, さん, 様, and so on. Though people in the west are far more averse to it sometimes than the Japanese are to English words, for example. As an Anime fan, it is sad to me, because honorifics are a big part of what makes anime, anime for me, and the fact that this practice is slowly disappearing in the west, is saddening to me. Localization and the overzealous orthodox orthography practitioners are a plague that I'm never going to like.
I've been learning English for years but reading novels aren't easy for me. There're tons of unknown words! but reading is fun. Hope you enjoy your language journey😃
@cuddles1767 Furigana is usually put on as a reading aid to tell how to read kanji and it's written in hiragana. The example I mentioned in my comment is another (and kind of rare) use of furigana. It's not used to tell the way of reading kanji but it tells the sound of original words (it's called transliteration which I learned from other comment). And it's written in katakana because katakana is used for foreign words. I hope it make sense😅
Japanese is complicated, but furigana is helpful. Reading some Japanese books with furigana is the best way to learn Japanese. I mean that's actually how Japanese kids learn to read.
Hanja isn't used as often these days, thus the reading aid in Hangul isn't either. Funnily enough, the opposite happens sometimes. When multiple Sino-Korean words (Korean words of Chinese origin) have the same pronunciation, thus the same Hangul spelling, the Hanja character is sometimes placed next to it to avoid confusion. Today, Hanja are mostly used in Legal documents, scholarly world, or in historical contexts, and usually only words with specialised or ambiguous meanings as annotation to the Hangul. They are used in decorative ways too in advertising. And in North Korea, Hanja is flat out not used, after Kim Il Sung banned it.
@@studijasymrov7630 Pure coincidence. Han Chinese comes from the Han dynasty, so it just originated as a surname. Han Korean comes from the Korean word han meaning "great" or "leader" (possibly cognate to Mongolia Khan). In Chinese characters (Hanja), Chinese Han is 漢/汉 (trad/simp) and Korean Han is 韓.
@@GlockasI wasn't exactly sharing it for you, but for others. And unfortunately, RUclips doesn't have an untagged quote system, so I had to reply to you, so that people understand the connection.
This is kind of interesting. Whereas foreigners learning Japanese might consider Kanji to be the bane of their existence, I as a foreign, but HSK level 5, speaker of Mandarin Chinese prefer it. Take the Kanji for Tokyo for instance. It's 東京, which roughly (but accurately enough) translates as "East Capital". China also has a 北京 "North Capital", Beijing, the capital of China, and 南京, "South Capital", Nanjing, as in the Rape of Nanjing, It was a Chinese capital city. As for 西京, "West Capital", Xijing? Yeah, there was one. It's now called Xi'an (西安). I can't pronounce or understand spoken Japanese, but when they write in Kanji, I understand it just fine.
I've been studying Japanese for a while and this is a pretty decent summation on the writing system. As I learned more about it I learned how well it works for the language to clear up any miscommunication in writing. That it, assuming the reader knows how to read the kanji. Names of people and places written in Kanji though are a nightmare to deal with. Especially old cities can have names that are so old that they don't even match their kanji anymore as the pronunciation shifted over the years or were named something else without updating the kanji so people didn't have to redraw maps. Some peoples' names do that as well with newer names being represented with old Kanji that used to be used for a different name. No matter how good I've gotten at Japanese, I have a 90% chance of reading a name in kanji wrong or thinking it's some new kanji I haven't learned yet and looking for a dictionary entry that doesn't exist. Furigana with names is incrediblely helpful.
When I was learning Japanese, there were only 1945 Joyo (common use) Kanji, they put some "name" Kanji into that list. Yes, there's a separate list of Kanji to be used in proper names. Place names have a lot of these and unorthodox readings, so this furigana thing is important to read station names. They even use furigana on TV.
sometimes you can "sound out a kanji" for example, 清精晴請情 all share a reading of せい and share the kanji 青, they don't necessarily carry the meaning of 青, but rather have it there as a way to show the reading.
@@vytah This is not exception, as the kanji 青 has the sound jō. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but you should be able to guess the sound with reasonable accuracy.
There are also some cases where English words are written using Chinese characters based on their meaning with a furigana above written in katakana, Japanese is probably the most interesting writing system out there
5:14 "ょ" is the small version of "よ", which is pronounced "yo". The difference between the smaller and larger versions is different from that of uppercase and lowercase characters in the English/Latin alphabet tho. The smaller versions of kana modify the pronunciation of the previous kana. In this case, the kana before "ょ" here is "き", which is pronounced as "ki". If the regular "よ" was put after "き" to make "きよ", it would be pronounced as "kiyo" (ki-yo). However, because it's written as "きょ" instead, it's pronounced as a single syllable, "kyo". 8:51 While furigana on their own don't help explain what words mean, the kanji plus the furigana can help, at least once you know some basic kanji and their meanings, among other things, tho sometimes just the kanji is useful for figuring out the meaning. In the case of Tokyo, "東" (pronounced as "ひがし" [higashi] on its own, but as "とう" [tou] in this case) means "east", while "京" (pronounced as "きょう" [kyou], among others) means "capital". So, all in all, Tokyo means "Eastern Capital". This not only makes sense from a Western perspective, given how far east Japan, and therefore Tokyo, is, but also because from the perspective of the former capital (Kyoto), Tokyo is in the eastern side of Japan. Oddly enough tho, Kyoto (京都/きょうと) literally means "Capital Capital", or something along those lines, but the usual translation is "Capital City" lol
You missed that when written by an 8th grader(or someone of that mentality) or an isekai author, the furigana will be written in katakana above some 4 character phrase.
Nice video. One thing I would have liked you mention probably is that furigana can also be repurposed in literature in creative ways. Simple example: in manga, when a character talks about someone else, perhaps the kanji of that someone else's name will be shown, but in the furigana, the hiragana *or even kanji* for "this guy" or "he" can be inserted to signify what the guy is *actually* saying in speech.
"Both hiragana and katakana have symbols that represent the a sound, so why not just have one?" - and how is this different from English? we also have two symbols to represent the same sound: "A" and "a'. Everyone makes such a big deal about Japanese having three writing systems, when English does too. Consider: "THREE", "three", and "3" 🙂
you're just ignoring kanji. it's not just another 50 kana like katakana (or our uppercase/lowercase), it's Thousands of symbols. Thousands. it's incomparable. as to why they don't just have one to represent the sound, it would make the language a lot less readable and a lot less digestible. Japanese readers can gather info in a moment from something that they'd have to focus on if it was written with only hiragana. itwouldbecomparabletoreadingasentencelikethisinsteadofspacedoutseparatedandmadedigestible.
In Japan, hiragana and katakana are used differently depending on the language. This is especially true for languages foreign to Japan. For example, "point" must be written in katakana. However, this is limited to foreign words from the Edo and Meiji periods. The names of plants and animals are also written in katakana.
I mean, the letter a actually has three graphemes- it's just that one of the lowercase ones is used in typeset print and the other is used in handwriting and sometimes also in italics. (Apparently not in the font RUclips uses though...)
う actually often doesnt make a U sound. When you see an O kana with a U after it (so OU together) the u basically just turn into a lengthening of the O sound. Thats why we dont say Toe-oo-kyo-oo. Japanese is incredibly regular and logical, but there are a few irregularities and that う thing is one of them.
katakana is used for loanwords but it's also used for some words that aren't and for emphasis. Japanese has pretty loose rules with writing and you can basically do whatever you want. Sometimes people write words in hiragana that would normally be written in katakana or vice versa, or sometimes words usually written in kanji are rendered in kana. Even a lotta loanwords have kanji writings. coffee for example is usually written as コーヒー(ko-hi-) but u can write it with 珈琲 instead. As for knowing what words mean, kanji already has that built in. Most words aren't written with single kanji so if you see a new word with unfamiliar kanji you can usually guess it's meaning for example if you know the word 食べる (taberu (to eat)) and事(koto(thing)) then when you see 食事(shokuji) it's pretty easy to guess that this means food even tho it's reading is totally different (tho 食 on it's own is also read shoku and means food so the reading is the same if your comparison is that word rather than 食べる) and often with unfamiliar kanji you can guess the meaning based on the radicals - parts it's made up from. for example 雨(ame(rain)) and 雷(kaminari(lightning)) notice how the symbol on top is the kanji for rain? Often those relationships will be present in kanji... tho the bottom radical is 田(ta(rice field)) which might give a different impression so it's not a perfect solution.
One quick Re: I want to make to the part where you pointed out the drawbacks of furigana: yes it's true that they don't tell you the meaning of the Kanji, but they do allow you to look the Kanji up, because in order to type Kanji, you of course need to know the reading, which the ruby tell you. So in a weird, indirect way, they actually do kind of help you figure out the meaning if you don't know it
The way you showed the entirety of the kana alphabets with hiragana in traditional up-down and right-left cut in half and organized vertically but katakana in occidental left to right up-down manner confused me so much. Actually, it's a graphic mistake on your part.
Btw it can also help in the reading of different kanji! If you read a kanji that is made by a compound of 2 or more kanji, and then in another word you see only one of these kanji, you can still read a part of the word. This makes it so even if you don't know the word you can still sometimes read it
I'm a stop-and-start learner of Japanese. Currently very novice, only able to form very simple sentences with maybe a few hundred words. While I do need to practice my hiragana and katakana, I did learn both alphabets. I haven't even started with kanji yet because it is pretty intimidating.
So the focus of this video is mainly Furigana, i.e. Hiragana script annotated to Kanji characters to describe their readings. I would have pointed out a major challenge of learning Japanese: A typical word is not represented by a single Kanji character but by a compound of Kanji characters with themselves (usually two of them) and/or Hiragana script, and that the reading and the meaning (the semantic contribution to that word) depends on that word. This makes Furigana invaluable to learn Japanese words.
8:55 not exactly universal, but, in many cases, kanji with several radicals (components that are kanji) tend to have one (usually the one on the left or the top) that indicates the rough meaning (e.g. if it's a plant, a mammal, a bird, a fish, something related to water, to the mountains, etc.) and another that indicates one of the readings (this one fails more often due to the changes in pronunciation from Chinese); using furigana and the rough meaning radical helps a lot (e.g. you have 雲 with くも, "kumo", as the furigana, and you notice that the top part, 雨, means "rain", so you mentally search for rain-related words read as "kumo" and that tells you that that's the kanji for "cloud"). 1:22 to explain way more simply why they exist, katakana was created by monks to write buddhist prayers (in approximate sanskrit) while hiragana was developed by nobles to make writing things easier (was originally more complex than katakana, got simplified and slightly fixed at the end of the 19th century). While more uncommon now, at the end of the 20th century and the 00s there were a lot of old people who didn't even know how to read katakana. 3:05 even more confusing is the fact that they sometimes use simpler kanji with a different root meaning instead of more complex kanji; one example would be the kanji for "age" (as in "years old"), which is 歳 and read "sai", but in order to save 10 strokes and make it look cleaner, they quite often use 才, still "sai" but meaning "talent".
The ancient Egyptians came up with the same idea. When they needed to add a new word, they would come up with a hieroglyph to represent it pictorially, and then write some existing hieroglyphs next to it to represent it phonetically.
I didn't know furigana is a separate system. I always thought it's just like subtitling, using hiragana to explain the kanjis. It just doesn't feel like another system, just making it easier by writing it in simpler way.
One should also remember that, seeing that Kanji is just Chinese characters, they have multiple readings that are also quite iffy. You have the native Japanese reading, like a calque I guess, and multiple Chinese transliterations that purely depend on the time period they were borrowed from, as Chinese was a bit like Latin for E. Asia. 東京, or Tokyo, means "eastern capital" - but the words themselves are Chinese, and also taken from the earliest periods, so back when the Chinese pronounced it something like "tuwng kyaeng" which the Japanese adapted to "to kyo." Modern Chinese would say this as "Dongjing." And if the Japanese took these pronunciations now, Tokyo would sound more like "Tonkin." But these are the so called "sino-xenic" readings. There are also those native Japanese readings. In the case that they decided to use these more, Tokyo would be known as... Azumamiyako. But it should be noted that the sino-xenic readings displaced a lot of the native Japonic ones, so "azuma" and "miyako" are pretty archaic and basically never used in any context anyway nowadays.
Furigana is a godsend. Without it, even knowing some basic meanings and pronunciation rules, I'd read 日曜日 as ひようび, despite it actually being read as にちようび. Don't even think about trying to figure out how to pronounce 生 without furigana or extensive studying...
By a strange coincidence I have been recently trying to make sense of Japanese characters. It appears that furigana is, functionally speaking, akin to the short-lived educational experiment that was ITA, but it genuinely is a guide to pronunciation of the 'proper' symbols rather than a replacement of the conventional spelling.
Japanese only has 5 vowel sounds, not including diphthongs. A is always ah, I is always ee, etc. So foo-ree-gah-nah, not fur-ih-gah-nah, and kah-tah-kah-nah, not cat-ih-kah-nah.
As a Chinese who can read and speak Simplitied and traditional Chinese, and seeing Kanji, I see our pronounciation and understanding what the Kanji means an absolute win.
This may seem pedantic, but Japanese actually uses 4 writing systems; the three you mentioned plus romaji. Like... you literally could not read a bunch of stuff in Japan if you couldn't identify which "Roman" symbol corresponded to what sound. Of course, most English speakers will already know this alphabet as the one they're most used to, but it's still an additional writing system you need to know if you're going to be in modern day Japan.
Hiragana doesn't have an upper case and a lower case, so there is that. There's no reason why someone who doesn't use the Roman alphabet would understand that 'd' is pronounced the same as 'D'. or 'e' the same as 'E'. The characters do not resemble each other. I suppose katakana are like a cross between capital letters and italics - they often emphasise the words. Kanji are made up of 'radicals' - they are like the building blocks of kanji. They can sometimes be a guide to how a kanji is read. It's not a perfect system - not by a long way! But it can help, if you are totally stumped. Radicals can also help to find the meaning of a kanji, but only in very broad terms, and it can misguide as often as it helps. But if you see the radical for 'heart' somewhere in a kanji, it may have something to do with emotions, for example.
Great video. I have two minor things to add though. 1) "Furigana" doesn't help you understand the word" is true, but also quite pointless to say. Their job is to inform the reader about the reading of the Kanji/word. It's the same in English too, just because you know how to pronounce "apricate" doesn't mean you know what that word means (to bask in the sun). At least with Kanji, the radicals in the kanji can sometimes give you a hint on what a word could be related to, this is by no means foolproof though. 2) I would have at least mentioned all the other uses of Furigana. For example, kirakira names or using unexpected, non-standard readings. 天使 would normally be pronounced tenshi (angel), but there are people called 天使 with added furigana telling you to pronounce it えんじぇる. Also to give some other examples of Furigana: in Fate they use a mix of characters from all three scripts and sometimes even Latin letters, to write one name of their special moves, but then furigana it with the hiragana/katakana for what they actually say, giving it a second name. E.g. Gae Bolg is written as 刺し穿つ死棘の槍 (Sashi Ugatsu Shikyoku no Yari, Spear of Impaling Barbed Death) but it has furigana above it reading ゲイ・ボルク (Gae Bolg), the celtic name of the spear, which is what the character will actually say.
As with all languages, one need to be schooled in them. It's like a Japanese won't know what the 26 letters in the English alphabet means without being schooled. Even for English speakers, as a toddler, one has to taught what letters are and the sound it represent. For Kanji, as are all Sinitic characters, a learner is taught in both meaning and pronunciations. In Japanese, the Kanji are borrowed from the Sinitic language but given Japanese pronunciation; however, in Sinitic languages such as Cantonese, the way characters are constructed have phonetic elements to them, like characters with a similar body, either sounds the same, or not too far off, but they can be way off too, and that's where schooling is needed. Every language needs schooling to learn, no language is somehow intuitive to a non speaker.
as a chinese,learning japanese seems kinda easier than other country people,but i do hate remember japanese 片假名katakana,most katakana is straight prounance of foreigner languages and usually so long words,and i do find that japanese nowadays translators being lazier and lazier,even there is already same meaning words in kanji/japanese chinese words,they still use katakana to add them into japanese.such as 電車 means tram,in chinese it is same words 电车,but when it comes to 电视 in chinese,japanese use katakana テレビ，basically is the same prounance of english television.And more and more modern things are using this type of translation,i guess it is because japanese admire western world,they choose to straightly copy prounance into japanese,rather than mix it into japanese kanji
Katakana for foreign words and borrow words isn't exactly the case, in old newspapers there's no hiragana, only kanji and katakana is used even those katakana is written as hiragana today, with Furigana it's a bit easier but still difficult with all the different systems, Nihon or Nippon...
My favourite weird thing about hiragana and katakana is they descended from the same phonetic kanji. That's why some of them look VERY similar indeed to each other, such as _ni_ に二 which merely lacks the left-most stroke in katakana form. Originally they were not meant to serve two separate mixed-use roles at all - women were supposed to learn hiragana for phonetic-only writing because it was "flowing and delicate", thus supposed to be easier for women to write; while men were supposed to learn katakana because it was "angular and strong". It was originally an attempt to completely gender-segregate literacy. Thankfully it didn't really catch on!
This is a pretty standard way to approach explaining what kanji are, but not a great one. Single characters that represent an entire word by themselves and have cute graphical etymologies like the three trees are a minority of the symbols and not really representative of the system. Most characters have a radical part that gives a clue to meaning, and a phonetic part that would be more helpful if you spoke medieval Chinese, and they typically aren't used alone in a one character, one meaning manner even in Chinese, typically being used conventionally with other kanji and having multiple possible readings and meanings, even in Chinese and especially in Japanese. The reality of kanji is somewhere between the idea of a logography and a nightmare syllabary, but closer to the latter. Whatever you think about kanji, the reality is worse lol
1:00 The way you arranged the kana irks me. The Katakana are about how I would put them, but what happened on the Hiragana side? Why are they in vertical lines that go half way?
When I compared it to wikipedia table na ta sa ka a ni chi shi ki i nu tsu su ku u ne te se ke e no to so ko o wa ra ya ma ha __ri __ mi hi o(wo) ru yu fu __ re __ me he(e) n ro yo mo ho Idk where he pulled his unconventional kana "table" from but as you can see it misplaced two kana (ん and を) and missing ゑ (we) kana
@@ginbei711 wa, wo, and n are a bit weird. Putting them in any order is fine. We is not used in modern Japanese, so it shouldn't be included. The table is internally consistent, it's just a weird way of arranging it. Especially since the katakana table is arranged normally.
@@ginbei711ん and を match up exactly from his table to yours. don't know what you're on about. you also forget mu(む). 'we' isn't used, it'd be like including þ or ð or ʃ in a graphic of the english alphabet.
the katakana is like ✋ ✋ and makes sense, is reasonable. the hiragana is like 🫲 🫲 which is really weird and unintuitive. it acts like はひふへほ,まみむめも, andらりるれろ are inherently different from the top set. if we are going to deliniate it like that, はひふへほ has much more of a right to be in the top section than なにぬねの, as it uses Dakuten. the way the hiragana is organized, it would be much more intuitive ordered as 🫲🫲, not 🫲 🫲. the katakana is perfect as it is organized intuitively, ✋ ✋.
@@DoroNijimaru No offence I Love kanji they are beautiful and cool at same time but I mean that Japanese actually just doesn't need kanji at all it can be written entirely with Hiragana or Katakana but they don't abolish it for cultural and traditional reason so if they want to still write with Kanji and don't want to abolish it they can simply add furigana on every kanji that will make it easy to read for both native and foreigner
@@SuonTamang you are mistaken that they do not need it. recitation is not all there is to a language. kanji adds comprehension. kanji aids in digestibility. you can replace kanji and recitation will not be affected, but understanding a language is more than just reading the words. wi kʊd ˈmænˌdeɪt ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ bi ˈrɪtən fəˈnɛtɪkli, ænd ɪt wʊd hɛlp ˈfɔrən ˈspikərz rid ðə wɜrdz ˈbɛtər,‹we could mandate english be written phonetically, and it would help foreign speakers read the words better,› bʌt soʊ mʌʧ ˈminɪŋ ɪz lɔst. ɪts ʤʌst ə strɪŋ ʌv saʊndz. noʊ hɪnt ʌv ˌɛtəˈmɑləʤi tu eɪd ɪn ˌʌndərˈstændɪŋ.‹but so much meaning is lost. it's just a string of sounds. no hint of etymology to aid in understanding.› it helps with one issue, but hurts so much else in the process
When I was learning English, I initially thought that considering the complicated logic and exceptions of English spelling, why not mark all English words with International Phonetic Alphabets? The main reason why Japanese kanji doesn't add furigana is that you shouldn't read that part after you understand the language, just like you can't learn English if you only read IPA.
@@SuonTamang ok then, tell me what does this word mean ( せい ) ?? It can mean tens and hundreds of others things right?? So what could be a way that we can distinguish what we actually mean without confusing everyone? Look, Japanese is a different language, the kanji itself means something, its not actually a just a mere sound.
Hmm ... If you don't speak English, and came to Australia, and saw a sign saying "Canberra", you could sound that out and work out, roughly, how it's pronounced. You still have no clue it's a capital city.
Are you sure about that? I took one look and immediately started parsing it two different ways as Can-bear-uh and Cun-bruh and then thought it might have been an imported name or local indiginous name and thought of Can-berra with a more Spanish pronunciation before concluding that I don't know enough about Australia's history to accurately pinpoint where the name comes from and gave up. In an English mindset, where we don't really care about the vowels too much and are used to the common patterns of reading it can feel roughly similar, but to a non-native it could be difficult to overlook the differences.
I did say roughly. My point was not about the pronunciation, but about the fact that the Canberra sign doesn't tell you it's the capital, which was part of the story relating to the Tokyo sign.
You forgot the other system, Romanji. All vehicles in Japan are labeled with Romaji names, ie. you will see "Toyota" and "Suzuki" in "standard" Latin letters. Many other companies also only print their names in Romanji, never kana or kanji.
5:14 It's not a yo よ, it's a small yo ょ, together with ki き makes the sound kyo. A small Hiragana ya, yu, or yo (ゃ, ゅ or ょ) is added at the ending of i-row (きki, しshi, ちchi, にni, ひhi, みmi , りri, ぎgi, じji, びbi, ぴpi). This changes the i vowel sound to a glide (palatalization) to a, u or o, e.g. きゃ (ki + ya) /kya/. Small y kana is called yōon.
Kanji isnt that hard if you can speak the language before you touch it, i dont know any better language that you can have fun mixing concepts and reading and bending intents for multiple layers of meaning. It isnt that bad, it is just scary as a writing system. After all i can write and pronounce english despite these two having little in common while kanji is tied to language heavily, kanji is a simpler version of japanese since it leaves no room for misinterpretation unless a guy plays a rebus. There is so many evil ways to make rebuses in kanji, like purposefully writing wrong kanji so that a regular bystander would pronounce it correctly while you intend to use a different pronucation and mean the concept under wrong reading or pulling out a dictionary of obscure readings or set any pattern so that only your pals can decipher, or so many dad jokes that rely on a shared reading. I remember spelling so bad and having to look stuff up every time i tried typing anything when still learning english. You can write derpy words in english to preserve pronuncation which is bound to the meaning. Like 'oh my god' and 'oh my gawd' would be understood as the same thing, or common these days 'bro' and 'bruh'.
Why even use Kanji if it has to be explained with other alphabets? Why not just... use the other alphabets... If they are just used for symbolism, then what they literally mean isn't strictly important to understanding them. And if they are used for direct communication... They still need to be explained...
As a Japanese, Japanese is like if Latin languages didn't have spaces. Maybe the Latin language could have mixed runes, Greek, and Arabic in their writing.
Japanese is my 2nd language, and the lack of spaces still irks me. I started learning Japanese about 20 years ago. It's TERRIBLE for dyslexics like me😭
that's why the use of the 3 different systems is so important. it makes text digestible. the different between "15% of $100" and "fifteen percent of one hundred dollars"
Just give me the plain Latin alphabet of the West and I'll be fine! English will be EASY to learn! Oh, but then there's all the different pronunciations with words with the same spellings but different meanings and pronunciations...! D'OHHHH!
This why learning language is hard than it should because of people like you. When they think "language", they only think "writing system". Too much focus on reading and writing, writing a word in romaji doesnt gonna change the way it sounds.
What lovely content it would have been a flawless video had it not been for the way he stresses the last phoneme of each last word of a sentence... utterly insufferable
Before finishing the video: You could have at least put katakana and hiragana in the same order. Btw you mispronounce a lot of japanese words. After watching the video: I feel like you should have mentioned earlier that you don't speak japanese.
because there are too many homonyms in Japanese, for example salmons (the fish) and alcohol (the drink) are both さけ (sake - although there is a difference in pitch accent). Meanwhile the kanji 鮭 and 酒 can be used to distinguish between salmon and alcohol.
It wouldn't work, there are far too many homonyms, u would practically never be able to tell the meanings of certain words. U think I'm joking but the amount of homonyms is staggering, that alone is reason enough for kanji to exist
If Japan wanted to replenish their population they should simplify the writing system by reducing the Kanji and make it easier for foreigners to gain residency, then all of the anime weebs could be elder care workers.
![KAYTRANADA - Witchy (feat. Childish Gambino) [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/jGK3YVmGZ3Y/mqdefault.jpg)
This is my first video of my slightly updated style! Basically the backgrounds are no longer pure white and I’ve drawn my character in more silly poses. Hope you enjoy!
I think this is a great update to the style and it helps add more uniqueness to your videos.
😊❤😊❤
❤😊
Love your videos!💚
You have style???
Kanji being pronounced in completely different ways depending on if it's by itself or within a word, and what word it's in is actually a minor plot point in Spirited Away: the character Chihiro is renamed "Sen" by magically removing all but one Kanji from her name when written down.
It's symbolic as well. Chihiro means "a thousand questions/fathoms" whereas Sen just means "one thousand", effectively reducing her to just a number
Chi 千 is a native japanese pronunciation of a thousand, while sen 千 is from middle chinese
So basically even numbers in japanese are borrowed, when languages usually don’t borrow numbers from other languages
❤😊❤😊
@@akakksskk exactly, the kunyomi and onyomi pronunciations. And of course it's not like Japanese borrowed numbers from Chinese after it already existed, Japanese started as an offshoot of Chinese when Chinese people emigrated to the islands of Japan. So it's just as natural as all the languages descended from proto-Indo-European having similar numbers as each other.
@@akakksskk huh, I wouldn't say that usually languages don't borrow numbers but maybe I've misunderstood you
@@citrezene i only know korean and japanese that have borrowed numbers from chinese
NO WAY i literally just was trying to search “Japanese words on top of kanji” this morning trying to figure this out.
Furigana ふりがな
Radicals can help clue in on what a kanji means. For example, the kanji for "bright" 明 contains the radicals for "sun" and "moon," because the sun and moon are both bright. Another example is the kanji for "rest" 休 containing the radicals for "person" and "tree." A person rests by a tree.
The sole two kanji that actually make sense
Unfortunately, Ideographic Kanji aren't in the majority. Majority of Kanji are Phono-Semantic.
i thought the right part/the non-radical part mostly just explains its pronunciation
@@pitekamonuIt does. But there are exceptions.
Before Tokyo became the capital, Kyoto had been the capital for many centuries. Kyoto (京都) literally means Capital City. Then Tokyo became the capital (it used to be called Edo). Tokyo (東京) means Eastern Capital (To = east, Kyo = capital). Note that Tokyo is located to the east of Kyoto, so the name makes sense.
It should be worth noting that pronunciation and spelling wise, it's not Tokyo and Kyoto in Japanese, it's Toukyou and Kyouto, or Tōkyō and Kyōto if you prefer the macron diacritic.
Vowel length matters in Japanese, because it changes the meaning of the word, just like in Latin.
@@danielantony1882 It's the difference between 凝り (kori) and 氷 (kohri).
@@JamesDavy2009“Oh” is incorrect orthography. In English, “Oh” simply makes the “O” phonetic. That doesn’t work in any other language, not to mention, the difference is not about which is phonetic and which isn’t. 氷 is Kōri (Ko-orí), not Kohri. The difference between Kōri and Kori is the vowel length, and it’s indicated by the macron. Vowel length changes the meaning of the word in Japanese, just like in Latin.
Japanese Karaokes also use furigana.
Japanese here. This video looks so niche for me😅 but I want to add a trivia just for FYI😃
Furigana is also used in translated novels from other language to Japanese. For example if the original word in the English novel was blue devil, the Japanese translation would be 青い悪魔 (aoi akuma) but sometimes furigana such as ブルーデビル (buruu debiru) would be put on. It's one of the translation technique to let the readers know both the translated words and original words simultaneously.
That technique is also called “Transliteration” in the west. The concept of keeping the word as it sounds in the original language. It's the reason why some translators of JP to EN still keep honorifics like 君, ちゃん, さん, 様, and so on. Though people in the west are far more averse to it sometimes than the Japanese are to English words, for example.
As an Anime fan, it is sad to me, because honorifics are a big part of what makes anime, anime for me, and the fact that this practice is slowly disappearing in the west, is saddening to me.
Localization and the overzealous orthodox orthography practitioners are a plague that I'm never going to like.
The more you know the original, the more you can't stand the poor localization😂 I guess that's one of the reason a lot of people learn languages.
Thanks! I've been learning Japanese, and reading original Japanese texts is very difficult!
I've been learning English for years but reading novels aren't easy for me. There're tons of unknown words! but reading is fun. Hope you enjoy your language journey😃
@cuddles1767
Furigana is usually put on as a reading aid to tell how to read kanji and it's written in hiragana. The example I mentioned in my comment is another (and kind of rare) use of furigana. It's not used to tell the way of reading kanji but it tells the sound of original words (it's called transliteration which I learned from other comment). And it's written in katakana because katakana is used for foreign words. I hope it make sense😅
Japanese is complicated, but furigana is helpful. Reading some Japanese books with furigana is the best way to learn Japanese. I mean that's actually how Japanese kids learn to read.
Hanja isn't used as often these days, thus the reading aid in Hangul isn't either.
Funnily enough, the opposite happens sometimes. When multiple Sino-Korean words (Korean words of Chinese origin) have the same pronunciation, thus the same Hangul spelling, the Hanja character is sometimes placed next to it to avoid confusion.
Today, Hanja are mostly used in Legal documents, scholarly world, or in historical contexts, and usually only words with specialised or ambiguous meanings as annotation to the Hangul. They are used in decorative ways too in advertising.
And in North Korea, Hanja is flat out not used, after Kim Il Sung banned it.
Why South Koreans call themselves with same word as Chinese call themselves, to be exact "Han"?
@@studijasymrov7630 Pure coincidence.
Han Chinese comes from the Han dynasty, so it just originated as a surname.
Han Korean comes from the Korean word han meaning "great" or "leader" (possibly cognate to Mongolia Khan).
In Chinese characters (Hanja), Chinese Han is 漢/汉 (trad/simp) and Korean Han is 韓.
@@GlockasIt's basically a homophone. And homophone means that it sounds the same, but is written differently, or even means something different.
@@danielantony1882 I know what a homophone is, but thanks I guess.
@@GlockasI wasn't exactly sharing it for you, but for others. And unfortunately, RUclips doesn't have an untagged quote system, so I had to reply to you, so that people understand the connection.
This is kind of interesting. Whereas foreigners learning Japanese might consider Kanji to be the bane of their existence, I as a foreign, but HSK level 5, speaker of Mandarin Chinese prefer it. Take the Kanji for Tokyo for instance. It's 東京, which roughly (but accurately enough) translates as "East Capital". China also has a 北京 "North Capital", Beijing, the capital of China, and 南京, "South Capital", Nanjing, as in the Rape of Nanjing, It was a Chinese capital city. As for 西京, "West Capital", Xijing? Yeah, there was one. It's now called Xi'an (西安). I can't pronounce or understand spoken Japanese, but when they write in Kanji, I understand it just fine.
If I recall correctly, the Japanese West Capital is Kyoto.
@@tristanmitchell1242And the Chinese Characters/Kanji for that word are 京都. Not related to the direction of west.
@@danielantony1882 it just meant "capital city", because they didn't need to specify a direction until there was more than one
@@kaitlyn__LDid they specify it though?
@@danielantony1882 no it doesn't. The two characters that we see literally means Capital City, no character for directions is in the word.
I've been studying Japanese for a while and this is a pretty decent summation on the writing system. As I learned more about it I learned how well it works for the language to clear up any miscommunication in writing. That it, assuming the reader knows how to read the kanji. Names of people and places written in Kanji though are a nightmare to deal with. Especially old cities can have names that are so old that they don't even match their kanji anymore as the pronunciation shifted over the years or were named something else without updating the kanji so people didn't have to redraw maps. Some peoples' names do that as well with newer names being represented with old Kanji that used to be used for a different name. No matter how good I've gotten at Japanese, I have a 90% chance of reading a name in kanji wrong or thinking it's some new kanji I haven't learned yet and looking for a dictionary entry that doesn't exist. Furigana with names is incrediblely helpful.
よ makes "yo" sound...
For "yu" sound you shall use ゆ.
Also, that Japanese symbol looks like ю (yu) in Cyrillic
@@LowTierArchon as a native Russian speaker, I’m ashamed that I didn’t realize that earlier.
?
@@LowTierArchonsame with ヨ and Э but the sound is quite different
Also, きょ is not きよ
When I was learning Japanese, there were only 1945 Joyo (common use) Kanji, they put some "name" Kanji into that list. Yes, there's a separate list of Kanji to be used in proper names. Place names have a lot of these and unorthodox readings, so this furigana thing is important to read station names. They even use furigana on TV.
sometimes you can "sound out a kanji"
for example, 清精晴請情 all share a reading of せい and share the kanji 青, they don't necessarily carry the meaning of 青, but rather have it there as a way to show the reading.
Those are called Phono-Semantic Kanji (形声漢字･形聲漢字)
Except not always. For example, 情 is most often read じょう
@@vytah
This is not exception, as the kanji 青 has the sound jō. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but you should be able to guess the sound with reasonable accuracy.
There are also some cases where English words are written using Chinese characters based on their meaning with a furigana above written in katakana, Japanese is probably the most interesting writing system out there
interesting here means messy,right?
@@DordordNo. McDoubleMaster is being literal.
I've seen an example of that in a skit where Mr. Yan taught the Ode to Joy (known there as 第九) using kanji to help sound out the lyrics.
5:14 "ょ" is the small version of "よ", which is pronounced "yo". The difference between the smaller and larger versions is different from that of uppercase and lowercase characters in the English/Latin alphabet tho. The smaller versions of kana modify the pronunciation of the previous kana.
In this case, the kana before "ょ" here is "き", which is pronounced as "ki". If the regular "よ" was put after "き" to make "きよ", it would be pronounced as "kiyo" (ki-yo). However, because it's written as "きょ" instead, it's pronounced as a single syllable, "kyo".
8:51 While furigana on their own don't help explain what words mean, the kanji plus the furigana can help, at least once you know some basic kanji and their meanings, among other things, tho sometimes just the kanji is useful for figuring out the meaning.
In the case of Tokyo, "東" (pronounced as "ひがし" [higashi] on its own, but as "とう" [tou] in this case) means "east", while "京" (pronounced as "きょう" [kyou], among others) means "capital". So, all in all, Tokyo means "Eastern Capital". This not only makes sense from a Western perspective, given how far east Japan, and therefore Tokyo, is, but also because from the perspective of the former capital (Kyoto), Tokyo is in the eastern side of Japan.
Oddly enough tho, Kyoto (京都/きょうと) literally means "Capital Capital", or something along those lines, but the usual translation is "Capital City" lol
You missed that when written by an 8th grader(or someone of that mentality) or an isekai author, the furigana will be written in katakana above some 4 character phrase.
Nice video. One thing I would have liked you mention probably is that furigana can also be repurposed in literature in creative ways. Simple example: in manga, when a character talks about someone else, perhaps the kanji of that someone else's name will be shown, but in the furigana, the hiragana *or even kanji* for "this guy" or "he" can be inserted to signify what the guy is *actually* saying in speech.
4:24 Also known as Romaji
Really enjoyed this video! Totally new topic for me and I love it when something fresh comes along to fire up the old brain cells. Thanks 🙏
8:32 but this basically happens in every language, like, u know how to pronounce a word but not what it means
I'm giving a special thanks just to hear you try to pronounce my name again! However, I shall give you a reading aid:
とう ざい なん ぼく
東 西 南 北
"Both hiragana and katakana have symbols that represent the a sound, so why not just have one?" - and how is this different from English? we also have two symbols to represent the same sound: "A" and "a'. Everyone makes such a big deal about Japanese having three writing systems, when English does too. Consider: "THREE", "three", and "3" 🙂
you're just ignoring kanji. it's not just another 50 kana like katakana (or our uppercase/lowercase), it's Thousands of symbols. Thousands. it's incomparable.
as to why they don't just have one to represent the sound, it would make the language a lot less readable and a lot less digestible.
Japanese readers can gather info in a moment from something that they'd have to focus on if it was written with only hiragana. itwouldbecomparabletoreadingasentencelikethisinsteadofspacedoutseparatedandmadedigestible.
In Japan, hiragana and katakana are used differently depending on the language. This is especially true for languages foreign to Japan. For example, "point" must be written in katakana. However, this is limited to foreign words from the Edo and Meiji periods.
The names of plants and animals are also written in katakana.
I mean, the letter a actually has three graphemes- it's just that one of the lowercase ones is used in typeset print and the other is used in handwriting and sometimes also in italics. (Apparently not in the font RUclips uses though...)
@@SpringStarFangirl my youtube has the tailed a. might be my phone font.
i can do α (alpha) to get it to look more like the commonly hand-written one
う actually often doesnt make a U sound. When you see an O kana with a U after it (so OU together) the u basically just turn into a lengthening of the O sound. Thats why we dont say Toe-oo-kyo-oo.
Japanese is incredibly regular and logical, but there are a few irregularities and that う thing is one of them.
katakana is used for loanwords but it's also used for some words that aren't and for emphasis. Japanese has pretty loose rules with writing and you can basically do whatever you want. Sometimes people write words in hiragana that would normally be written in katakana or vice versa, or sometimes words usually written in kanji are rendered in kana.
Even a lotta loanwords have kanji writings. coffee for example is usually written as コーヒー(ko-hi-) but u can write it with 珈琲 instead.
As for knowing what words mean, kanji already has that built in. Most words aren't written with single kanji so if you see a new word with unfamiliar kanji you can usually guess it's meaning for example if you know the word 食べる (taberu (to eat)) and事(koto(thing)) then when you see 食事(shokuji) it's pretty easy to guess that this means food even tho it's reading is totally different (tho 食 on it's own is also read shoku and means food so the reading is the same if your comparison is that word rather than 食べる)
and often with unfamiliar kanji you can guess the meaning based on the radicals - parts it's made up from. for example 雨(ame(rain)) and 雷(kaminari(lightning)) notice how the symbol on top is the kanji for rain? Often those relationships will be present in kanji... tho the bottom radical is 田(ta(rice field)) which might give a different impression so it's not a perfect solution.
One quick Re: I want to make to the part where you pointed out the drawbacks of furigana: yes it's true that they don't tell you the meaning of the Kanji, but they do allow you to look the Kanji up, because in order to type Kanji, you of course need to know the reading, which the ruby tell you. So in a weird, indirect way, they actually do kind of help you figure out the meaning if you don't know it
The way you showed the entirety of the kana alphabets with hiragana in traditional up-down and right-left cut in half and organized vertically but katakana in occidental left to right up-down manner confused me so much. Actually, it's a graphic mistake on your part.
Btw it can also help in the reading of different kanji! If you read a kanji that is made by a compound of 2 or more kanji, and then in another word you see only one of these kanji, you can still read a part of the word. This makes it so even if you don't know the word you can still sometimes read it
Sho-Funaki = SmackDown's #1!
(Though he was neither an announcer nor a commentator, but actually a backstage interviewer.)
Why did you display the Hiragana using the top-to-bottom, right-to-left format, but the Katakana using the left-to-right, top-to-bottom format?!
I'm a stop-and-start learner of Japanese. Currently very novice, only able to form very simple sentences with maybe a few hundred words. While I do need to practice my hiragana and katakana, I did learn both alphabets. I haven't even started with kanji yet because it is pretty intimidating.
はい、そうです。かんじはたいへんべんきょうします。
My dog is called Ruby. I named her after Australian Ruby Payne-Scott who practically invented Radio Astronomy but who is almost forgotten.
So the focus of this video is mainly Furigana, i.e. Hiragana script annotated to Kanji characters to describe their readings. I would have pointed out a major challenge of learning Japanese: A typical word is not represented by a single Kanji character but by a compound of Kanji characters with themselves (usually two of them) and/or Hiragana script, and that the reading and the meaning (the semantic contribution to that word) depends on that word. This makes Furigana invaluable to learn Japanese words.
8:55 not exactly universal, but, in many cases, kanji with several radicals (components that are kanji) tend to have one (usually the one on the left or the top) that indicates the rough meaning (e.g. if it's a plant, a mammal, a bird, a fish, something related to water, to the mountains, etc.) and another that indicates one of the readings (this one fails more often due to the changes in pronunciation from Chinese); using furigana and the rough meaning radical helps a lot (e.g. you have 雲 with くも, "kumo", as the furigana, and you notice that the top part, 雨, means "rain", so you mentally search for rain-related words read as "kumo" and that tells you that that's the kanji for "cloud").
1:22 to explain way more simply why they exist, katakana was created by monks to write buddhist prayers (in approximate sanskrit) while hiragana was developed by nobles to make writing things easier (was originally more complex than katakana, got simplified and slightly fixed at the end of the 19th century). While more uncommon now, at the end of the 20th century and the 00s there were a lot of old people who didn't even know how to read katakana.
3:05 even more confusing is the fact that they sometimes use simpler kanji with a different root meaning instead of more complex kanji; one example would be the kanji for "age" (as in "years old"), which is 歳 and read "sai", but in order to save 10 strokes and make it look cleaner, they quite often use 才, still "sai" but meaning "talent".
9:21
ルビ Rubi comes from the British printing term "ルビー Ruby".
The font size was close to 振り仮名 furigana.
had to listen to 5:54 a few times to realize you weren't saying ''wily short people"
The ancient Egyptians came up with the same idea. When they needed to add a new word, they would come up with a hieroglyph to represent it pictorially, and then write some existing hieroglyphs next to it to represent it phonetically.
I didn't know furigana is a separate system. I always thought it's just like subtitling, using hiragana to explain the kanjis. It just doesn't feel like another system, just making it easier by writing it in simpler way.
5:21
explaines each sound
somehow managed to say it wrong
One should also remember that, seeing that Kanji is just Chinese characters, they have multiple readings that are also quite iffy. You have the native Japanese reading, like a calque I guess, and multiple Chinese transliterations that purely depend on the time period they were borrowed from, as Chinese was a bit like Latin for E. Asia.
東京, or Tokyo, means "eastern capital" - but the words themselves are Chinese, and also taken from the earliest periods, so back when the Chinese pronounced it something like "tuwng kyaeng" which the Japanese adapted to "to kyo." Modern Chinese would say this as "Dongjing." And if the Japanese took these pronunciations now, Tokyo would sound more like "Tonkin."
But these are the so called "sino-xenic" readings. There are also those native Japanese readings. In the case that they decided to use these more, Tokyo would be known as... Azumamiyako. But it should be noted that the sino-xenic readings displaced a lot of the native Japonic ones, so "azuma" and "miyako" are pretty archaic and basically never used in any context anyway nowadays.
Furigana is a godsend. Without it, even knowing some basic meanings and pronunciation rules, I'd read 日曜日 as ひようび, despite it actually being read as にちようび. Don't even think about trying to figure out how to pronounce 生 without furigana or extensive studying...
By a strange coincidence I have been recently trying to make sense of Japanese characters. It appears that furigana is, functionally speaking, akin to the short-lived educational experiment that was ITA, but it genuinely is a guide to pronunciation of the 'proper' symbols rather than a replacement of the conventional spelling.
RIP, Akira Toriyama
I can read & write Hiragana & Katakana. I also can read & write a few Kanji. I don't know much spoken Japanese Boku baka né!
Japanese only has 5 vowel sounds, not including diphthongs. A is always ah, I is always ee, etc. So foo-ree-gah-nah, not fur-ih-gah-nah, and kah-tah-kah-nah, not cat-ih-kah-nah.
As a Chinese who can read and speak Simplitied and traditional Chinese, and seeing Kanji, I see our pronounciation and understanding what the Kanji means an absolute win.
This may seem pedantic, but Japanese actually uses 4 writing systems; the three you mentioned plus romaji. Like... you literally could not read a bunch of stuff in Japan if you couldn't identify which "Roman" symbol corresponded to what sound. Of course, most English speakers will already know this alphabet as the one they're most used to, but it's still an additional writing system you need to know if you're going to be in modern day Japan.
Hiragana doesn't have an upper case and a lower case, so there is that.
There's no reason why someone who doesn't use the Roman alphabet would understand that 'd' is pronounced the same as 'D'. or 'e' the same as 'E'. The characters do not resemble each other. I suppose katakana are like a cross between capital letters and italics - they often emphasise the words.
Kanji are made up of 'radicals' - they are like the building blocks of kanji. They can sometimes be a guide to how a kanji is read. It's not a perfect system - not by a long way! But it can help, if you are totally stumped.
Radicals can also help to find the meaning of a kanji, but only in very broad terms, and it can misguide as often as it helps. But if you see the radical for 'heart' somewhere in a kanji, it may have something to do with emotions, for example.
Great video. I have two minor things to add though.
1) "Furigana" doesn't help you understand the word" is true, but also quite pointless to say. Their job is to inform the reader about the reading of the Kanji/word. It's the same in English too, just because you know how to pronounce "apricate" doesn't mean you know what that word means (to bask in the sun). At least with Kanji, the radicals in the kanji can sometimes give you a hint on what a word could be related to, this is by no means foolproof though.
2) I would have at least mentioned all the other uses of Furigana. For example, kirakira names or using unexpected, non-standard readings. 天使 would normally be pronounced tenshi (angel), but there are people called 天使 with added furigana telling you to pronounce it えんじぇる. Also to give some other examples of Furigana: in Fate they use a mix of characters from all three scripts and sometimes even Latin letters, to write one name of their special moves, but then furigana it with the hiragana/katakana for what they actually say, giving it a second name. E.g. Gae Bolg is written as 刺し穿つ死棘の槍 (Sashi Ugatsu Shikyoku no Yari, Spear of Impaling Barbed Death) but it has furigana above it reading ゲイ・ボルク (Gae Bolg), the celtic name of the spear, which is what the character will actually say.
As with all languages, one need to be schooled in them. It's like a Japanese won't know what the 26 letters in the English alphabet means without being schooled. Even for English speakers, as a toddler, one has to taught what letters are and the sound it represent. For Kanji, as are all Sinitic characters, a learner is taught in both meaning and pronunciations. In Japanese, the Kanji are borrowed from the Sinitic language but given Japanese pronunciation; however, in Sinitic languages such as Cantonese, the way characters are constructed have phonetic elements to them, like characters with a similar body, either sounds the same, or not too far off, but they can be way off too, and that's where schooling is needed.
Every language needs schooling to learn, no language is somehow intuitive to a non speaker.
as a chinese,learning japanese seems kinda easier than other country people,but i do hate remember japanese 片假名katakana,most katakana is straight prounance of foreigner languages and usually so long words,and i do find that japanese nowadays translators being lazier and lazier,even there is already same meaning words in kanji/japanese chinese words,they still use katakana to add them into japanese.such as 電車 means tram,in chinese it is same words 电车,but when it comes to 电视 in chinese,japanese use katakana テレビ，basically is the same prounance of english television.And more and more modern things are using this type of translation,i guess it is because japanese admire western world,they choose to straightly copy prounance into japanese,rather than mix it into japanese kanji
You forgot onyomi and kunyomi in regards to kanji. There are different readings on one kanji depending on the context.
Katakana for foreign words and borrow words isn't exactly the case, in old newspapers there's no hiragana, only kanji and katakana is used even those katakana is written as hiragana today, with Furigana it's a bit easier but still difficult with all the different systems, Nihon or Nippon...
My favourite weird thing about hiragana and katakana is they descended from the same phonetic kanji. That's why some of them look VERY similar indeed to each other, such as _ni_ に二 which merely lacks the left-most stroke in katakana form.
Originally they were not meant to serve two separate mixed-use roles at all - women were supposed to learn hiragana for phonetic-only writing because it was "flowing and delicate", thus supposed to be easier for women to write; while men were supposed to learn katakana because it was "angular and strong". It was originally an attempt to completely gender-segregate literacy. Thankfully it didn't really catch on!
I was really hoping the the term 'Ruby' was because 'Ruby is red' because 'Ruby is read to decipher the logogram' 😊
This is a pretty standard way to approach explaining what kanji are, but not a great one. Single characters that represent an entire word by themselves and have cute graphical etymologies like the three trees are a minority of the symbols and not really representative of the system. Most characters have a radical part that gives a clue to meaning, and a phonetic part that would be more helpful if you spoke medieval Chinese, and they typically aren't used alone in a one character, one meaning manner even in Chinese, typically being used conventionally with other kanji and having multiple possible readings and meanings, even in Chinese and especially in Japanese. The reality of kanji is somewhere between the idea of a logography and a nightmare syllabary, but closer to the latter. Whatever you think about kanji, the reality is worse lol
Kanji also serve as stems to verbs and certain adjectives where their grammatical case is written with hiragana known as okurigana.
8:29 same issue in english or pretty much every language XD
Time for bigger things... Language Explain... for a future video.
8:47 i mean all these problems go away when you learn Mandarin, especially in both traditional and reformed script.
1:00 The way you arranged the kana irks me. The Katakana are about how I would put them, but what happened on the Hiragana side? Why are they in vertical lines that go half way?
When I compared it to wikipedia table
na ta sa ka a
ni chi shi ki i
nu tsu su ku u
ne te se ke e
no to so ko o
wa ra ya ma ha
__ri __ mi hi
o(wo) ru yu fu
__ re __ me he(e)
n ro yo mo ho
Idk where he pulled his unconventional kana "table" from but as you can see it misplaced two kana (ん and を) and missing ゑ (we) kana
@@ginbei711 wa, wo, and n are a bit weird. Putting them in any order is fine. We is not used in modern Japanese, so it shouldn't be included.
The table is internally consistent, it's just a weird way of arranging it. Especially since the katakana table is arranged normally.
I didn’t focus on it while listening to the video, but now that I look at it, it’s definitely weird. Can’t blame him tho.
@@ginbei711ん and を match up exactly from his table to yours. don't know what you're on about. you also forget mu(む).
'we' isn't used, it'd be like including þ or ð or ʃ in a graphic of the english alphabet.
the katakana is like
✋
✋
and makes sense, is reasonable.
the hiragana is like
🫲
🫲
which is really weird and unintuitive.
it acts like はひふへほ,まみむめも, andらりるれろ are inherently different from the top set.
if we are going to deliniate it like that, はひふへほ has much more of a right to be in the top section than なにぬねの, as it uses Dakuten.
the way the hiragana is organized, it would be much more intuitive ordered as 🫲🫲,
not
🫲
🫲.
the katakana is perfect as it is organized intuitively,
✋
✋.
So Why can't they add furigana in every kanji
like mandate it? it's an opt-in thing. that's like saying they should change cursive to always have print written above.
@@DoroNijimaru No offence I Love kanji they are beautiful and cool at same time but I mean that Japanese actually just doesn't need kanji at all it can be written entirely with Hiragana or Katakana but they don't abolish it for cultural and traditional reason so if they want to still write with Kanji and don't want to abolish it they can simply add furigana on every kanji that will make it easy to read for both native and foreigner
@@SuonTamang you are mistaken that they do not need it.
recitation is not all there is to a language. kanji adds comprehension. kanji aids in digestibility. you can replace kanji and recitation will not be affected, but understanding a language is more than just reading the words.
wi kʊd ˈmænˌdeɪt ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ bi ˈrɪtən fəˈnɛtɪkli, ænd ɪt wʊd hɛlp ˈfɔrən ˈspikərz rid ðə wɜrdz ˈbɛtər,‹we could mandate english be written phonetically, and it would help foreign speakers read the words better,› bʌt soʊ mʌʧ ˈminɪŋ ɪz lɔst. ɪts ʤʌst ə strɪŋ ʌv saʊndz. noʊ hɪnt ʌv ˌɛtəˈmɑləʤi tu eɪd ɪn ˌʌndərˈstændɪŋ.‹but so much meaning is lost. it's just a string of sounds. no hint of etymology to aid in understanding.›
it helps with one issue, but hurts so much else in the process
When I was learning English, I initially thought that considering the complicated logic and exceptions of English spelling, why not mark all English words with International Phonetic Alphabets?
The main reason why Japanese kanji doesn't add furigana is that you shouldn't read that part after you understand the language, just like you can't learn English if you only read IPA.
@@SuonTamang ok then, tell me what does this word mean ( せい ) ?? It can mean tens and hundreds of others things right?? So what could be a way that we can distinguish what we actually mean without confusing everyone? Look, Japanese is a different language, the kanji itself means something, its not actually a just a mere sound.
Japanese has a guiding form
Hmm ... If you don't speak English, and came to Australia, and saw a sign saying "Canberra", you could sound that out and work out, roughly, how it's pronounced. You still have no clue it's a capital city.
Are you sure about that? I took one look and immediately started parsing it two different ways as Can-bear-uh and Cun-bruh and then thought it might have been an imported name or local indiginous name and thought of Can-berra with a more Spanish pronunciation before concluding that I don't know enough about Australia's history to accurately pinpoint where the name comes from and gave up. In an English mindset, where we don't really care about the vowels too much and are used to the common patterns of reading it can feel roughly similar, but to a non-native it could be difficult to overlook the differences.
I did say roughly. My point was not about the pronunciation, but about the fact that the Canberra sign doesn't tell you it's the capital, which was part of the story relating to the Tokyo sign.
The problem with furigana is you have to stop yourself reading like _____---____--____-_____---____ lol
You forgot the other system, Romanji. All vehicles in Japan are labeled with Romaji names, ie. you will see "Toyota" and "Suzuki" in "standard" Latin letters. Many other companies also only print their names in Romanji, never kana or kanji.
Hitachi comes to my mind.
I've spotted numerous mistakes in this video, tbh I'd recommend educating yourself more before make a video about something.
Like what? Ive been learning Japanese for years and fail to see any mistakes. Please point One of these out.
5:14 It's not a yo よ, it's a small yo ょ, together with ki き makes the sound kyo.
A small Hiragana ya, yu, or yo (ゃ, ゅ or ょ) is added at the ending of i-row (きki, しshi, ちchi, にni, ひhi, みmi , りri, ぎgi, じji, びbi, ぴpi).
This changes the i vowel sound to a glide (palatalization) to a, u or o, e.g. きゃ (ki + ya) /kya/. Small y kana is called yōon.
Kanji isnt that hard if you can speak the language before you touch it, i dont know any better language that you can have fun mixing concepts and reading and bending intents for multiple layers of meaning. It isnt that bad, it is just scary as a writing system. After all i can write and pronounce english despite these two having little in common while kanji is tied to language heavily, kanji is a simpler version of japanese since it leaves no room for misinterpretation unless a guy plays a rebus. There is so many evil ways to make rebuses in kanji, like purposefully writing wrong kanji so that a regular bystander would pronounce it correctly while you intend to use a different pronucation and mean the concept under wrong reading or pulling out a dictionary of obscure readings or set any pattern so that only your pals can decipher, or so many dad jokes that rely on a shared reading. I remember spelling so bad and having to look stuff up every time i tried typing anything when still learning english. You can write derpy words in english to preserve pronuncation which is bound to the meaning. Like 'oh my god' and 'oh my gawd' would be understood as the same thing, or common these days 'bro' and 'bruh'.
How about romanji for people like us to understand Japanese worlds
Why even use Kanji if it has to be explained with other alphabets? Why not just... use the other alphabets... If they are just used for symbolism, then what they literally mean isn't strictly important to understanding them. And if they are used for direct communication... They still need to be explained...
Why most of the words end up with "uh" 😂😂
Every kanji character has at least two readings.
生: lol only 2???
As a Japanese, Japanese is like if Latin languages didn't have spaces. Maybe the Latin language could have mixed runes, Greek, and Arabic in their writing.
Japanese is my 2nd language, and the lack of spaces still irks me. I started learning Japanese about 20 years ago. It's TERRIBLE for dyslexics like me😭
that's why the use of the 3 different systems is so important. it makes text digestible.
the different between
"15% of $100"
and
"fifteen percent of one hundred dollars"
Just give me the plain Latin alphabet of the West and I'll be fine! English will be EASY to learn! Oh, but then there's all the different pronunciations with words with the same spellings but different meanings and pronunciations...! D'OHHHH!
Kind of reminds me of IPA.
😮😮😮😮
😊
@@mingfanzhang8927 😟😟😟😟
This why learning language is hard than it should because of people like you. When they think "language", they only think "writing system". Too much focus on reading and writing, writing a word in romaji doesnt gonna change the way it sounds.
hello
Bruh.. this is like cuneiform.
What lovely content it would have been a flawless video had it not been for the way he stresses the last phoneme of each last word of a sentence... utterly insufferable
You said it well; katakana really sounds like broken english xD
Before finishing the video: You could have at least put katakana and hiragana in the same order. Btw you mispronounce a lot of japanese words.
After watching the video: I feel like you should have mentioned earlier that you don't speak japanese.
Why can't Japanese finally abolish Kanji and use only Hiragana and Katakana
because there are too many homonyms in Japanese, for example
salmons (the fish) and alcohol (the drink) are both さけ (sake - although there is a difference in pitch accent).
Meanwhile the kanji 鮭 and 酒 can be used to distinguish between salmon and alcohol.
@@herballemon Just use some diacritics and the Problem ist solved, still a Mich Better solution than kanji
why can't english finally abolish uppercase and use only lowercase letters?
Maybe because they serve a purpose??
It wouldn't work, there are far too many homonyms, u would practically never be able to tell the meanings of certain words. U think I'm joking but the amount of homonyms is staggering, that alone is reason enough for kanji to exist
@@nuko-_-nuko-_- they do distinguish the homonyms while speaking, why would it be a problem while writing/reading?
If Japan wanted to replenish their population they should simplify the writing system by reducing the Kanji and make it easier for foreigners to gain residency, then all of the anime weebs could be elder care workers.
There’s so many mistakes in this video, it was hard to watch
略字
@@mythrin そうです。動画が違います。
Kanji later spreaded to Korea and China and became Chinese characters
Haha
When using Chinese/Kanji characters to write the Korean language it’s called Hanja.
Don’t forget Vietnam where it’s known as Chữ Nôm.
>kanji spread to china
Mate, what do you think the Kan(漢/汉) in kanji stands for😂
🤨🤨
Akasa Hachinuka Kona Minehefuhiho