As you can see, many Japanese people can't write some kanji off the top of their head. So how do Japanese people write Japanese? Simple. With a computer or a phone! I think part of the reason why Japanese people are forgetting kanji is that it's so much easier to use a keyboard instead of a pen and paper. And if you want to learn Japanese, you can do it too! It's such a relief that you don't have to memorise how to write kanji on your own any more. Actually, if you want to learn Japanese, I can send you some free Japanese lessons by email. So subscribe here bit.ly/3bzsMnu
i won't lie, it's amazing to me how much even natives struggle with them. i'm not a native and have never even been to japan and yet i don't have any issues with any of the words here (if it was outside the 常用漢字 and maybe words like 魑魅魍魎 came up, then i could understand.)
Oh wow that really is a relief! I tried learning Japanese at one point and I can write hiragana and kana from memory but never Kanji. It's so intimidating
Because if you only use hiragana, many words with kanji with Chinese readings become homophonic (since Japanese phonology isn't very complex). Reading the words with kanji help you distinguish the meanings almost instantly.
learning to write kanji as a foreigner past the most common 200 or so was always a meme anyway anyone who gets to a high level in japanese knows that it's all about reading lots of books and media when you can read words in kanji then you can type them too and that's the most practical way to "write kanji" in this day and age anyway
Creeps MaPasta thank you so much! To be honest, since I wrote this comment until now, I have learned at least 5 new kanji, and I think seeing kanji and learning how to write it is more enjoyable after I took it for fun and strengthening my memory skills, and I feel happy after I find that I wrote it correctly, sorry for my English
I honestly love seeing my Japanese professor sometimes stand for a whole minute in front of the whiteboard and think "how do you write that one?" Knowing the Japanese sometimes struggle with kanji makes me feel a little better about learning them myself.
In Japan, everyone in elementary and junior high school is required to study 2,136 kanji characters. Some children sometimes get calluses on their fingers in order to get a perfect score on a kanji test🤣🤣🤣Even if they go that far, when they only use computers and smartphones, they are unable to write kanji🥶In short, if you can read, it will not interfere with your life, so I would like those who are going to learn Kanji to take it easy.
"Kanji is difficult" "Yeah, kanji is difficult” "I don't wanna learn them anymore" "We can just use hiragana" Me, as a foreigner who learns japanese: I see so much pain in your eyes girls
Kanji make Japanese easier to learn for foreigners. For the Japanese it's their native language, they can differentiate between homonyms without much mental strain, and they are comfortable with their Chinese vocabulary so they don't require any visual aid to recall the meaning of a particular word. For me as a foreigner, spoken Chinese loanwords are easier to understand when I can visualize them. For example, I'm watching anime and I hear "だんせいきょうふしょう". I'm comfortable enough with 男性 and 恐怖 to immediately recognize them. Now しょう. There are tons of しょう's in Sino-Japanese, and only kanji help me differentiate between them effectively. In this case 症 makes the most sense. Honestly I can't imagine having to read a novel in hiragana, it would be such a pain in the ass.
Milk Lab - I am Japanese. I can read but it would be harder to understand. Using kanji is preferable because it has more detail in each Character. Also if I know the kanji, I can understand the Chinese but just a little though.
@@vaylard9474 I'm totally understand this! LOL. For reading, Kanji will help us to understand the meaning more easily. I still remember I didn't understand a thing a child said in a manga because it's written in all hiragana. I have to think for some minutes to get what she said LOL. But it is different if you ask me to write Kanji. Like in this video, they know the Kanji if they read it but to write is totally different matters...
Somehow I started studying japanese again after six years. It was the kanji that brought me back, not the hiragana. I'm not into the easy stuff, I want to be challenged.
Most japanese people can read kanji perfectly well. It's just that the writing doesnt stick. If you'd ask these folks to type the words, no one would make a mistake
Me too. I can expect to continue learning and recognizing some kanji, which gives me satisfaction. But I definitely think I won't master writing them at all!!!!
I don't know about Japanese, but there are older Chinese who complain that kids these days are so used to typing Hanzi/Kanji that they've often forgotten how to write them.
Kanji is actually difficult to learn, but it is very interesting to know how this character was created or compounded, how ancient Chinese people were inspired. Imagining the meaning of unknown kanji from its parts is also fun.
Girl: I don’t want to learn more kanji we can just use hiragana YESSSSSSS but i know kanji is pretty much essential if you want to really learn japanese
@@anthemsofeurope2408 yeah of course, im pretty sure kanji wouldnt be going anywhere, but it sure would be nice if japanese didnt use so much of it. But of course it is their culture, and i am still going to try and learn it.
@@Greyr4X yeah i know, imagine the ease if they just used hiragana. but of course, language learning is never easy, and kanji is part of japanese literature and culture, so i still respect the language :)
@@stationeryevolution467 I also learn japanese at the moment. I can remember many kanjis (mostly like "water", "city" or "mountain", they are easy). You could write all kanjis in hiragana. 山 would be やま (mountain).
Ironically enough, I find Kanji super useful as someone who started learning Japanese only 2 months ago; it helps identify words quicker and it helps with analyzing sentences. It also is helpful in making information more compact: 私 takes up so much less space on a page than わたし, even if it is more complex to write. Though, I definitely get why people get annoyed with it; trying to write Kanji small isn’t easy, especially if you have a dull pencil. Makes me think it would be a good idea to invest in a mechanical pencil… Interesting to hear a perspective with those fluent with the language!
Lmao ikr. I’m going to live with a family member in Japan when I graduate and there’s no Japanese language course at the high school I’d go to so I’m taking Chinese instead and I didn’t think it would be as helpful as it actually is when I’m in Japan.
@@b1acksol " You just need to learn a different pronunciation when learning kanji. It should be very simple. " -Me, still struggling to understand kanji despite being a native Chinese speaker.
Consider that Japanese people learn Japanese because they have to, not because they want to. So if you're studing Japanese ya shouldn't feel depressed if *_even_* some Japanese people dunno how to draw a janji.
Japanese being forced to learn Kanji in school is the same as Chinese being forced to learn the traditional characters in school or like people in west who are forced to learn Latin. But thank God, being forced to learn Latin is more of a thing in the past now. These old language arts are not even that applicable in the modern day but it's ridiculous how you're still forced to learn them in school.
??? Japanese are also forced to learn ancient Japanese and ancient Chinese. And those two are included in National Center Exam (something like SAT) kanji is more important and necessary skill. Everyone has to be able to read kanji even if they can’t write it unlike Latin in Europe
@@shoma9716 what do you mean ancient Japanese and ancient Chinese? Isn't that just kanji? I agree that kanji in Japan is more useful than Latin is in the west, but it's still not necessary.
I know everyone already probably said this, but as someone trying to learn Japanese, seeing even natives struggling with kanji made me feel much better and confident. Thank you for this video.
It would have been interesting to see if they could tell the meaning of the words instead of writing it, because I have a feeling they would be able to interpret them more easily than actually write them.
@@theprophet2444 same. I am currently learning Japanese and just learnt my 300th Kanji character. I already shelved the notion of having to write any of the characters from the Kana sets and focusing on being able to read and pronounce them right. I can spend the rest of my life learning how to write them. Issue of course is that this is the digital age, we use keyboards and mobile phone apps for everything now, nobody writes to anyone on paper anymore so I might just get away using Google translate to write documents. My British friend who lives in Osaka told me that's what he does, the dude is married to a Japanese woman and has a kid with her. He also told me not to sweat it, he only knows a thousand Kanji. I still find that all very impressive though. 😄
Chinese are good at everything. There’s always an unknown Chinese people that has the world record for everything and push their limits. Idk what drives them tbh
everyone speaks german i'm going to speak malay: gile susah siot kanji ni harap harap dpt belajar lah mcm mana nak tulis perlu cari cikgu yg betul betul pandai lah
Читать иероглифы всё равно придётся. Я считаю если человек смог по памяти написать иерголиф, значит он его хорошо выучил. Увидеть иероглиф и вспомнить что он значит легче, чем самим вспомнить и написать.
Cómo hispanohablante me alivia un poco saber que hasta los mismos japoneses tienen problemas para escribir los kanjis Ya que en si the English It is really difficult because of its pronunciation (which does not agree with what is written and changes a lot) Et le français Avec sa prononciation compliquée de mots et ses signes qui n'existent pas dans ma langue 漢字と仮名を組み合わせた日本語では、3つの言語すべてを考えたり話したりすることが困難になっているため、困難を抱えているのは私だけではないことを知ってほっとしています 漢字
(Ancient) Japanese people: “This new system of writing called Kanji from our neighboring country will improve our literature and knowledge” Also (current) Japanese people: “can’t we just use hiragana instead?” Edit: just FYI, I’m Japanese and I’ve been studying Kanji for more than 15 years so I know how people are stressed about memorizing complex Kanji, though the ones appeared in this video aren’t that hard😂😂 That’s why many Japanese people in the comment section are kinda confused, aware that many non-Japanese might think that Japanese people can’t even use their mother tongue correctly. Please understand that those that are interviewed in this video don’t represent Japanese as a whole, they’re just a part of massive population and there are MANY people, even middle school students, who can understand every Kanji appeared in the video.
It's difficult to communicate using only Hiragana cuz our syllable is very simple and there's a lot of meaning for a word read in the same way... That's why we're still using Kanji unlike Korean language.
Y T hahah yeah true but watching people not being able to write or read in Kanji makes me doubt the usefulness of it😂 not sure if you’re Japanese (you used ‘our’ so probably you are??) but anyways 必要最低限の漢字以外は辞書とか自動変換とか使わないと完璧に覚えてられないからどうせならアルファベットみたいな感じになってれば覚えやすいのにな〜って思いました笑笑 教養として一般で使われてる言葉くらいは書けて/読めて当然でないといけないだろうと思いますが...。まあ全部ひらがなだと読むのめんどくさいし細かいニュアンスも伝わらないしなので結局は極論ですよね
The extra sad thing is realizing that they adopted hiragana _after_ kanji, and just never bothered to transition fully. "Alright guys, our language has way too many homonyms, and using spaces is off the table. How do we make sure people can tell what we're writing to them?" "How about we use chinese characters. some of them are virtually identical to hiragana and katakana, like 夕 and タ, the more complex ones are all literally made of combinations of the basic ones, and sometimes they're related to their radicals, but usually not. And each one has like 4 to 6 different readings depending on the word they're in. And sometimes they just have a unique reading that you just have to know." "Well, do they at least make it easier to write lengthy words?" "Here's a 56 stroke kanji. If you draw any of the strokes in the wrong order, it will be illegible."
0:40 She missed a left stroke in the letter meaning fight. Remember when I was a kid, this is a common mistake to make. And my teacher told me that a fighter without a knife is no fighter at all.
@@aye2you He was refering to 戦 (fight), where learners occasionally mistaken the part 戈 with 弋. Pictogramically, it looks like a warrior without whos sword/knife (that missing stroke).
lmao not all but like they dont have the exact same meaning and have COMPLETELY different pronounciation and that just gets on my nerves and make me lose motivation to learn japanese T-T
I will assume he mainly works in an office perhaps dealing with alot of documents and alot of people that work in that field (in Japan) if they have a career they are usually are Law graduates which is quite heavy on the use of Kanjis that most normal folk at Japan dont tend to use everyday
@@ericperez7750 a bit late response but holy crap man now i have a very great idea to cobtinue my japanese study Maybe this reading manga in japanese isn't a very bad idea after all
Actually, the Japanese government once debated abolishing the Kanji system during the Meiji Restoration, but for various reasons it decided against it. It took years for South Korea to completely phase out the use of Kanji, because newspapers and other printed medium kept using Kanji until the internet started to take over as a preferred medium for delivering news. On the other hand, North Korea phased it out relatively quickly it for the purpose of increasing the literacy rate. If Japan were to do away with the Kanji system they should have done it long time ago like Korea. There are too many written works and records that will need to be edited/re-written that the process of phasing out the Kanji system will take much longer that it took South Korea. In other words, it is too late now to abolish Kanji, so Japan is better of sticking with it.
I disagree with you because it's easier to change it now since most things are virtual. And if you never start you'll never achieve, later is better than never.
@@natanoliveira554 Japan, which lagged behind Western countries in terms of modernization, sought to modernize in various ways. One of these was the abolition of kanji writing. This was because Japan believed that a complicated writing system such as Kanji was hindering the modernization of its own country. Some of them thought that the Japanese language should be abolished and the alphabet should be unified.
@@低燃費エコドライブ少年 I think it’s Japanese unique feature that exists kanji,hiragana,katakana 3 writing system. In Meiji era many foreign word is translated using kanji but today people prefer to use katakana.Sometimes I think katakana is too long to read.Although kanji is hard for writing but easy for grasping meanings
Battle is actually used quite often in Japanese as a direct loan word. But it's quite common for East Asian language speakers to require clarification when no context is provided for a word. A peculiarity of Mandarin is its abundance of homophones, which were passed on to Japanese and Korean.
Yeah, that was fascinating. The amount of context required in Japanese is pretty crazy sometimes. English and most western languages seem to rely on context much less.
The odd words are usually differentiated by melody. This is also the difference between men's and women's. If picking up the case 「戦闘」and「銭湯」the first is Sen-tou and the second is sen-tou. Women know the meaning of sen-tou「銭湯」 but doesn't use it. They rather use "O-yu." It is also used for "bath" not for public bath and only includes the meaning of bath-tub. In short a bath room is independent from toilets in Japanese house.
I wanna die it also speeds up the reading I think, because the character suggests the meaning itself, while for the other two, you kinda have to mix them up to make sentences, and others would have to separate and recognize words themselves
@@hugebuffman3619 Kanji is also easier to read, it's just hard to write and learn. This is Japan in Hiragana: にほん This is Japan in Kanji: 日本 Sentences: 田中さん日本はあそこだ。 たなかさんにほんはあそこだ。 The top sentence is Hiragana and Kanji, the bottom sentence is just Hiragana. For me the top sentence is easier to read because the words are easier to identify. It's like saying 'one plus one equals two' instead of 1 + 1 = 2 Kanji also helps to prevents the confusion between hiragana 'ha' with the particle 'wa' which is written with the same character, any word that has ha in it tends to be in Kanji like 話 (hanashi). Finally no it's not just space it also helps to combat against homonyms by using different Kanji, because like English, Japan has some as well.
As someone who learned Japanese since last September and started living in Japanese for about 2 months now, I prefer seeing and reading kanji, but to write them, it’s a whole another level 😂 I can recognise them while typing yes but writing it out is almost impossible 😂
@@mayoiko that doesnt mean native speakers don't struggle with them. Care to mention any language simple enough that no native speakers commit typos on?
@@verybarebones i never see any native speaker struggle with my native language, and most of us dont just speak the national language we also speak more specific local language too, languages are not equally hard or easy, the world is big, open your eyes
@@verybarebones typo is not the same thing as not knowing the spelling/meaning, typo is just happen by accident. not the same as people who cant tell difference between "their" and "they're"
i feel like reading is much easier than writing in japanese. remembering the symbols and writing them down from scrach is much harder than recognizing what which one they are.
Algo que me he dado cuenta en los meses que llevo estudiando japonés es que los kanjis los puedes reconocer fácilmente cuando los lees, sin embargo la dificultad está cuando tienes que escribirlos
@Имран Захаев yeah, but if we remove kanji and insert spaces, we'll get 4 years for free, 4 years of not having to learn kanji lol... sure fucking hope it's good for the brain as you say, or maybe I'll have no space left once I learn kanji.
So, legit answer to the question (from someone who shouldn't have any authority on this whatsoever: They use kanji because it separates words from particles. I don't have japanese on my phone, so I'm going to have to romaji it; if you saw in hiragana "ha ha ha ha..." You wouldn't know where one word began and another ended (mostly because the hiragana for "ha" can be used as the subject particle pronounced "wa". The start of the sentence was "ha ha wa ha..." With ha ha meaning mother)
*Me studying *: why the hell do I need to learn this? My mom: imagine someone comes up to you and ask you about this and you don't know what a shame Me: wh- who would do that? *how my mom expects ppl to ask me:*
I remember writing in Chinese for the first time and it is so difficult for me so I assume it would be the same as Japanese Kanji. But the thing is that not all Kanji gives me the struggle to write for those that has less than ten strokes. Like a year ago, I was enjoying writing in Japanese, and yes I also wrote Kanjis with a lot of strokes. Imagine everything in Japanese are just Hiragana and Katakana since Kanji came from China and the Japanese will not struggle writing their letters just like how we write in English.
@@musevms I was talking about the complex kanjis / kanjis of words that are rarely used, even japanese people don't know some kanjis, so why would anyone learning japanese learn the kanjis not even japanese people know?
We have several words which read “Sentou”. For example, 戦闘(battle), 銭湯(Public bath), 先頭(the front of a line), 千頭(1000 of animals). So he probably got confused about which SENTOU
This video makes me feel more confident in just by seeing this. I thought that learning like all of kanji was like the base of Japanese so it stunned my motivation but I’m glad to see some people share my pain. 😂
@@darrenfleming7901 There isnt quite a unique character for every word. There are just about 2500 regularly used kanji, for about 15000 words, which is the general average a Japanese person may know.
Most Japanese students can write most of the kanji. That's because they study hard. On tests, you have to write all the basic things you learned in class in kanji to get a score. The reason why the people in the video can't write kanji is because they have fewer opportunities to study now that they are working, and also because they don't have the chance to use the kanji themselves on a daily basis. From a high school student in Japan.
Advice to fellow learners of the Japanese language: learning Kanji is not the same as learning a phonetic system (such as kana, Cyrillic, or the latin alphabet, all of which you can learn within a week), it's a different concept altogether. Learning Kanji is like learning words or word stems. You're just never going to master the Kanji if you're stuck in the western mentality. It's supposed to take a few years to learn, so be patient.
@@glory1356 My advice to YOU: Don't learn. Forget about the kanji and stick to the hiragana. Stay on the beginner level and leave the kanji to the experts. That's my advice to all the trolls. 😁
Hey, I'm learning Japanese, I'm quite at the beggining - i've learned just some grammar, hiragana and katakana, some radicals (I'm trying to learn them first to make learning Kanji easier) and I'm almost finishing learning the first grade's kanji. How much kanji do you think I still have to learn to be able to read decently, like, get most of the meaning of japanese twitters? I'm asking to you because you're a native and I've never actually spoken to a native japanese before (English is not my native language either, I'm brazilian)
@@joaovitordemelo8209 to speak decently learn the most common 2000 kanji. Look up most common 2000 kanji and go from most to least common. This is a good strategy for any language
@@davidribosome4326 That's what I'm doing, with Anki's help (a spaced-repetition software that helps memorization). First, I learned all common radicals (about 214), and then, I started learning kanji by making mnemonics using the radicals. I'm learning 20 new kanji per day and constantly reviewing it, and the order I'm using it's the order japanese people learn in school (because i read that is more didatic than the JLPT order)
@@davidribosome4326 After learning all kanji (and meanwhile I'm already acquiring some vocabulary and grammar notions) I plan to learn japanese itself. I think it will be easier for me this way (like learning an alphabet and then moving to the language, but in this case the alphabet has 2000+ words)
面白いです! I’m a Japanese and I don’t write kanji in my daily life. In our daily life, we type hiragana to the computer and it changes them to kanji. Although we learn many kanji from elementary school to high school, we forget them after graduation😂. All we need is that we can read them. That’s why some people like 1:25 notice that the kanji they write is not correct(=something is wrong) but they can’t write the correct ones. Kanji is one of Japanese but sometimes I feel like that remembering kanji is similar to remember foreign language.(Of course it’s much easier than studying foreign language though) In schools, we have English-Japanese / Japanese-English dictionary to learn English. Similarly, we have kanji-Japanese dictionary to learn kanji.
This is not a perfect comparison but that sounds like learning to write in cursive as an English speaker. You can read it pretty easily but you very rarely need to write it, and so you forget how to.
@@LadyPelikan I haven't used it since middle school I think so I gradually forgot how to write in it. My signature has also devolved into a series of squiggles, haha. Glad that some people still use it though.
jak sam To be fair, majority of Americans can’t distinguish their there and they’re. Or using “an” before a vowel so the average Japanese are smarter than the average American.
Japanese cannot write kanji correctly due to PC and smartphone.But they can choose kanji properly on PC and smartphone.Literacy rate is 99%. There are 2000 chinese characters for daily use.
@Error_404 PL It is not very different from chinese at all, many of the traditional hanzi (traditional chinese) characters is being used in Kanji, and many simplified hanzi characters has been simplified in the same way as kanji.
Error_404 PL Tsu and Shi or N and So I have a harder time differentiating N and So rather than Tsu and Shi, because there are only two strokes. The hardest thing about Japanese is learning how to pronounce a certain Kanji character in different instances. Chinese being a tonal language family and Japanese being not, there are a lot of homophones.
Me: learned hiragana and katakana in Japanese language but have been crying in toilet for hours seeing kanji. Japanese: (confused about kanji) Me : (stays confused too)👀
I started learning Japanese a couple of days ago and so far I have learnt Hirakana and after thinking that I'd need to memorise Kanji I thought it would be a disaster to learn, but this... Does put a smile on my face. EDIT: Actually screw kanji I am not learning this. Surely I will be fine with Hiragana and Katakana.
It depends on what your goals are, if you want to focus on speaking or understanding Japanese, Kanji might not be necessary, but not studying them at all can make everything more complicated :')
It’s actually more frustrating in some situations if only hiragana is used. Because in Japanese, there are so many words with same pronunciation but different meanings. I actually prefer reading materials with kanji.
I am Chinese and my mum taught me very well when I was learning how to write. Words that contain 貝(it means shell) in it usually are related to money as shells were money back in thousands years ago. Therefore, for “wairo”--賄賂 is related to money. There are also some other words that have secret relationship between each other sometimes but I’m not gonna list them all out as it’ll be too long
y=Yea the book remembering kanji talks about that too. honestly the best book to learn kanji is from there. it attach's story's into each kanji that it would be very hard to forget. like i'm actually learning about 50 kanji a day from that book and its grilled into my head. i'm honestly so greatful for that book because before it was so hard for me to remember before. So I highly recommend it for people that are learning kanji. you can find it online.
I am a high-school student. Almost all of the students can write this level of kanji. But we don’t always use them so you don’t worry about that you can’t. Personally, I feel adults can’t remember kanji more than young people because they don’t often write kanji. It is the most important that you can read them. Then you will never have trouble living in Japan.
Do you think education in the future will reduce teaching how to write kanji by hand? I've learned to read hundreds of kanji, but I can't write any. It doesn't seem very important when most communication and documents are typed.
@@kaciewolverton2692 In my opinion, it won’t be changed. I think it is necessary to learn kanji. Then we don’t have to practice writing them by hand but I feel it's the best way to remember them. Actually, it is not so important to be able to write down them but we sometimes have trouble when typed them. This is because we have hundreds of thousands homonyms kanji such as こうしょう. There are 48 ways to write the word in kanji so I can’t choose kanji I should use correctly in case I don’t usually use. For me, it's embarrassing for a Japanese person to make a mistake in Kanji, so I'm studying it. My English is poor but I hope it conveys my point to you😊
but in order to live in Japan you will have to fill out a lot of forms and do a lot of paperwork in the Japanese language to be able to legally reside in Japan.
@@さも-t9h How it's possible than one of the countries with most highest education in the world and the people it's unable to write in his own language? it seems very weird to me.
Yup but the problem is, although you can communicate with only kana, you virtually can't read Japanese without Kanji cause they use Kanji in pretty much every sentence..
I was scared of kanji at first but man they feel so convenient and make sentences easier to read (when you know them). If they didn't exist, I think it would be painful to read, especially for beginners. They help you to know where words start, where are the particles, verbs... Don't be scared of them, kings and queens on the internet, they are your friends not your enemies. Learn vocabulary and read some texts, and these quirky symbols will become familiar to you
Yuta! That was awesome! I'm studying kanji, because I'd like to be able to read Japanese novels eventually. It's nice to know that even Japanese people have trouble sometimes. But I'm curious, I assume these people would have no trouble reading the kanji they got wrong if they saw it in a book or newspaper. Is that correct? They only have trouble remembering how to WRITE the kanji, but not how to read it.
+Silvie Monk But don't asssume you can read every novel after you studied the joyo Kanji. I know Japanese people that can't even read one complete page of a Mishima Yukio novel without looking up words in a dictionary. And those are educated people. You'll have to use dictionaries quite often as well (depending on the novels of course, Kirino Natsuo for example is way easier than Futabatei Shimei.)
+mamamandora Usually Japanese people don't use dictionary when they read book, They can guess the meanigs from the Kanji even if they don't know the meanings. So MIshima is no problem for most of them. I like Mishima too.
Japanese people TOLD ME that they find Mishima difficult. If you can read his stuff, fine. I once asked for some help I needed for a translation and in some cases those people couldn't help me at all. I am talking about at least six different people. And "guessing" the meaning, come on, really? I know how this "guessing" works.
Based on what I know, Japanese people learn a few set of kanji per grade which could probably reach 1000+ kanji characters after graduating, then they might forget the difficult ones for not using it daily and by choosing the hiragana version of the difficult kanji... Which means people who wants to learn the Japanese language should focus on the commonly used kanji characters...
Supposedly, if you know the most common ~750 kanji, you'll be able to read and write average-level texts at about 90% coverage. Of course, there are more uncommon kanji that are used in people's names and sometimes read in totally wild ways, but at least you only have to hear the name once to understand it.
I was starting to wonder if no one was going to point out that it would be much easier for a Chinese speaker to learn kanji. Thank you for vindicating my belief.
Remington Lamey Not quite. You know the meaning, though not exactly the same all the time, and that’s it. Japanese way of reading kanji is complicated as hell
As a native chinese (I speak Cantonese), it’s easy for us to recognise and write Kanji, but the meaning in Chinese isn’t always the same as in Japanese. When I pick up Japanese products at supermarkets I just skim for Kanji and get a rough meaning of it😂😂😂
@@remingtonlamey3464 Plus, sometimes the pronunciation isn't anywhere close to being the same in the two languages. It can be more confusing than if you didn't know any kanji to begin with. My brain wants to think the Chinese pronunciation when I see the Japanese kanji.
In the West, research has been done (and widely publicized) suggesting that people read entire words in "romanji," instead of reading them letter by letter. They simply look at the first and last letters, and then fill in the rest of the word, even if the letters are mis-spelled. My point being, that if any similar effect exists with regard to kanji, then it might explain some of the results here: Japanese people might well be used to reading the entire character at a glance, instead of picking apart, and hence remembering, the individual components. But that's just speculation on my part.
+Nick Hentschel Going by my experiences in learning Chinese Hanzi I think that's completely correct. I can read a character and know what it is at a glance but if I think about it to write them I can't pick out the individual parts of the character to write it, unless it's a frequently used word.
I agree here, being exposed to "kanji" throughout my life in chinese and japanese settings. In a vague sense, I can tell when a character is written as it should, however when it is written wrong I occasionally cannot tell you exactly what is off. My experience however is only being a 二世, however I get this feeling from my mother all the time when I ask for help.
+Nick Hentschel I think you're right, because I study Chinese and I often have no problems in reading words that I already know, but when I'm going to write them down, I forget a part of the character even though I have a visual idea of how the character looks, in my mind.
+Nick Hentschel If you have learned a foreign language before, you'll know that "recalling" and "recognising" are totally different skills. "Recognising" includes reading and listening. Sometimes I call this as "passive language skill". It's the one that you can learn quite quickly from textbooks. "Recalling" includes writing and speaking. This is the one that needs a lifetime practice. Being able to read a kanji doesn't mean you can write it because they're different set of skills.
best thing about kanji is that you can guess what the word means if you know the kanji, like "atherosclerosis" is kinda confusing, but as "動脈硬化" you can at least comprehend that your veins are getting stiff because it literally means it in the name.
That’s very interesting. In English one can guess stiffening veins only if they were taught their Greek and Latin “root words”. Most that go into medical profession do
The words 動脈·硬化 literally mean vein & stiffening. That advantage is not from the writing system but how the word is phrased. You can still create a word “vein-stiffening” with the writing system of English.
Fun Fact: "Kanji" has often been described by Japanese people as the hardest part of the Japanese language. (Though to Chinese speakers learning Japanese....it's the *EASIEST*)
ye kanji sucks xD would be so much easie when japanese change it to only hirgana and katakana or even romanji so ppls dont have to learn any symbol and it would be easy : Ohayo gozaimasu! Genki desu ka?
Obviously. It's like learning Latin as a Spanish speaker I would struggle. But if A latin speaker learned Italian or Spanish it would be *easier* for them. Kanji derived from Chinese. But I heard that Cantonese for Mandarin speakers is hard. So to each there own. +Luxaly God no, that is awful. we mite as wel write lyke dis in inglish. Romaji isn't proper and just help sound it out. Common used Kanji isn't that hard to learn. Lazy bum.
Both systems are inefficient to learn. The time spent learning to read and write should be minimal to focus the youth on learning as much as possible in their developmental years.
I remember my Japanese teacher in HS (1st ever American class in the curriculum!) was teaching us some basic kanji, and she explained how they imagine things to memorize them. For example chichi; father, is "two swords crossed to defend the family." We had the "chomen" notebooks to practice hira/kata, so I'm able to read/write those fluently at least.
This is actually understandable. If you think about English, even if you see certain words in books or on the internet it doesnt mean you know how to spell them.
4:47 This man wrote every word given accurately and easily, I noticed and was really impressed with him throughout the video. In particular, he is even extremely humble.
As you can see, many Japanese people can't write some kanji off the top of their head. So how do Japanese people write Japanese? Simple. With a computer or a phone!
I think part of the reason why Japanese people are forgetting kanji is that it's so much easier to use a keyboard instead of a pen and paper. And if you want to learn Japanese, you can do it too! It's such a relief that you don't have to memorise how to write kanji on your own any more.
Actually, if you want to learn Japanese, I can send you some free Japanese lessons by email. So subscribe here bit.ly/3bzsMnu
i won't lie, it's amazing to me how much even natives struggle with them. i'm not a native and have never even been to japan and yet i don't have any issues with any of the words here (if it was outside the 常用漢字 and maybe words like 魑魅魍魎 came up, then i could understand.)
I'm really confused to learn Kenji while learning Kiragana and Katakana.
3 likes
@@cristlewrite7944 Thank you soo much❣️
Oh wow that really is a relief! I tried learning Japanese at one point and I can write hiragana and kana from memory but never Kanji. It's so intimidating
'why tf are you late for work?'
'sorry some guy in the street was testing my kanji lmao'
Lmao I laughed really hard at this
@@oeno6301 im glad
Made my day
LMAOO 😂😂
Almost Japanese go to work about 10 minutes before, so we were not late haha
The guy with blue tie and spects is that classmate who always says he haven’t prepared for the tests but still manages to gets A+.
Oηιon Коммγнизмα WHYYY
It's specs mate
Arpit Das sorry my bad
Caster Gil God I am jealous . I could be doing a thing for 3 years and still forget it after few days . You are blessed buddy.
i do that too
"Battle"
Dude: Ah I see this often in games.
This man has a bright future.
Y e s h
@Augusto Cejas ahh i see your a man of culture as well
We'll watch his career with great interest
Indeed
I dont think so
As a Japanese, kanji is quite hard to remember and write, but it makes reading a lot faster.
Yes.Each kanji almost refers to a whole vocabulary and takes small space.
As a Chinese, I really don't think kanji is hard to remember and write.because we use kanji in every single day😂
@@wenyichao5078But Japanese Kanji are also different from the Chinese ones
@@igaIIta Kanji and Chinese Hanzi are similar and have the same rule in shape,so it's not
hard to remember.
@@theSUN2773 shape. But not sound. Japanese had irregularities there.
Me as a foreigner learning Kanji for almost 2 years
Locals : Why can't we just use hiragana
Hiragana and katakana bro i really memorized it all
is learning kanji sortof like learning vocab as well?
@@Eman-ud6tg im not already dead bro i'm still alive 😁😁😁
xX Móšțøpĕ ŔŌBŁŐX Xx
Hi,I'm Japanese.
To be precise, the word is"お前はもう死んでいる。".
"わ" to "は".
"し" to "死".
"しで" to "死んで".
Because if you only use hiragana, many words with kanji with Chinese readings become homophonic (since Japanese phonology isn't very complex). Reading the words with kanji help you distinguish the meanings almost instantly.
Every person who is having a hard time learning kanji just suddenly felt a huge weight lift off their shoulders after this video
learning to write kanji as a foreigner past the most common 200 or so was always a meme anyway
anyone who gets to a high level in japanese knows that it's all about reading lots of books and media
when you can read words in kanji then you can type them too and that's the most practical way to "write kanji" in this day and age anyway
No, actually I kinda lost hope
Creeps MaPasta thank you so much! To be honest, since I wrote this comment until now, I have learned at least 5 new kanji, and I think seeing kanji and learning how to write it is more enjoyable after I took it for fun and strengthening my memory skills, and I feel happy after I find that I wrote it correctly, sorry for my English
That’s me!
jiyui X imma cheer for you^.^
“i see it a lot in video games”
ahh yes a man of culture
lol Yamaguchi u here 😂
@@mosota9079 Hallooo Yamaguchiiiii
Hello yamaguchi
@@MPV-ig9iq Hello Taehyung!!!!
HEY!! I thought you were practicing with the others?!
I honestly love seeing my Japanese professor sometimes stand for a whole minute in front of the whiteboard and think "how do you write that one?" Knowing the Japanese sometimes struggle with kanji makes me feel a little better about learning them myself.
In Japan, everyone in elementary and junior high school is required to study 2,136 kanji characters. Some children sometimes get calluses on their fingers in order to get a perfect score on a kanji test🤣🤣🤣Even if they go that far, when they only use computers and smartphones, they are unable to write kanji🥶In short, if you can read, it will not interfere with your life, so I would like those who are going to learn Kanji to take it easy.
大丈夫。日本語を話せて、ひらがなを書ければ日本人は文脈を読みとって
漢字を教えてくれるよ
@user-OMANGEMANGE so what do japanese people write in? Isnt all documents written like that in japan?
@@stanlee4210 Hiragana and katakana can be used for the same words. They are phonetic. Kanji is ideographic.
ワイもカンニングしてたから大丈夫や
アニメの字幕でリスキルしてる
"Kanji is difficult"
"Yeah, kanji is difficult”
"I don't wanna learn them anymore"
"We can just use hiragana"
Me, as a foreigner who learns japanese: I see so much pain in your eyes girls
Kanji make Japanese easier to learn for foreigners.
For the Japanese it's their native language, they can differentiate between homonyms without much mental strain, and they are comfortable with their Chinese vocabulary so they don't require any visual aid to recall the meaning of a particular word.
For me as a foreigner, spoken Chinese loanwords are easier to understand when I can visualize them. For example, I'm watching anime and I hear "だんせいきょうふしょう". I'm comfortable enough with 男性 and 恐怖 to immediately recognize them. Now しょう. There are tons of しょう's in Sino-Japanese, and only kanji help me differentiate between them effectively. In this case 症 makes the most sense.
Honestly I can't imagine having to read a novel in hiragana, it would be such a pain in the ass.
@Ki 木Ojo 王女
I'm not Chinese either.
Milk Lab - I am Japanese. I can read but it would be harder to understand. Using kanji is preferable because it has more detail in each Character. Also if I know the kanji, I can understand the Chinese but just a little though.
@@vaylard9474 I'm totally understand this! LOL. For reading, Kanji will help us to understand the meaning more easily. I still remember I didn't understand a thing a child said in a manga because it's written in all hiragana. I have to think for some minutes to get what she said LOL.
But it is different if you ask me to write Kanji. Like in this video, they know the Kanji if they read it but to write is totally different matters...
Somehow I started studying japanese again after six years. It was the kanji that brought me back, not the hiragana. I'm not into the easy stuff, I want to be challenged.
Most japanese people can read kanji perfectly well. It's just that the writing doesnt stick. If you'd ask these folks to type the words, no one would make a mistake
it's a little bit like spelling I guess, we can understand things written down but if you're bad at spelling it can be difficult writing it right
@@francesatty7022 ARE you japanese?
I don’t know how the Japanese learn it, but I use Traditional Chinese and it isn’t that hard to learn.
Is it like cursive?
Delivious if you know traditional chinese,then you can learn any language.
Kanji: *Exists*
English people: Kill me now
Japanese people: Kill me now
Chinese people: *I like your funny words magic man*
笑笑
母
@Saharla Dahir yeah but its pronounced haha
こんいちえあ
@@TR_gamer08 is that supposed to be こんにちわ？
読めるし見たら分かるけど、インターネットで変換ができる世の中になってから自分の手で書く事が減って、書けと言われても細部まで思い出せない事が増えた。
Same. My ability to write in mandarin has suffered even though I can read it and type decently.
As a chinese i have the same problem, we all count an text generator
放弃大脑 解放双手
鬱←読めるし意味も分かるんだけど、いざ書いてってなったら無理かも
"Why can't we just use hiragana"
Me. Right now. Learning japanese for the first time.
Me too. I can expect to continue learning and recognizing some kanji, which gives me satisfaction. But I definitely think I won't master writing them at all!!!!
I just started to learn japanese on my own. I really dont know how its gonna work out buut.
Yeah and goodluck to your studies
Jonatan Luna lol same
you are not alone. im also self studying 😂
I’m imagining there’s elderly Japanese citizens who complain how kids can’t write Kanji these days.
Japanese boomer
Hai hai booma!! (Okay boomer!) xD
I don't know about Japanese, but there are older Chinese who complain that kids these days are so used to typing Hanzi/Kanji that they've often forgotten how to write them.
applefoodie just as how many adults complain about kids no longer knowing how to write cursive these days.
joomer
"i see sentou often in video games"
see mom? gaming *is* educational.
I have no other options to reject this statement (y) :D
"Dairantou Smash Brothers"
Pokemon gym battle
Lmao. The only educational game is Oregon Trail
Saquez *is*
Kanji is actually difficult to learn, but it is very interesting to know how this character was created or compounded, how ancient Chinese people were inspired. Imagining the meaning of unknown kanji from its parts is also fun.
its a very interesting writing system although very hard to learn for many
"Ancient" Chinese people, i've got news for you they still write entirely with Chinese characters every day!
me: ok ive memorized hiragana and katakana. its time to learn kanji
my brain: の
me: pls
my brain: ノ
frogworm • I felt that
Lmao
Yeah LMAO
I felt that hard😂💀
XD
This makes me a little more confident in learning Japanese
Same.
The part where woman said "Kanji wa musukashi desu" made me feel better.
@Someone誰か 難しい is muzukashii right? Not ga
Artyona what are some good apps??
@@jjjosssueee Kanji study is a good one for reviewing
Girl: I don’t want to learn more kanji we can just use hiragana
YESSSSSSS
but i know kanji is pretty much essential if you want to really learn japanese
Would be cool, but probably not possible, because of religion. Shinto texts are writen in kanji and it's also a part of japanese culture, so sadly no
but It's like everywhere especially on their posters and sign boards xD
@@anthemsofeurope2408 yeah of course, im pretty sure kanji wouldnt be going anywhere, but it sure would be nice if japanese didnt use so much of it. But of course it is their culture, and i am still going to try and learn it.
@@Greyr4X yeah i know, imagine the ease if they just used hiragana. but of course, language learning is never easy, and kanji is part of japanese literature and culture, so i still respect the language :)
@@stationeryevolution467 I also learn japanese at the moment. I can remember many kanjis (mostly like "water", "city" or "mountain", they are easy). You could write all kanjis in hiragana. 山 would be やま (mountain).
Ironically enough, I find Kanji super useful as someone who started learning Japanese only 2 months ago; it helps identify words quicker and it helps with analyzing sentences. It also is helpful in making information more compact: 私 takes up so much less space on a page than わたし, even if it is more complex to write. Though, I definitely get why people get annoyed with it; trying to write Kanji small isn’t easy, especially if you have a dull pencil. Makes me think it would be a good idea to invest in a mechanical pencil…
Interesting to hear a perspective with those fluent with the language!
How many kanji have you learned now, 9 months later?
'we can just use hiragana'
me trying to catch up in my japanese: *YES I AGREE*
i never felt more understood when she said that 😭
Lmao ikr. I’m going to live with a family member in Japan when I graduate and there’s no Japanese language course at the high school I’d go to so I’m taking Chinese instead and I didn’t think it would be as helpful as it actually is when I’m in Japan.
@@b1acksol
" You just need to learn a different pronunciation when learning kanji. It should be very simple. "
-Me, still struggling to understand kanji despite being a native Chinese speaker.
Hahahahaah that woman understands me
Me after realizing that I'd have to read a whole chunk of text full of hiraganas: *NO* *PLEASE* *GO* *BACK*
Moral of the story: Do not feel sad, even Japanese people cant know them all
I feel bad saying it but... Thank god.
@@DoNotDisturb. LOL 😆
@@DoNotDisturb. I felt this deep in my soul
yeah im only gonna learn hiragana i dont got time to learn katakana and kanji
@@ギャル-t8j Katakana is the same as Hiragana. They all sound the same just look different.
Katakana is just for foreign words and names
4:32 - "Kanji is difficult..
I don't want to learn them anymore."
*_MOOD._*
Consider that Japanese people learn Japanese because they have to, not because they want to. So if you're studing Japanese ya shouldn't feel depressed if *_even_* some Japanese people dunno how to draw a janji.
Japanese being forced to learn Kanji in school is the same as Chinese being forced to learn the traditional characters in school or like people in west who are forced to learn Latin. But thank God, being forced to learn Latin is more of a thing in the past now. These old language arts are not even that applicable in the modern day but it's ridiculous how you're still forced to learn them in school.
@@Living_Legacy Well, Latin is forced only in certain High Schools/Universities.
??? Japanese are also forced to learn ancient Japanese and ancient Chinese.
And those two are included in National Center Exam (something like SAT)
kanji is more important and necessary skill. Everyone has to be able to read kanji even if they can’t write it unlike Latin in Europe
@@shoma9716 what do you mean ancient Japanese and ancient Chinese? Isn't that just kanji? I agree that kanji in Japan is more useful than Latin is in the west, but it's still not necessary.
This video is so fun to come back to as I keep progressing in Japanese
I know everyone already probably said this, but as someone trying to learn Japanese, seeing even natives struggling with kanji made me feel much better and confident. Thank you for this video.
They werent native thats why they think its difficult
It would have been interesting to see if they could tell the meaning of the words instead of writing it, because I have a feeling they would be able to interpret them more easily than actually write them.
@Cloud RUclips bro... 👀
@@theprophet2444 same. I am currently learning Japanese and just learnt my 300th Kanji character. I already shelved the notion of having to write any of the characters from the Kana sets and focusing on being able to read and pronounce them right. I can spend the rest of my life learning how to write them. Issue of course is that this is the digital age, we use keyboards and mobile phone apps for everything now, nobody writes to anyone on paper anymore so I might just get away using Google translate to write documents. My British friend who lives in Osaka told me that's what he does, the dude is married to a Japanese woman and has a kid with her. He also told me not to sweat it, he only knows a thousand Kanji. I still find that all very impressive though. 😄
@@Cats_Bread they are
Kanji exists
American: fml
Englishman: fml
Japanese: fml
Chinese: lol ez
Chinese are good at everything. There’s always an unknown Chinese people that has the world record for everything and push their limits. Idk what drives them tbh
@@lllIlIllIIIl if you can learn writting traditional Chinese, you can learn anything
I think Chinese can even understand kanji
Chinese people really skip the step of remembering the stroke and everything and jump into remembering the sound&meaning instead. Which is sick
Luta we don’t, we just know the pattern of writing in order because we have learned so many characters.
Meanwhile, some native English speakers confuse THEIR with THEY’RE.
and THERE
also YOUR YOU'RE
Iam not even native and I thought iam the only one who does 😂😂
@Its_ cookiecat I'm german and I make mistakes with Seid und Seit as well 😂
@@seulxejn Seid ist eigentlich ,,Seid ihr". Ich weiß nicht ob du Deutsche(r) bist, aber es ist leicht D mit T zu vertauschen.
everyone speaks german
i'm going to speak malay:
gile susah siot kanji ni
harap harap dpt belajar lah mcm mana nak tulis
perlu cari cikgu yg betul betul pandai lah
私達日本人は漢字を普段から使いますが、ほとんどはパソコンやスマホなどを利用しますので変換され出てくるため書く機会が少なく手書きではなかなか書けなくなってきています。
日本語を勉強している方に安心してもらえる動画になって良かったと思います。
日本語には同じ発音でも違う意味の言葉が沢山あり、漢字を使い分けていますが、日本人は漢字の選択に殆ど苦労しません。
そして知らない漢字があっても書き順はあまり間違えないと思います。部首などのパーツで認識できるからです。部首やパーツの書き順はほとんど決まっています。書き順を間違えると漢字全体のバランスが悪くなり格好の悪い字になります。
また部首にもそれぞれ意味があり、知らない漢字でも、パーツの意味から読み方や漢字全体の意味を推察できます。
漢字を書くことは大切ですが、その漢字の適切な使い方や意味を正しく認識するほうが大切だと思います。『憂鬱』が書けても使い方や意味を間違えるほうが、書けないことより恥ずかしいことだと思います。
Читать иероглифы всё равно придётся.
Я считаю если человек смог по памяти написать иерголиф, значит он его хорошо выучил.
Увидеть иероглиф и вспомнить что он значит легче, чем самим вспомнить и написать.
@@ВладимирРеволюционер What's going on here, lmao. Why did you reply to him in Russian
@@kjullthedemon Потому что я русский.
@@ВладимирРеволюционер well you should stop being Russian then
Cómo hispanohablante me alivia un poco saber que hasta los mismos japoneses tienen problemas para escribir los kanjis
Ya que en si the English It is really difficult because of its pronunciation (which does not agree with what is written and changes a lot)
Et le français Avec sa prononciation compliquée de mots et ses signes qui n'existent pas dans ma langue 漢字と仮名を組み合わせた日本語では、3つの言語すべてを考えたり話したりすることが困難になっているため、困難を抱えているのは私だけではないことを知ってほっとしています 漢字
(Ancient) Japanese people: “This new system of writing called Kanji from our neighboring country will improve our literature and knowledge”
Also (current) Japanese people: “can’t we just use hiragana instead?”
Edit: just FYI, I’m Japanese and I’ve been studying Kanji for more than 15 years so I know how people are stressed about memorizing complex Kanji, though the ones appeared in this video aren’t that hard😂😂 That’s why many Japanese people in the comment section are kinda confused, aware that many non-Japanese might think that Japanese people can’t even use their mother tongue correctly. Please understand that those that are interviewed in this video don’t represent Japanese as a whole, they’re just a part of massive population and there are MANY people, even middle school students, who can understand every Kanji appeared in the video.
It's difficult to communicate using only Hiragana cuz our syllable is very simple and there's a lot of meaning for a word read in the same way...
That's why we're still using Kanji unlike Korean language.
Y T hahah yeah true but watching people not being able to write or read in Kanji makes me doubt the usefulness of it😂 not sure if you’re Japanese (you used ‘our’ so probably you are??) but anyways 必要最低限の漢字以外は辞書とか自動変換とか使わないと完璧に覚えてられないからどうせならアルファベットみたいな感じになってれば覚えやすいのにな〜って思いました笑笑 教養として一般で使われてる言葉くらいは書けて/読めて当然でないといけないだろうと思いますが...。まあ全部ひらがなだと読むのめんどくさいし細かいニュアンスも伝わらないしなので結局は極論ですよね
The extra sad thing is realizing that they adopted hiragana _after_ kanji, and just never bothered to transition fully.
"Alright guys, our language has way too many homonyms, and using spaces is off the table. How do we make sure people can tell what we're writing to them?"
"How about we use chinese characters. some of them are virtually identical to hiragana and katakana, like 夕 and タ, the more complex ones are all literally made of combinations of the basic ones, and sometimes they're related to their radicals, but usually not. And each one has like 4 to 6 different readings depending on the word they're in. And sometimes they just have a unique reading that you just have to know."
"Well, do they at least make it easier to write lengthy words?"
"Here's a 56 stroke kanji. If you draw any of the strokes in the wrong order, it will be illegible."
Didn't hiragana come after Kanji?
Yes can't they
0:40 She missed a left stroke in the letter meaning fight. Remember when I was a kid, this is a common mistake to make. And my teacher told me that a fighter without a knife is no fighter at all.
is she fighting sugar?
@@sauusa6294 😂😂😂😂 糖
I dont get what youre talking
@@aye2you He was refering to 戦 (fight), where learners occasionally mistaken the part 戈 with 弋.
Pictogramically, it looks like a warrior without whos sword/knife (that missing stroke).
@@firstnamelastname3367 ok a i get it now thanks
"We can just use hiragana" made my day xD
@@RadkeMaiden We laugh at them for being salty at Taiwan
@@RadkeMaiden I laugh at Chinese people, because they are not allowed to criticise their government.
It's litteraly me trying to learn Japanese :')
@@RadkeMaiden and the rest of the world laugh at Chinese
What a relief
That genuinely made me feel so much better! I’m learning Japanese at the moment and can never retain Kanji, I have no idea why.
We need only to read Kanzi.
For example, Most Japanese can read “檸檬” （lemon）.
But Most Japanese can’t write it
柠檬
@@georgeshen943 that is simplified chinese? (簡體字?)
@@randomperson3974 yes
Just like in China, everybody reads 戊戌, but they just don’t know which one is which one.
my eyes are paining, did u squeeze some lemons?
Chinese people: I learnt those when i was 5.
that's quite true though, I was learning characters when I was 4...
@@fungyuncoi4818 I could not hold a pencil when I was 4 years old. you guys are perfect
@@gizemkara9004 there is always an Asian better than you at everything- someone I think
@@heylol1 No one had to. Why do you think it’s called a comment section?
lmao not all but like they dont have the exact same meaning and have COMPLETELY different pronounciation and that just gets on my nerves and make me lose motivation to learn japanese T-T
the man in the glasses and suit was on point. didn't miss any.
he was very educated I wonder what kind of work he has to do at his job
***** if you say so
I will assume he mainly works in an office perhaps dealing with alot of documents and alot of people that work in that field (in Japan) if they have a career they are usually are Law graduates which is quite heavy on the use of Kanjis that most normal folk at Japan dont tend to use everyday
His suit was pretty neat
how is his entire career being discussed with his outfit being the only thing we know about him? 😂
Thank you for these videos! ありがとございます
Me: I will learn Kanji
Japanese person: No
Me: I will not learn Kanji
*Japasene person: の
いいえ
꧁Twilight UnderSky꧂
What house..?
シ ダークローズDarkRose oops I forgot about the extra い lol
꧁Twilight UnderSky꧂
へえ…
Me: trying to learn Japanese so I can read manga
That one kanji: how would you like to die
How is your progress?
@@ericperez7750 last year i read 1 manga and now i read like 10
Oh about the study? Yeah it's boring and i think it's not needed for now
Oh ok lol. but you obviously read the manga in Japanese right?
@@ericperez7750 a bit late response but holy crap man now i have a very great idea to cobtinue my japanese study
Maybe this reading manga in japanese isn't a very bad idea after all
@@thatguy7155
oh ok, hope you continue studying!
Japanese language (日本語)
American「🤔」
Englishman「🤔」
Japanese 「🤔」
“Japanese language?” I’m still learning
Chinese：😁
japanese could also be 日本人 if it's nationality
Aint that "go" after "nihon" means Japanese language?
@@deadman9455 Are you replying to me or OP?
Actually, the Japanese government once debated abolishing the Kanji system during the Meiji Restoration, but for various reasons it decided against it. It took years for South Korea to completely phase out the use of Kanji, because newspapers and other printed medium kept using Kanji until the internet started to take over as a preferred medium for delivering news. On the other hand, North Korea phased it out relatively quickly it for the purpose of increasing the literacy rate.
If Japan were to do away with the Kanji system they should have done it long time ago like Korea. There are too many written works and records that will need to be edited/re-written that the process of phasing out the Kanji system will take much longer that it took South Korea. In other words, it is too late now to abolish Kanji, so Japan is better of sticking with it.
Why would they want it abolished?
I disagree with you because it's easier to change it now since most things are virtual. And if you never start you'll never achieve, later is better than never.
@@natanoliveira554
Japan, which lagged behind Western countries in terms of modernization, sought to modernize in various ways. One of these was the abolition of kanji writing. This was because Japan believed that a complicated writing system such as Kanji was hindering the modernization of its own country. Some of them thought that the Japanese language should be abolished and the alphabet should be unified.
@@低燃費エコドライブ少年 I think it’s Japanese unique feature that exists kanji,hiragana,katakana 3 writing system.
In Meiji era many foreign word is translated using kanji but today people prefer to use katakana.Sometimes I think katakana is too long to read.Although kanji is hard for writing but easy for grasping meanings
1945年時点で識字率が95%以上であったため、廃止する必要がないという結論に達しました
It's good to know that I'm not alone with forgetting how to write certain kanji! Reading kanji is much easier!
LeSweetpea so I'm guessing that's a normal problem yeah?
If I can read, that's good enough right?
For sure!
Yes, totally! It gives me so much more confidence to continue learning Japanese - seeing other people mess up the kanji) Ee, subarashi!!!
I love Kanji thou XD
Its like recognizing people's faces doesn't mean you can draw them from memory.
I found it interesting when an English word was used to clarify a Japanese one. (As in "battle") "Oh, that one!"
Battle is actually used quite often in Japanese as a direct loan word. But it's quite common for East Asian language speakers to require clarification when no context is provided for a word. A peculiarity of Mandarin is its abundance of homophones, which were passed on to Japanese and Korean.
i think "sentou" has more than one meaning and hence kanji, so he just said the word in English so they could easily get which sentou he is about
Yeah, that was fascinating. The amount of context required in Japanese is pretty crazy sometimes. English and most western languages seem to rely on context much less.
That was the first thing I noticed. I was surprised at the odd words that have infested Japanese.
The odd words are usually differentiated by melody. This is also the difference between men's and women's. If picking up the case 「戦闘」and「銭湯」the first is Sen-tou and the second is sen-tou. Women know the meaning of sen-tou「銭湯」 but doesn't use it. They rather use "O-yu." It is also used for "bath" not for public bath and only includes the meaning of bath-tub. In short a bath room is independent from toilets in Japanese house.
me:maybe i can learn kanji,maybe its not that hard.
japanese ppl:kanji is hard.
Me:okay.
2000 characters. What are they useful for? Saving some space
I wanna die it also speeds up the reading I think, because the character suggests the meaning itself, while for the other two, you kinda have to mix them up to make sentences, and others would have to separate and recognize words themselves
I wanna die they are the language____chinese
I’m a non-Chinese person living in Hong Kong, and I feel like Kami-sama after seeing these people fail.
@@hugebuffman3619 Kanji is also easier to read, it's just hard to write and learn.
This is Japan in Hiragana:
にほん
This is Japan in Kanji:
日本
Sentences:
田中さん日本はあそこだ。
たなかさんにほんはあそこだ。
The top sentence is Hiragana and Kanji,
the bottom sentence is just Hiragana.
For me the top sentence is easier to read because the words are easier to identify. It's like saying 'one plus one equals two' instead of 1 + 1 = 2
Kanji also helps to prevents the confusion between hiragana 'ha' with the particle 'wa' which is written with the same character, any word that has ha in it tends to be in Kanji like 話 (hanashi).
Finally no it's not just space it also helps to combat against homonyms by using different Kanji, because like English, Japan has some as well.
As someone who learned Japanese since last September and started living in Japanese for about 2 months now, I prefer seeing and reading kanji, but to write them, it’s a whole another level 😂 I can recognise them while typing yes but writing it out is almost impossible 😂
Imagine yourself trying to learn a language that even the native speakers have a hard time with.
So every language?
@@verybarebones haha no, some languages are easy
@@mayoiko that doesnt mean native speakers don't struggle with them. Care to mention any language simple enough that no native speakers commit typos on?
@@verybarebones i never see any native speaker struggle with my native language, and most of us dont just speak the national language we also speak more specific local language too, languages are not equally hard or easy, the world is big, open your eyes
@@verybarebones typo is not the same thing as not knowing the spelling/meaning, typo is just happen by accident. not the same as people who cant tell difference between "their" and "they're"
i feel like reading is much easier than writing in japanese. remembering the symbols and writing them down from scrach is much harder than recognizing what which one they are.
Yes, that is true.
I’m Japanese and I think it’s true
That is true
Me: Aight I think I'm decent at writing Hiragana and Katakana.
*kanji exists*
なに??
何‽‽‽
Yeahh 😂😂
nani ⁉️⁉️‼️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️
@Pink Cut Interrobang
何ですか？
Algo que me he dado cuenta en los meses que llevo estudiando japonés es que los kanjis los puedes reconocer fácilmente cuando los lees, sin embargo la dificultad está cuando tienes que escribirlos
Parece que ya no es una distreza necesaria en el siglo XXI
"We can just use Hiragana." Most beautiful thing I've ever heard. 700 Kanji in and I'm going to pull my hair out.
Have you ever tried Anki?
@@tsunderebluu4943 yes, I have it installed, I also use WaniKani. Still, it's intense once you've been doing it every day for 3 months.
@@Yarsig I'm dying here too. Still every time I read fan fic from some of my favorite manga series, I get encouraged again. It's a vicious circle.
@Имран Захаев yeah, but if we remove kanji and insert spaces, we'll get 4 years for free, 4 years of not having to learn kanji lol...
sure fucking hope it's good for the brain as you say, or maybe I'll have no space left once I learn kanji.
So, legit answer to the question (from someone who shouldn't have any authority on this whatsoever:
They use kanji because it separates words from particles. I don't have japanese on my phone, so I'm going to have to romaji it; if you saw in hiragana "ha ha ha ha..." You wouldn't know where one word began and another ended (mostly because the hiragana for "ha" can be used as the subject particle pronounced "wa". The start of the sentence was "ha ha wa ha..." With ha ha meaning mother)
*Me studying *: why the hell do I need to learn this?
My mom: imagine someone comes up to you and ask you about this and you don't know what a shame
Me: wh- who would do that?
*how my mom expects ppl to ask me:*
that's literally my dad
This is me and mom lol
Dude I understand you so fking much.
You just never know when a random RUclips channel might do it 🤔
Japanese people: kanji is pretty hard
Chinese people: that’s what we write on the daily
Ya, this is what we learned daily. But the fact, we can't even write it out on the spot too🤣🤣🤣
I mean some of the words are different from Chinese.
But the word 贿赂 quite similar to chinese, but yet, I can't write it without handphone
@@christinetay6646 It's the same in Traditional Chinese though.
@@HingYok is it?? 😂😂
My traditional chinese is bad
@@HingYok Fun fact: some of the words are not the same as traditional chinese
I remember writing in Chinese for the first time and it is so difficult for me so I assume it would be the same as Japanese Kanji. But the thing is that not all Kanji gives me the struggle to write for those that has less than ten strokes. Like a year ago, I was enjoying writing in Japanese, and yes I also wrote Kanjis with a lot of strokes. Imagine everything in Japanese are just Hiragana and Katakana since Kanji came from China and the Japanese will not struggle writing their letters just like how we write in English.
if japanese people cant remember how am i supposed to 😭😭
With this: ruclips.net/video/sspUdoV9Il0/видео.html
you are not, why would you want to speak a vocabulary no one else speaks lol
Seudofonix its best to learn if youre wanting to write and read? cant read subtitles or books without knowledge of it
@@crow4834 You have to learn more kanjis, when you find a hard one you will be able to read it because of its parts, but not write it
@@musevms I was talking about the complex kanjis / kanjis of words that are rarely used, even japanese people don't know some kanjis, so why would anyone learning japanese learn the kanjis not even japanese people know?
"Sentou?"
"Sentou as in 'battle' "
"OH!"
We have several words which read “Sentou”.
For example, 戦闘(battle), 銭湯(Public bath), 先頭(the front of a line), 千頭(1000 of animals).
So he probably got confused about which SENTOU
@@はひ-s9z That's fair. How much will the fare cost to get us to the fair? Fare well.
CopShowGuy what do you mean?
@@はひ-s9z English has many words that sound the same as well. Fair, fare, fair, and fare all sound the same but all four have different meanings.
CopShowGuy I got it lol
Reading Kanji is easy… but writing… is a whole different story
がんばってください✨
@@るか-r4l thanks for hiragana atleast I can read it
@@るか-r4l it is kanbatte kudasai
@@Diamond-pv3bp yes!😍thanks for learning Japanese.
How am I supposed to read kanji tho? Like I don’t understand I just memorize it
This video makes me feel more confident in just by seeing this. I thought that learning like all of kanji was like the base of Japanese so it stunned my motivation but I’m glad to see some people share my pain. 😂
Anyone: hey maybe learning Japanese would be fu-
Kanji: I’m gonna stop you right about there amigo
I find learning kanji fun but I guess I'm an exception due to the comments
@@bing123go no disrespect to japanese but having a unique drawing for every word defeats the purpose of a writing system.
@@darrenfleming7901 There isnt quite a unique character for every word. There are just about 2500 regularly used kanji, for about 15000 words, which is the general average a Japanese person may know.
Youcsn learn Japanese.
It’s just the writing system that is difficult.
@@deo. i would rather kms like fr, no offense.
The first girl is like "jesus stop asking me to write these damn words!"
+DisEkript true lolol
still very cute girl but her reaction is just like "Oh God I forgot these exist"
+DisEkript Lol
+Rick Butler I love 'em cute ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
+Rick Butler Actually, if she would have known all the Kanji the situation wouldn't allow her to act so cutely.
I always wonder how Japanese students are able to complete their test in time writing kanji
Now I know they don't
Lmao
@Lauchianto k my bad
Oh ok
Most Japanese students can write most of the kanji. That's because they study hard. On tests, you have to write all the basic things you learned in class in kanji to get a score.
The reason why the people in the video can't write kanji is because they have fewer opportunities to study now that they are working, and also because they don't have the chance to use the kanji themselves on a daily basis.
From a high school student in Japan.
@@suno6423 Are there times when you may forget or not know a kanji letter?
Advice to fellow learners of the Japanese language: learning Kanji is not the same as learning a phonetic system (such as kana, Cyrillic, or the latin alphabet, all of which you can learn within a week), it's a different concept altogether. Learning Kanji is like learning words or word stems. You're just never going to master the Kanji if you're stuck in the western mentality. It's supposed to take a few years to learn, so be patient.
Cold hearted truth 😓
"a few years"
Good stuff
Sorry but I'm not taking advices from Ben Shapiro fan...
@@glory1356 What does that have to do with learning Japanese? 👀
@@glory1356 My advice to YOU: Don't learn. Forget about the kanji and stick to the hiragana. Stay on the beginner level and leave the kanji to the experts.
That's my advice to all the trolls. 😁
It's amazing to see on a psychologic view how the more unsure they are of the answer the smaller their writing and viceversa.
Nero Deserto werent there also some big mistakes too?
@@nekokna Yeah, but you can be wrong and confident for sure.
Me a japanese: laughs at them for not knowing
Me a Japanese: not remembering learning any of this
Hey, I'm learning Japanese, I'm quite at the beggining - i've learned just some grammar, hiragana and katakana, some radicals (I'm trying to learn them first to make learning Kanji easier) and I'm almost finishing learning the first grade's kanji. How much kanji do you think I still have to learn to be able to read decently, like, get most of the meaning of japanese twitters? I'm asking to you because you're a native and I've never actually spoken to a native japanese before (English is not my native language either, I'm brazilian)
@@joaovitordemelo8209 to speak decently learn the most common 2000 kanji. Look up most common 2000 kanji and go from most to least common. This is a good strategy for any language
@@davidribosome4326 That's what I'm doing, with Anki's help (a spaced-repetition software that helps memorization). First, I learned all common radicals (about 214), and then, I started learning kanji by making mnemonics using the radicals. I'm learning 20 new kanji per day and constantly reviewing it, and the order I'm using it's the order japanese people learn in school (because i read that is more didatic than the JLPT order)
@@davidribosome4326 After learning all kanji (and meanwhile I'm already acquiring some vocabulary and grammar notions) I plan to learn japanese itself. I think it will be easier for me this way (like learning an alphabet and then moving to the language, but in this case the alphabet has 2000+ words)
@@joaovitordemelo8209 NICE. Im doing the same. Good luck :)
0:11 nope, learning Japanese while at 70% fluency in Chinese means I almost exclusively use kanji when possible
面白いです! I’m a Japanese and I don’t write kanji in my daily life. In our daily life, we type hiragana to the computer and it changes them to kanji. Although we learn many kanji from elementary school to high school, we forget them after graduation😂. All we need is that we can read them. That’s why some people like 1:25 notice that the kanji they write is not correct(=something is wrong) but they can’t write the correct ones.
Kanji is one of Japanese but sometimes I feel like that remembering kanji is similar to remember foreign language.(Of course it’s much easier than studying foreign language though)
In schools, we have English-Japanese / Japanese-English dictionary to learn English. Similarly, we have kanji-Japanese dictionary to learn kanji.
This is not a perfect comparison but that sounds like learning to write in cursive as an English speaker. You can read it pretty easily but you very rarely need to write it, and so you forget how to.
Haha. I find writing cursive really easy - it's trying to decide what I wrote (or my parents!) that is tricky!!!
Thanks for the insight in how Japanese write today!
@@LadyPelikan I haven't used it since middle school I think so I gradually forgot how to write in it. My signature has also devolved into a series of squiggles, haha. Glad that some people still use it though.
@@KingKuuga I write both notes, lettres and diary. But I like paper, stationary and books (as objects), and I know I'm not representative.
When a system is so complicated that the natives struggle
jak sam To be fair, majority of Americans can’t distinguish their there and they’re. Or using “an” before a vowel so the average Japanese are smarter than the average American.
rxd also, they don’t know how to use commas when they’re making a list.
rxd or they misspell easy words like “realise”
Your and you're
rxd also I’m pretty sure other countries that have English as the primary language will make those same mistakes
Foreigner: Menu
Japanese: 献立
Me, an intellectual: メニュー
Edit: 1K likes!!! Thanks guys
That's what duolingo taught me to say lol
@@ivankoh3779 even duolingo just gave up
めぬ?
*AVENGERS THEME PLAYS*
@its cat what are u trying to say?
I can't believe it has been 8 years since this video was uploaded. I remember watching it years ago like it was yesterday.
Japanese cannot write kanji correctly due to PC and smartphone.But they can choose kanji properly on PC and smartphone.Literacy rate is 99%.
There are 2000 chinese characters for daily use.
@Error_404 PL It is not very different from chinese at all, many of the traditional hanzi (traditional chinese) characters is being used in Kanji, and many simplified hanzi characters has been simplified in the same way as kanji.
Teach me japanese
It makes sense. I'm a Chinese, but due to PC and smartphone, sometimes I cannot write correctly either.
Error_404 PL
Tsu and Shi
or
N and So
I have a harder time differentiating N and So rather than Tsu and Shi, because there are only two strokes.
The hardest thing about Japanese is learning how to pronounce a certain Kanji character in different instances. Chinese being a tonal language family and Japanese being not, there are a lot of homophones.
Yi Zhou 对啊
Me: learned hiragana and katakana in Japanese language but have been crying in toilet for hours seeing kanji.
Japanese: (confused about kanji)
Me : (stays confused too)👀
I read “Wairou” as “Wario” help
Are ya coding son
曾彥茗 *fake* yandere dev
fair
i read it as 'Wayrow'
Alex, you should be learning how to code not how to talk japanese f off.
Very well updating of these old videos that i enjoyed watching! Very good memories
I'm happy i can still enjoy these videos, and wondered how you managed renew or update. Fantastic. Very good job you did, beautiful
The suited man is my hero he knows how to write everything in a beautiful way
His handwriting was god awful actually.
@@leejiale3970 It's bad. 2:15 was good.
Me learning Japanese: "How the hell do they learn all those letters?"
Japanese People: "Why can't we just use Hiragana?"
tell them to write a story in Hiragana. They will be like I am learning Kanji quickly as possible.
@@fasddfadfgasdgs why?
@@miruz3519 becauseit'dbelikereadingthisandtryingtomakesenseofitallasyoureaditatyournormalreadingpacelol
@@kefler187 I had pain reading that but I did
@@kefler187 because it'd be like reading this and trying to make sense of it all as you read it at your normal reading pace lol
Me being new to learning Japanese: Yes I managed to learn Hiragana in just a few weeks!
Kanji: Oh hello there..
Katakana: "Sorry to bump in, but...."
I AM HERE!
I am pretty fluent in hiragana(reading and writing) after like 3 hours now. Learning katakana rn, and I don’t wanna start kanji. Looks overwhelming xD
@@poof9327
Pretty easy once u master the first 2
@@qamar1041 cap
I started learning Japanese a couple of days ago and so far I have learnt Hirakana and after thinking that I'd need to memorise Kanji I thought it would be a disaster to learn, but this... Does put a smile on my face.
EDIT: Actually screw kanji I am not learning this. Surely I will be fine with Hiragana and Katakana.
It depends on what your goals are, if you want to focus on speaking or understanding Japanese, Kanji might not be necessary, but not studying them at all can make everything more complicated :')
"We can just use hiragana",
Finally, someone who understands me.
fr 😭
and what if you want write foreign words? you gonna to write in katakana.
@@robertcastel1565 They were only asked to write 'domestic words' (Kanji) in this video though, hence they mentioned wanting to use hiragana instead.
It’s actually more frustrating in some situations if only hiragana is used. Because in Japanese, there are so many words with same pronunciation but different meanings. I actually prefer reading materials with kanji.
@@danieltran9634 People would never talk about their mother again
Too scared to write the nonsense ははは looks like
Well, I feel better now that I know Japanese people have trouble learning Kanji.
me too....
hahahaha same
wickedninja8599 Lol same
I wonder how much more (or less) difficult it could be for the Chinese.
I am Chinese and my mum taught me very well when I was learning how to write. Words that contain 貝(it means shell) in it usually are related to money as shells were money back in thousands years ago. Therefore, for “wairo”--賄賂 is related to money. There are also some other words that have secret relationship between each other sometimes but I’m not gonna list them all out as it’ll be too long
Matthew Tse please do
Wow so it isn't random. That'll make it easier to learn once you know some. Like a snowball going off a mountain.
y=Yea the book remembering kanji talks about that too. honestly the best book to learn kanji is from there. it attach's story's into each kanji that it would be very hard to forget. like i'm actually learning about 50 kanji a day from that book and its grilled into my head. i'm honestly so greatful for that book because before it was so hard for me to remember before. So I highly recommend it for people that are learning kanji. you can find it online.
NoviMusic where I need it!!😭🤣
@@lullaby_xx0324 What is the title of the book please ?
読めはするけど書けって言われたら難しいよね
I am a high-school student. Almost all of the students can write this level of kanji.
But we don’t always use them so you don’t worry about that you can’t.
Personally, I feel adults can’t remember kanji more than young people because they don’t often write kanji.
It is the most important that you can read them. Then you will never have trouble living in Japan.
Do you think education in the future will reduce teaching how to write kanji by hand? I've learned to read hundreds of kanji, but I can't write any. It doesn't seem very important when most communication and documents are typed.
@@kaciewolverton2692
In my opinion, it won’t be changed.
I think it is necessary to learn kanji. Then we don’t have to practice writing them by hand but I feel it's the best way to remember them.
Actually, it is not so important to be able to write down them but we sometimes have trouble when typed them.
This is because we have hundreds of thousands homonyms kanji such as こうしょう. There are 48 ways to write the word in kanji so I can’t choose kanji I should use correctly in case I don’t usually use.
For me, it's embarrassing for a Japanese person to make a mistake in Kanji, so I'm studying it.
My English is poor but I hope it conveys my point to you😊
but in order to live in Japan you will have to fill out a lot of forms and do a lot of paperwork in the Japanese language to be able to legally reside in Japan.
@@さも-t9h How it's possible than one of the countries with most highest education in the world and the people it's unable to write in his own language? it seems very weird to me.
@@robertcastel1565 Nowadays they almost never have to fill out forms. I guess the paperwork you mentioned is almost once in a lifetime.
me: *laughs in hiragana and katakana*
broo kana is such a breeze, kanji is fucking hell
フヘへ。。
Same tho
Yup but the problem is, although you can communicate with only kana, you virtually can't read Japanese without Kanji cause they use Kanji in pretty much every sentence..
へへ はは (´༎ຶོ◡༎ຶོ`)
笑笑
as long as you can read and recognize it i guess.
The likes....don't wanna spoilt it so imma comment..
I was scared of kanji at first but man they feel so convenient and make sentences easier to read (when you know them). If they didn't exist, I think it would be painful to read, especially for beginners. They help you to know where words start, where are the particles, verbs...
Don't be scared of them, kings and queens on the internet, they are your friends not your enemies. Learn vocabulary and read some texts, and these quirky symbols will become familiar to you
some of those look complicated as hell to remember XD
so do they not use it for everyday things then?
true but in japan they have so many different forms of writting right? or am i wrong?
+Jordy Uk Once you start to learn them they're not as complicated as they look because most difficult looking kanji are made up of similar components.
not really if you're Chinese like me ;)
FiveADay Kanji
And in 7th grade youre just a mindless blob, huh? XD
Yuta! That was awesome! I'm studying kanji, because I'd like to be able to read Japanese novels eventually. It's nice to know that even Japanese people have trouble sometimes.
But I'm curious, I assume these people would have no trouble reading the kanji they got wrong if they saw it in a book or newspaper. Is that correct? They only have trouble remembering how to WRITE the kanji, but not how to read it.
That's correct.
+Silvie Monk But don't asssume you can read every novel after you studied the joyo Kanji. I know Japanese people that can't even read one complete page of a Mishima Yukio novel without looking up words in a dictionary. And those are educated people. You'll have to use dictionaries quite often as well (depending on the novels of course, Kirino Natsuo for example is way easier than Futabatei Shimei.)
+mamamandora I don't assume I'll make it far enough at all. It's the journey.
+mamamandora Usually Japanese people don't use dictionary when they read book, They can guess the meanigs from the Kanji even if they don't know the meanings. So MIshima is no problem for most of them. I like Mishima too.
Japanese people TOLD ME that they find Mishima difficult. If you can read his stuff, fine.
I once asked for some help I needed for a translation and in some cases those people couldn't help me at all. I am talking about at least six different people. And "guessing" the meaning, come on, really? I know how this "guessing" works.
Based on what I know, Japanese people learn a few set of kanji per grade which could probably reach 1000+ kanji characters after graduating, then they might forget the difficult ones for not using it daily and by choosing the hiragana version of the difficult kanji...
Which means people who wants to learn the Japanese language should focus on the commonly used kanji characters...
Supposedly, if you know the most common ~750 kanji, you'll be able to read and write average-level texts at about 90% coverage. Of course, there are more uncommon kanji that are used in people's names and sometimes read in totally wild ways, but at least you only have to hear the name once to understand it.
漢字はその1文字だけでも意味を持つし、組み合わせて更に意味を持たせられる。音の響きが優先されるひらがなと、外来の印象を与えるカタカナ、これに加えて漢字があると読む時に細かな表現まで込められた意味をしっかり伝えられるから読みやすいんだよな。でも画数が多いと書くとなると普段からよく使う文字じゃないと忘れる字が多い。問題なく読めるけど書けない漢字が多いというより、読ませるための文字だからって感じかなあ
The business guy knew bribe lmao
*ironic*
Woudn't you need to if you were one?
Me as native chinese speaker: why cant we just use kanji
Have you ever seen ancient chinese poems as Japanese texts? It’s kind of beautiful
I was starting to wonder if no one was going to point out that it would be much easier for a Chinese speaker to learn kanji. Thank you for vindicating my belief.
Remington Lamey Not quite. You know the meaning, though not exactly the same all the time, and that’s it. Japanese way of reading kanji is complicated as hell
As a native chinese (I speak Cantonese), it’s easy for us to recognise and write Kanji, but the meaning in Chinese isn’t always the same as in Japanese. When I pick up Japanese products at supermarkets I just skim for Kanji and get a rough meaning of it😂😂😂
@@remingtonlamey3464 Plus, sometimes the pronunciation isn't anywhere close to being the same in the two languages. It can be more confusing than if you didn't know any kanji to begin with. My brain wants to think the Chinese pronunciation when I see the Japanese kanji.
In the West, research has been done (and widely publicized) suggesting that people read entire words in "romanji," instead of reading them letter by letter. They simply look at the first and last letters, and then fill in the rest of the word, even if the letters are mis-spelled.
My point being, that if any similar effect exists with regard to kanji, then it might explain some of the results here: Japanese people might well be used to reading the entire character at a glance, instead of picking apart, and hence remembering, the individual components.
But that's just speculation on my part.
+Nick Hentschel Going by my experiences in learning Chinese Hanzi I think that's completely correct. I can read a character and know what it is at a glance but if I think about it to write them I can't pick out the individual parts of the character to write it, unless it's a frequently used word.
I agree here, being exposed to "kanji" throughout my life in chinese and japanese settings. In a vague sense, I can tell when a character is written as it should, however when it is written wrong I occasionally cannot tell you exactly what is off. My experience however is only being a 二世, however I get this feeling from my mother all the time when I ask for help.
+Nick Hentschel I think you're right, because I study Chinese and I often have no problems in reading words that I already know, but when I'm going to write them down, I forget a part of the character even though I have a visual idea of how the character looks, in my mind.
+Nick Hentschel If you have learned a foreign language before, you'll know that "recalling" and "recognising" are totally different skills.
"Recognising" includes reading and listening. Sometimes I call this as "passive language skill". It's the one that you can learn quite quickly from textbooks.
"Recalling" includes writing and speaking. This is the one that needs a lifetime practice.
Being able to read a kanji doesn't mean you can write it because they're different set of skills.
Kevin Setiadi That could also be a factor, yes. But please don't assume that it's something I "should" know already.
best thing about kanji is that you can guess what the word means if you know the kanji, like "atherosclerosis" is kinda confusing, but as "動脈硬化" you can at least comprehend that your veins are getting stiff because it literally means it in the name.
That’s very interesting. In English one can guess stiffening veins only if they were taught their Greek and Latin “root words”. Most that go into medical profession do
The words 動脈·硬化 literally mean vein & stiffening. That advantage is not from the writing system but how the word is phrased. You can still create a word “vein-stiffening” with the writing system of English.
@audrey_belrose 火箭🚀firearrow 火車🚆firecar? I don't believe that English words can be allowed to be invented in this way.
@audrey_belrose 動move脈pulse 硬hard化turn change movepulsehardturn?
Each Chinese character has only one syllable, so Chinese characters can be combined as you want. English words cannot be combined like Chinese.
I think most people tend to recognize kanji but asking them to write it difficult as shown
Yeah, like the phrase "I'd know it if I saw it."
Fun Fact:
"Kanji" has often been described by Japanese people as the hardest part of the Japanese language.
(Though to Chinese speakers learning Japanese....it's the *EASIEST*)
ye kanji sucks xD would be so much easie when japanese change it to only hirgana and katakana or even romanji so ppls dont have to learn any symbol and it would be easy : Ohayo gozaimasu! Genki desu ka?
OverwatchGameplays No way, pal!!! Kanji is so much better!!
+Jinhunter Slay Writing in kanji is an art
Obviously. It's like learning Latin as a Spanish speaker I would struggle. But if A latin speaker learned Italian or Spanish it would be *easier* for them. Kanji derived from Chinese. But I heard that Cantonese for Mandarin speakers is hard. So to each there own.
+Luxaly God no, that is awful. we mite as wel write lyke dis in inglish. Romaji isn't proper and just help sound it out. Common used Kanji isn't that hard to learn. Lazy bum.
Coco _ i agree
Japanese:*can't remember Kanji*
Chinese: Literally the entire language is similar to Kanji
Chinese： Only Hanzi 汉字 （Kanji 漢字）
What do you mean "similar"? 'Kan'(漢) from word "Kanji" literally means "Mandarin" , so "Kanji" translates to "Mandarin's Characters"....
Both systems are inefficient to learn. The time spent learning to read and write should be minimal to focus the youth on learning as much as possible in their developmental years.
Chinese is not similar to Kanji
IT IS THE *KANJI*
@@onemanorchestra9095 yeah but there are still some differences. pronunciation as well.
I remember my Japanese teacher in HS (1st ever American class in the curriculum!) was teaching us some basic kanji, and she explained how they imagine things to memorize them. For example chichi; father, is "two swords crossed to defend the family." We had the "chomen" notebooks to practice hira/kata, so I'm able to read/write those fluently at least.
Cute!
"it's basically chinese but stolen by japanese"
*- my asian mom 2019*
It is,
@@LastBastion y u gotta be toxic to my english? i speak 🇳🇱 🇨🇳
@@Zh3nx ._.
Your mom's statement is actually correct 😁
Asianchickensoup I think that they were just agreeing with you, like oh yeah, it is
Too harsh, it's more a drawing experience rather than simply "stole"
This is actually understandable. If you think about English, even if you see certain words in books or on the internet it doesnt mean you know how to spell them.
hannah eee except kanji has certain stroke patterns. When get the patterns wrong, it's actually a big deal
I've never looked at a word in a book and lacked the ability to spell a word I just read.
Speak for yourself.
Me, a Japanese person who lives in England: *I'm glad I wasn't wandering around there at that time*
4:47 This man wrote every word given accurately and easily, I noticed and was really impressed with him throughout the video. In particular, he is even extremely humble.