Today I came across a post saying how learning kanji is the literal definition for excruciating pain and honestly it’s not the first time I saw something like that.. Do that much people hate them ? Why ? I personally love Kanji, I love writing them and discovering the etymology behind each words. I find them beautiful, like it’s an art form imo lol. I’d say I would have more struggle to learn vocabulary if I didn’t learn the associated kanji..🥲
Do Japanese learners really hate kanji that much?
Discussionにわのにわにはにわのにわとりはにわかにわにをたべた
(Niwa no niwa ni wa niwa no niwatori wa niwaka ni wani wo tabeta)
vs
にわの庭には二羽の鶏は俄に鰐を食べた
Nearly had a stroke trying to read that
It feels like Japanese effectively uses particles (の, に, を, etc) and kanji as punctuation.
In "academic" japanese there isn't exactly punctuation , so in many cases that's exactly the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_punctuation
Kanji is mostly required since Japanese has so many words that sound identical (maybe a little pitch accent) but mean different things in context. Since you can't write pitch accent, it's often the case that a sentence is broken up with hiragana and kanji, and even katakana to separate sentences and ideas. They've got some neat punctuation now in modern use that we don't have too though, like the "next part, next person" marker.
Reads like something a character would say from the Monogatari series.
Omg that‘s so true 😂
Missing the nyas.
Thanks I hate it 😂
This argument has been around forever and it's a horrible one. 1. You can find sentences like this one in every language ever. 2. Obviously if you remove kanji you need to use spaces. (The horror!)
The only true reason kanji exists is that removing them would be a giant ass hassle and would only help foreign language learners. And honestly, which country would mess up something as fundamental and important as their writing system for a bunch of aliens?
One of the funny things about Japan is that they use spaces in books for kids. I feel like advertising copy uses spaces sometimes, too.
Spaces-between-words technology exists here!
But they think it’s uncool in serious adult books!
I really don’t understand - and hate - that spaces are almost never used. I’m always like “is that a full word or a particle?” Zzz
I don’t know how far you are in your learning journey, but that should become not a problem at for you all after a while. It gets better haha
commonly shared parts of words become "one chunk" after a while; it will become more natural. for example when you see a present participle in english (moving, walking, eating, etc.) your brain is actually recognizing the -ing as one chunk. similarly "〜ている" will start to be chunked by your brain as youre reading, and many other verb structures and whole nouns.
Eventually when you're really good at a language your brain will just chunk entire words and recognize them by shape. You're likely not recognizing individual letters when reading english, only seeing rough shapes.
Without kanji, their distinct shapes are obviously gone, and a lot of hiragana chunks blend into the other kana, and it's a lot harder to parse.
Once you learn kanji (or can read furigana above it), spaces aren’t really necessary because “spaces” are created automatically with the mix of kanji, particles, and hiragana/katakana.
I mean sure but not only is the sentence contrived (I mean is there some circumstance where we imagine someone actually saying that) but spaces would also aid comprehension.
It's a Japanese tongue twister, a more difficult version of the common two chickens in the garden one
(にわにわにわにわにわにわにわとりがいる).
There are plenty tongue twisters in Japanese, for example
すもももももももももも、すもももももももものうち
(A Japanese plum is a peach, a peach is also a peach, both Japanese plums and peaches are a kind of peach)
I know. I’m partial to 魚を追う王を覆おう. But what I mean is, this is not a sentence someone would use to communicate something meaningful. Our writing system isn’t inadequate because it’s difficult to understand what “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” means, because that sentence is just nonsense and not something anyone would actually say.
I feel the same, but to be fair, that's probably just because we are used to it. If Japanese would be written entirely in Hiragana and or Katakana (maybe with spaces between words), we would be used to that and find it not a difficult to read quickly.
Yup the lack of space is probably what makes it so illisible
ThenagainreadinginEnglishoranyotherlanguageyouknowwellwithoutapacesisn'ttoobad.
But it certainly helps.
I read that just fine, but I did take an extra half second to find the end of "language" and "you".
Spaces make all the difference even to native readers.
EVENWORSEITHINKITISLIKEWRITINGINALLCAPSBECAUSEATLESATYOUCAPITALIZEATTHEENDOFTHESENTENCEANDPROPERNOUNS.
Not gonna lie, that was hard to read for me 😅
Yeah having started looking at Korean, spaces are the biggest thing that makes it hard.
I like kanji too but I honestly think Japanese society could live just fine if they had spaces and then pitch accent marks
So true.
If Japanese had gone the Korean route and ditched kanji, people would be like "can you imagine having to learn thousands of characters?"
It's 100% about what you're used to.
Kanji helps with the huge amount of homonyms that require context too though.
Just imagine Korean for example. There are so many words derived from Chinese that sound super similar to the Japanese equivalents and would be written in kanji in Japanese, but are written in Hangul in Korean. Foreign words, Chinese loan words, original Korean words..everything in Hangul. But it’s not that bad.
Yes but Korean has spaces to make it easier to read
So is that the only thing preventing hiragana from being a nice, readable way to present Japanese? I’d assume so, but maybe not. I’m still new to Japanese (but fluent in Korean).
Kanji help with homophones and Japanese has a LOT of homophones. But with spaces it'd probably work OK getting the meaning via context.
Still, kanji won't be going away so I don't understand the griping some people have about it. I'm with you, I think kanji are neat and I like them. I'll admit sometimes I get a mite annoyed when there's a 50 stroke kanji used commonly for a single syllable (looking at you 曜) but meh. Mostly I'm typing not Hans writing so even those aren't so bad
Yes. Every argument about Japanese mixed script was also made about Korean mixed script but they just got rid of it and the sky didn’t fall. The historical context was just different enough that the reformers won out in Korea.
I don't think so. The language has so many repetitive phonetic elements that it would be impractical to write it in pure kana.
Oh, it's definitely easier to read if you know the Kanji. The problem people have with it is that they're having a hard time remembering them. It doesn't take long to remeber all the Hiragana/Katakana so at some point that becomes comfortable enough, but many people struggle to find the right way for them to remember thousands of Kanji. Even if you look online for resources or guides most of them will give you a different strategy that they think is best. It becomes this huge task that they dread doing.
I haven’t studied Japanese in years and I don’t remember how to write most of the kanji that I used to be able to write, but I still recognize them when I see them. Remembering how to read kanji isn’t really that hard for me, it’s the writing if I’m not practicing on a regular basis.
Exactly! It would be a literal nightmare if there weren’t any ! Just imagine reading full hiragana T.T
That's basically just how most languages work though.
The reason why Kanji gets a bad rap is because it's so much work. Like, when you start out, hiragana is this super simple and elegant system that's not too hard to memorize, but then you've got to learn bizarro hiragana (katakana) which is exactly the same but different, so you've doubled the work but it's still relatively small so whatever, no biggie.
But then kanji rolls in and it's thousands upon thousands of characters that all each mean unique things, some have really complex designs that are hard to differentiate, each one can have multiple readings that often sound nothing alike and are barely connected in meaning, etc etc.
It's just super daunting. Once you've learned it, sure, it's easy, but that's... because you've learned it.
I will describe katana as "bizarro hiragana" from now on. It's spot on :D
lol I laughed at the bizarro hiragana :’) But more seriously, I think the approach is what makes it difficult for most learners, especially those who see kanji like a uniform group, a big entity to master. Rather than learning pure kanji with no meaning attached to it, it’s better to learn kanji associated with a vocab word. I think Japanese learners should also know what they’re going into, I often see learners complaining and asking for kanji to disappear, it’s probably irony but still when learning a new language one should know it’s specificities and go with it without trying to change and or fight with it.
The way I explain my distaste for it to my friends back home is that it's like trying to memorize someone else's shorthand. I don't deny it's very convenient when I can quickly parse sentences full of kanji I already have locked in, but I think it's worth mentioning that unlike modern Chinese, there are very few (if any) rules regarding when to use onyoumi/kunyoumi, how certain kanji or compounds mean completely unrelated things to their individual kanji that require a little thinking to understand (looking at you 親切、着服), and the fact that even the bare minimum level required for daily life here is still at least 500 to 600, which is daunting starting out. I can speak at a much higher level than I can read, and it's taken me this long to finally start developing the logical thinking required to intuit kanji I don't know from their radicals and memorize them more quickly. Katakana and the insistence on trying to shorten any word longer than four syllables can go to hell though.
The arc of learning Katakana:
Month 2 of Japanese: oh my god they want me to memorize another alphabet, and some of them are kinda the same but others totally different and there is literally シンツソ and クタケwhich were unrelated marks before how is this legal.
Month 4: holy shit kanji are hard.
Month 6: Katakana are like water on a parched throat, anything for a little familiarity in the sentences im building.
Month 24 / live in Japan/ actually reading Japanese in daily life: Katakana is the worst thing to happen to language period.
Could you elaborate month 24? Why is Katana then suddenly hated? 😅
In my case, it isn't foreign katakana words that I dislike, it's native Japanese ones. For example, I came across a sentence in my reading the other day that started ドキドキイライラムカムカすること and my brain just didn't want to handle it. I had to close the book and think about life for a moment.
Gosh a number of reasons really. The biggest is that at that point you feel quite comfortable with Hiragana and many Kanji, and you can read and understand most things - and use radicals and context to work out Kanji you might not be able to read (if not pronounce without some guidance on reading.)
The Kana and Kanji reveal themselves to be a very elegant, interlocking system to compress data while allowing for flowery sentences.
Katakana are never that. They are always to sound something out, always parsed with a furrowed brow, and is just that: it “needs to be parsed.” You still find yourself needing to roll around and wrestle for a little meaning. 勉強 stopped being “sounding out the word ‘benkiyouu’” in your brain a long time ago, replaced with the gestalt aesthetic package of its Kanji, which bring to mind other kanji, which reinforces meaning, etc etc.
Googled ジャスティンビーバー seeing it in the news today, for example .
Oh yeah, I mean right now I'm going through RTK and that's helped me with kanji a lot already. But I took French and Spanish in school and neither language requires anything like this. The most annoying thing you've got to deal with there is arbitrarily learning the gender of every single noun so you can pick the right article, but that's child's play by comparison. It'd be like if instead of le and la, every noun had its own unique article or even a combination of articles.
Like right now I want to continue to focus on rapidly increasing my vocab and my understanding of grammar but I need to take lots of time away to learn kanji because it's just non-negotiable. It pays dividends, but it's also one of the chief reasons Japanese is harder than many other languages.
That said, the very simple and rigid pronunciation of Japanese does make vocab acquisition difficult in a slightly different way: you’re just making up mnemonics to attach meaning to an ancient stick drawing.
I often do this without any audio at all, when in transit for example. Everything being a string of basically maximum three phonemic syllable slabs means “how do you spell that” is less of a problem.
Idk, maybe just my experience!
And no spaces.
To me Learning Kanji isn't main issue. For me it's that, there are many Kanji's that look almost identical. There might only be only 1 line difference or them using the Same radicals and confuse me.
Yup I feel that! I think reading on a phone make the issue worse, the eyes fatigue and the luminosity sure make it harder to differentiate them.
That’s why I got a kindle. It’s so much better
Second this, most basic example is 水 and 氷.
While that's true and I recently learned 牛 and 午 radicals, your example are at least obviously related.
I believe it's because learners are trying to memorize kanji and treat it as any other subject (simply drilling and memorizing separate stories for each kanji).
Most of the time this neglects the merits of kanji itself which is their associated patterns. It's more useful to memorize kanji in bulk after you notice patterns like 予 and 矛 and learn to differentiate them by the difference instead of memorizing new information about each one, and suddenly they are not really 2000 but just a bunch of groups with common traits like hundred groups or so.
Kodensha Kanji learner's course really takes this approach to the next level and creates useful mnemonics that can act as a pedestal to make identifying other kanji easier. It even says for some kanji there are probably more easier mnemonics to choose but the author have chosen certain mnemonics because of how they play into the larger picture of memorizing all of the 2000.
Vocab ofc is never a chore once you know the Kanji etymology, but people prefer to test their memory with Anki for everything and not look at the kanji itself for clues or comprehend the kanji and how it works inside the vocab word itself. They just tend to borrow from their memory like any other language or subject, therefore excruciating pain.
Is there a guide for these groups and do they mean similar things? I've heard this multiple times and ofc also noticed it myself, but it feels like some of the differences are so minor and the kanji mean such vastly different things that it's not of any help to me.
Agreed. I use wanikani rather than Kodensha, but after learning the kanji and readings it is soo much easier for me to remember new vocab. I find it interesting (and even lol funny sometimes - e.g. 金玉) rather than a chore.
The Heisig method uses a similar approach. I've tried the "write them 1000 times" approach, and it's boring, frustrating, and doesn't work. With Heisig, I've had a much easier time.
I really like kanji but I think advanced learners can forever how incredibly discouraging kanji can be for a beginner. I can pull out a book in Spanish and pick out words here and there just because they're similar to English. Otoh after learning two whole new alphabets, vocab, a while lot of grammar, and even a few hundred kanji, if a beginner pulls out a Japanese text they will have extreme difficulty making heads or tails out of it.
Yes it gets easier but the barrier to entry with Japanese is quite high and a lot of that is kanji. It's no surprise new learners get frustrated.
The key to not getting frustrated is accepting that none of it makes sense and rolling along with it.
This is it. This is where I’m at. I already learned two phonetic alphabets for the same exact sounds, and now I need to learn a third alphabet.
But not just any alphabet. No, these characters stand for words. One word, two words, maybe even three or more. Or maybe it doesn’t stand for that word at all, and you’re supposed to use one of its many unique pronunciations, and you can’t guess wrong because you’ll sound like an idiot.
And if it’s combined with a different kanji, now the words and meanings and sounds are completely different.
But it’s pretty, so yay?
Chinese here. What you guys talking about?
This is your fault! /s
🫡Excuse me sir you’re way above the issue
At least you only need to learn one pronunciation per kanji 😅
They are called hanzi in Chinese and that's not entirely true, there are several characters (even common ones) that have different pronunciations. It can be completely different or "just" a change of tone.
行 gang represent.
thanks 10 years of mandatory Chinese lessons that I have such shit comprehension of the Japanese grammar rules or how to construct sentences but I can guess the meanings of most sentences if there's enough kanji and I can somehow read enough of the kana 🫡
I absolutely love kanji. I find it so fascinating.
Katakana can go to hell though if you ask me.
Why the hate of katakana ?
I feel personally offended by katakana because half the time I'll spell something outloud like "what the fuck is this? It must be Italian or Swedish or---” I look it up and ofc it's English.
Katakana makes me feel stupid :')
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23d
i just suck at it that's all, even after all these years and living in japan.
I think every single Japanese learner would agree with this. Fuck katakana
I’m good at reading kanji (currently n2) but katakana … i STILL struggle with it. Why?!
Katakana is rarer than Hiragana and is rarely actively practiced like Kanji is so it frequently ends up the weakest of the three. Also, most Katakana words are terrible loan words.
Wait, you don’t like googling “ジャスティンビーバー” after trying to sound it out for ten minutes when it’s in your news feed?
And katakana always seems contextual. Makes me crazy. In Japan, a lot of people are using it for words I didn’t learn in katakana, enforcing extra practice.
I’ve thought a lot about this as I have the same issue. I wonder if part of my brain is occupied with what English/German etc. word it might be derived from, rather than just accepting it for the Japanese word that it is, as I do for hiragana. I feel like this need for recognition is slowing me down.
I feel like I’ll never truly master katakana even though I’ve been able to study kanji that is technically a lot more difficult lol. It’s nice to hear that even those who are way past the beginner stage still struggle with it.
Yes this thread is SO validating.
Part of me wonders if it’s because the Katakana strokes are so much more.. Roman looking? I.e. too close to ours, while everything else is stickier in the mind from its difference?
whichever monk decided シンツソ was a thing was so unkind 😭
I obsessed over シ and ツ and ン and ソso much in the beginning I never mix them up, but there are some katakana I use so infrequently that I just suddenly forget what they look like until I see them in writing. I’m not sure why some of them are just so forgettable for me. There is definitely something in the strokes that just doesn’t resonate with me. I had a class test a couple months ago where I had to change what I was talking about because I completely forgot the katakana for オ lmao. I always seem to forget ヌ, ネ too along with a few others, it’s so annoying. And I care too much about studying kanji to dedicate more time to those katakana leeches.
Hahaha totally. Yes, クタケ is so cruel
This is insane but as I’m writing this I realize I kinda use all three phonemes when I see any of the three characters, and rotate through them until the context fumbles together meaning.
I like to imagine ネ is a katakana that a little "ne"ko paw is covering, like is it ホ? No, here comes the cat paw to block it ネ
I'm N2 as well and just today I saw a lone ム and couldn't remember if it was katakana for む or ま. And I still slip up on ソ、ン and ノ
Whaaat, noo. I love katakana.
First of all, it's really pretty. カメラ、 エリカ、 ホテル、ポケット。
Once you memorise the ンソシツ (んそしつ), it becomes smooth sailing.
Indeed there are some attractive katakana but this is the first time I have seen someone "say" that.
I particularly like katakana on buildings and as emphasis.
I found katakana a slog, but am going to change my attitude and see how that works...
I’m actually about to register a visual design because the katakana used for it is so good looking. Will be printed on clothes 👀
I like katakana ¯\(ツ)/¯
Not just learners. Even native Japanese children often struggle much more with katakana than hiragana.
Yeah this. It's not only extremely useful (I dare say borderline vital) to understand what you're reading, it's also incredibly fascinating. They display such an interesting way of thinking and can be very insightful.
Hard agree.
Kanji are a beautiful puzzle box that simultaneously connect you to an entire lineage of an entire part of the world - it’s history, art, poetry, and the ‘Japanese psyche’ (term used lightly) all rolled into one.
Absolutely I can never bring myself to practice katana so every time I see it I have to google
I'm just a starter but for now, i love learning kanji. You can learn a word while still learning the story of it, how they use other parts to form a specific word. And i find that amused.
My favorite word always is 幸 (shiawase). It means happiness/fortune. Why??? Because if you own both a land/earth 土 (tsuchi) and money ¥ (Japanese Yen), you are rich af, thus come happiness/fortune 幸 (shiawase) 😂 Which I don't have, both of it 😂
😂 wait I didn’t know that 😭
Kanji is a lover that treats you mean, but you keep coming back for more
Kanji: Why are you running? Why ... Are ... You ... Running?
At first you hate him because he makes you want to cry. Then you realize you can't live without him. Then you realize you're overdependent on him. The "learned Japanese through reading" journey.
kanji is a toxic partner
It’s a huge barrier to entry, but it’s also one of the cool features of the language. It’s fun to learn if you’re not in a rush
Not me personally. I love learning new kanji and unironically, the more kanji you learn, the easier it becomes to memorize new ones.
The tricky part for me is to actually retain that new kanji for long periods of time. If i go a few days with zero reviews i'll hopelessly forget what that new kanji looked like. Now multiply that by 1000+ to include the other kanji i know and it becomes a review grind i have to invest time on every day.
That's where i'm guessing the struggle comes from for most people, not the learning, reading or writting, but the retaining part.
I love kanji though, makes the language so rich and beautiful in my opinion
Do you write them ? Because I feel like go through anki makes you struggle more to retain information..! Every day I rewrite the kanji I learned the last 3/4 weeks and add 5 more, and once a month I rewrite every one I (should) know. In the lot there most of the time a dozen I forgot how to write but could read easily
I felt that way but I learned about 300 kanji and went to Japan. Crazy how much I was able to read and understand with just 300 characters. Not everything, not even most of what I read, but just enough to get by. Really inspired me to keep learning for future trips 🥰
Born in China, so for me, compared to kanji, I am more uncomfortable with katakana.
Even though I was born in France, I’m more uncomfortable with Katakana :’)
Because katakana is not a completely homophonic word, but is spelled according to the style of Japanese speaking. But I think this may be one of the advantages of Japanese. Japanese has absorbed vocabulary and methods from many different languages throughout history.
But there are also some benefits. Once you know the katakana and English pronunciation of something, such as Shower Cap/シャワーキャップ, it will be easy to remember it. If you are a beginner in learning kanji, I highly recommend the Manyoshu.
Before i started study kanji i thought i would hate it. But after i started using WaniKani i started to love Kanji.
Wanikani is my absolute best friend
No... I might be wrong but people who stick to it for long enough either learn to love kanji or quit. Some people love them from the start though (I did!)
I'm with you there! I was expecting kanji to be super hard but it turned out to be fun! There are plenty of repeating structures and becomes easier the more you engage with it. I don't even learn onyomi or kunyomi, instead I go for words, be it a compound one or not. It's much easier that way
It's very time consuming to learn kanji. I understand why people don't like it. I think Kanji are interesting but it definitely slows down my learning process, especially at the beginning it did.
Long before I started really studying Japanese, I was in high school and internet resources were few and far between. I had one of those dumb "language in three months" books (spoiler: it took more than three months) and a list of the first 100 joyo kanji from somewhere that I was memorizing the old fashioned way (all the readings, etc.)
I went to an orientation seminar at a local university for something completely unrelated and there were some college students on the bus I took home. Two of them were looking at kanji on their workbooks and discussing how to write them correctly. I remember being so in love with the idea of doing Japanese as a full-time college course and eventual job but somehow never had the guts to commit to it.
A few years later I took up a private course and started really studying the language seriously and it was the first time in my life I felt actual enjoyment for learning something. It was mindblowing, I'd never felt anything like that throughout all my school and college years, and it made me question my path in life.
So no, I love kanji.
I'd say that kanjis are the best thing about japanese!
I love kanjis! Love the concept, the aesthetics and the usage/meanings
Learning kanji is my favorite part of Japanese. I don’t have something like a photographic memory per say, but the shapes comes fairly easily to me and I find writing kanji peaceful.
I can do it for hours. And that joy allows me to retain it. But I could totally understanding feeling oppositely.
Nah, I love Kanji katakana is the real hell
As a Japanese I absolutely hated learning kanji when I was at school. I had to fill a sheet of paper in kanji everyday and that was by far the most daunting part of my homework for me.
It was a breath of fresh air when my English education started. I don’t have to do the mind-numbing rote-learning for English! But soon I realised English words wouldn’t stick in my mind as easily as Japanese ones that are made up of a few characters of kanji. I sometimes manage to forget the meaning of a new English word in less than a minute. This rarely happens to me in Japanese.
I found memorising thousands of English words an equally or perhaps more painful experience than learning kanji. Having been exposed to English and several other European languages, I can now see kanji’s merits.
That being said, I wouldn’t go back to school and go through 9 years of kanji drilling again and I feel sorry for my gf who’s been having a rough time cramming for N2
How do native students do it? Do you also come up with often-bizarre little stories to memorise what components make up a particular kanji? Do teachers promote that as a method?
It’s hard to remember as my primary education days are more than a decade ago, I feel old
Iirc not so much story based mnemonics but more visual aids. I believe early grade kanji textbooks had illustrations for basic pictographic characters like putting 木 and a picture of a tree side by side to show how the character derived from the shape of actual trees
But I think in later grades both teaching and learning methods shifted to mostly rote memorisation as characters became more complex, and their meanings, more conceptual and abstract
Lately, I've been thinking of kanji as something somewhat similar to English's many different ways of spelling the same sounds in ways that (usually) clump together shared root meanings.
Example: "num-" and "pneum-" can both be pronounced as "noom", but the former usually means it's a word associated with numbers (e.g. numeral, numeric, the word 'number' itself) and the latter means it has to do with lungs/breathing (e.g. pneumonia, pneumatic)
Another example, "cy" and "psy" can both be pronounced "sai" but the former's related to revolutions (e.g. cycle, cyclone) and the latter to the mind (e.g. psychic, psychology, psyops).
Like kanji, they can be a pain to memorize and it's often hard to see the patterns in "why" they're spelled one way but not another, however, once you do, you can usually put together the meanings of more difficult words you've never seen by their base greek/latin/etc roots.
I have a love-hate relationship with kanji. Learning new ones with how similar they look, can be a real struggle sometimes. But I love being able to actually read and recognize them. I like to write kanji too, but some have so many strokes it can feel like a massive chore.
I love them, so much that I took the Kanji Kentei multiple times lol
It’s both a pain and not? For me, it's easier to understand what the sentence trying to say than a line of just hiragana. But at the same time, without furigana, I, as a beginner, absolutely struggle on how a word is spelled; e.g., 大人、人間、一人、愛人 all have 人 but all spelled differently and I would have no way of knowing which is which unless I already learned what that word is spelled
I used to hate them too until my brain got used to seeing them. They're still difficult for me since I'm only N4 (pushing go N3 by July), but at least now it's not as bad as it was when I was starting out.
After a while you begin to associate certain kanji with certain meanings, like 回 for occurrences, 度 for amount of times etc. Granted, this isn't a crutch for learning, but it can come in handy.
After reaching the middle of N4, I began to prefer learning kanji that look nothing alike the ones I've seen before, because I can begin associating said kanji to these new words.
I come from Chinese background so I find kanji to be the same as hanzi. It's way more useful and easier to read & understand than a bunch of hiraganas.
With a phonetic writing system, for the most part reading makes you better at speaking and speaking makes you better at reading. Kanji throw a big wrench in that, you can learn a spoken word though hearing it used but not have the first clue how to write it. You can learn some just by encountering them regularly in clear context, but it's always going to involve a lot of just sitting down and specifically studying kanji, which takes a lot of time. What I find is that this has caused my spoken language skills to outpace my reading level, which is frustrating. The things I can read feel simplistic and like they aren't really helping me improve. They are, at least at reading, but by the time my reading catches up to where my speaking was my speaking has outpaced it again.
It's not that we don't enjoy learning Kanji, but that learning Kanji is very time-consuming, and it takes a lot more effort. Most teaching methods also use Hiragana to spell a word or phrase before using the correct Kanji spelling. For example, いきます and 行きます are the same verb, but using Kanji is correct. It's not that Japanese people wouldn't understand what you wrote if you don't use the Kanji, but your Japanese fluency definitely shows some cracks if you can't use Kanji, because this is the proper way of doing things.
This is a singular Kanji, for changing a singular Hiragana, and now a sound must be associated with it, even though you only have a handful of words that will actually use this combination, or similar combination, of characters in order to make a verb or phrase.
Kanji is the 'extra' work that's the real barrier between being fluent and being able to write. And if you're trying to get a job, they sorta want you to write your resume. If you want to show your true abilities and fluency, you need to know the Kanji.
Does Kanji get easier the more you learn? I think so. Does it make the overall process different and less work? No.
And on top of all that, Kanji is the most complicated of the character families. Kanji is what both complicates and completes Japanese. The entire reason you use Hiragana to learn the word before then using Kanji to learn how the word is properly written is because you need that reference point to make it easier and grasp the concept easier.
Some people say, "What about radicals?" But radicals require extrapolation, which requires more knowledge of underlying meaning of individual characters, and this requires you to learn some Chinese as these two languages do overlap a lot when it comes to meaning; but the majority of Japanese people hardly bother with this unless they don't know a word. You know how with English you have roots to a word and it allows you to make sense of words you don't know with understanding the roots involved with that word? Japanese uses this with radicals that make Kanji up, with Kanji themselves, and with Hiragana. Japanese requires you to have a much deeper understanding to extrapolate meaning behind words you don't know, and then extrapolate the meaning of the full word based on context.
This is precisely why Japanese is defined as the most difficult language for a native english speaker to learn. It's also why Japanese has a learning plateau instead of a bell curve. Once you get the most difficult stuff in English down, it gets so much easier from there. Everything falls into place much easier, and you can just understand things. Japanese has Hiragana and Katakana, which are fairly easy to learn, then you have all the basic stuff, good good, but then you take that sharp incline. KANJI. And it doesn't get less painful or less time-consuming, only easier for each individual character. This is MOST of the language. The Kanji is what Japanese is mostly made of, with everything else being the minor part. This is the plateau. It only gets easier once you've completely mastered how Kanji functions and works and you have most of Kanji memorized. Only then do things get easier as Kanji only appear in specific spots and specific sets of characters because they make up certain words, with Hiragana, or are used to make certain words, with Kanji itself like 先生, and you get off of the plateau.
So, TL;DR, Kanji is a pain because it's like taking a few steps back in your learning to redo work you did a few moments prior, just to know a few words that will utilize that Kanji.
It takes a horrendous amount of time, but once you learn it, it's absolutely amazing. Tbh, I can't imagine there only being hiragana - the moment you understand kanji, reading becomes so much easier. Perhaps not even reading the words as much as just.. understanding. Because once you know the kanji, you don't necessarily need to know how to "read it in this exact context" - but you still understand what it probably means. Even words you've never heard before. I think people who hate kanji so much are just people who don't want to spend the time studying it, but knowing kanji makes learning Japanese SO much easier.
Westerners like me are used to read the words as we see them. Kanji feels like memorizing and abbreviating almost every word with Emoji.
It is artistic, but having the same symbol sound drastically different depending on the word is really tiresome for those not used to it.
I mean, English speakers don't really have room to complain about the same symbols having different sounds, given stuff like through, thorough, though, etc.
learning kanji is the literal definition for excruciating pain
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis.
The only thing worse than Kanji is lack of kanji. Those kana-only words are impossible.
It’s a bait and switch, I tells ya! You say you wanna learn Japanese. You picked a language! That one they speak in Japan.
And they then hit you with the ‘Compare with the Classical Chinese X, whence also came Y…’
Idk I love kanji it's my favourite part of the language
While i have only recently started learning knaji, i find it quite to my liking, even though it is partly confusing to me.
I expected to hate Kanji when I started learning. It seemed like this huge barrier which will forever prevent me from really understanding the language. However, I grew to like them pretty fast and find them totally fascinating by now.
I’d argue the problem with learning Kanji is it’s an additional barrier that doesn’t exist in most other languages. In other languages you have to learn the grammar and the vocabulary. Japanese then requires you to learn thousands of unique symbols on top of that.
No. Kanji makes it easier for me
> discovering the etymology behind each words
how do you usually do this? I find it hard to learn a kanji origin right after finding a new kanji that I've never seen before. Jisho.org doesn't provide more details or maybe I'm using it the wrong way.
I honestly don’t research that much on online dictionary but when I do it’s mostly for pitch accent through jpdb But when learning a new word and therefore immediately look up the kanji, you can easily see where it’s coming from, a recent example for me would be 海洋生物(kaiyouseibutsu) 海 -> kanji for sea, 洋 -> kanji for ocean, 生 -> kanji for living/life 物 -> kanji for things, so literally : marine living things -> marine animals. That’s what I mean by etymology. With each kanji you can actually understand so much of the written word and vice versa, when yesterday I heard this word I already knew who to write even though I had never saw it. There’s also many word that I would hear often and when I would look up the kanji it would make total sense because I already knew a word having one of the kanji and giving the same “vibe”. Lol sorry it’s so unclear
To me it's just like learning vocab with a couple extra steps, once you start learning it kanji it becomes less frustrating as you continue. Sometimes I'll come across readings that'll make me say "oh fuck off", but it lessens over time.
JP grammar continues to infuriate me though, much prefer grinding kanji over that.
Why don’t you like Japanese grammar ?
Pretty much everything, JP grammar feels almost like the complete opposite of what my English-only brain understands so it feels so alien to me. I studied Latin in high school and began to struggle with that when grammar became a huge focus (all those damn conjugations and declensions), so grammar in different languages is clearly just something I struggle with.
Kanji is interesting and beautiful but it takes a very long time to learn and reading them is difficult compared to a standard latin alphabet. It's very frustrating to see a word you can't even pronounce, especially when it happens a lot in close succession.
Personally, I like the look of kanji characters when written with a brush or as if with a brush, and being able to write them like that is satisfying. However, I do think they make achieving literacy needlessly difficult.
Nah Kanji has helped me so much in reading. Even when I forgot the furigana of a word i just write the kanji so no one knows that I don't know its furigana. But Katakana on the other hand, Fuck That Shit.
I like learning the meanings of kanji and various different combinations of them. That being said I would be lying if I said learning kanji is easy, especially with memory problems. It's tough. But still gotta do it, since it's a part of the language.
WaniKani is the only reason I enjoy learning Kanji.
Most people don’t want to have to learn thousands of characters just to be able to read.
It sucks when you’re at language school, and you’re one of the only westerners, and all the other students are from Taiwan, China, & Hong Kong (most of the full time schools in Japan). Yeah it’s nice when you can leisurely study but when you’re given daily kanji and vocabulary and expected to keep up with Chinese native speakers, it’s brutal.
Would be nice if some kanji didn't have like 10 readings.
Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
You can like them but still find them extremely challenging to learn. I think that is why people "hate" them, because they are not easy.
Waaaaaaay back when I was at Japanese school, we got ~20 new kanji every 3 days. It's not mentally challenging in the way that Quantum Mechanics would be, or physically challenging like climbing K2. It's just rote memorization, which means it quickly becomes boring. Hate? No. Just boring, which makes it difficult to stick to doing it. Eventually of course you can read more which helps make it more interesting, but the flood of new characters continues, and woe be upon you if you forget any.
Japanese people themselves even hate learning Kanji 😂
There's this whole image built up of Japanese as this nightmarish mess of "thousands of different characters and they're all different and you have to memorize them ALL!" which is just not true, and not even helpful. There are also books and resources in the vein of Heisig's RTK, which while probably extremely valuable in its intended use (I'm only familiar in passing) doesn't actually help you learn the Japanese language, it helps you learn kanji and readings, which are not one and the same thing.
I've seen people spending literally years of their lives engaging in rote memorization of kanji in a vacuum without actually engaging with learning vocabulary or grammar in a way that would lead to them making infinitely more useful progress in understanding or producing Japanese.
OP, you've said "you would have more struggle to learn vocabulary if you didn't learn the associated kanji", which means you understand that vocabulary (words, actual fragments of communication) are not the same thing as kanji (written symbols used to convey the vocabulary). There are people who think they are learning Japanese who don't understand this distinction, and are really just learning random squiggles that can't actually be used to send or receive information to another person.
I love them but not the on'yomi readings.
I personally hate Kanji. It is so tedious and makes me want to quit all together. Kudos to people who actually enjoy kanji, but having to learn radicals, the trying to figure out if it’s kunyomi or onyomi. Sure, single kanji is fine but when you get to compound words…kill myself. Sometimes they follow the rules, sometimes they don’t. I could be wrong in my thinking. But I remember when I first started Japanese, I wanted to start studying kanji. I would look up the kanji, then look at the example words they had. Half of them didn’t even follow the rules. Sometimes when I thought it was supposed to start with kunyomi, it would actually be onyomi…and vice versa. Plus there are around 3000 or so that are just the every day kanji? I even tried just learning vocabulary. That was more enjoyable, until I would come across new words with the same kanji, but it sounded different.
I’m just not smart enough and not patient enough to keep trying to learn them.
Please don’t say you’re not smart enough, and please do not quit because of kanji ! You’re probably just learning a way that don’t benefit you. Rather than learning kanji purely for the sake of it, to try to make sense of kun’yomi and on’yomi and to learn radicals individually, try to simply when learning a new word, learning the associated kanji, write it down on a list, and review it every day. Maybe it will help you
If you hate kanji, learn a different language. It's not worth it to spend years learning something you hate.
I think anyone who 'hates kanji' hasn't been learning for very long. It's a phase you need to get through but once you're past it, it unlocks a lot, like being able to understand the gist of a word's meaning despite not having seen it before.
As a bonus, you'll be able to make a pretty good guess of what any Chinese words you come across might mean.
It’s fine if I’m typing it. Not okay if I’m handwriting. My English writing is very large and round, so the small, square strokes of kanji kill my hand.
kanji feels way easier to work with imo
Sometimes when i forget words, i just need to see kanji to immediately remember. It really helps learning the language but it takes time to memorize them.
I really like kanji. I get really excited when I start to memorise the strokes and am able to write and read it fully. But maybe that’s because I’m a mathematician and both kanji and math treat me like were in a toxic relationship. I also do love learning new grammar concepts. It’s like solving a fun riddle :)
Even Japanese people avoid kanji as much as possible. Most learn to read a bunch, but never really use them for writing and forget how to write them.
I think beginners (in kanji) feel that way. I haven't met/seen that many people who are decently skilled in kanji who also hate it. The difficult is all at the beginning. It tapers off dramatically as you learn more characters.
I also think that people's learning methods have a lot to do with whether or not they hate kanji. Like, if they're not trying to understand the kanji, or at least making up their own mnemonics, or if they're focusing really hard on learning to write them perfectly, I can understand why they'd struggle.
Learning the simple, picture-based characters, learning the radicals, utilizing mnemonics, following a progression system (i.e. Heisig or KKLC), and putting off writing until a later stage are all things that will make the journey into kanji a lot more enjoyable.
Once you have roughly 500 kanji solidly under your belt the difficulty starts to taper off.
Honestly? Kanji is my favourite part of learning Japanese. I love doing my Kanji drills, and the satisfaction of being able to stumble upon the readings of words makes me feel very happy.
I like kanji, I don't like studying.
As an beginner (Level 10 Wanikani) I don't hate Kanji; I'm already seeing the benefits of Kanji after learning it instead of reading a bunch of Kana and trying to understand the words.
With Kanji if I fully learned the Kanji it makes it much easier for me to understand the full context.
As far as learning goes, I hate kanji because I'm excited to learn Japanese and I wanna learn it now and read it lol. But learning Kanji is a long process a lot longer than learning Kana.
People who don't mind aren't going to make posts saying they don't mind (usually).
I'm Chinese and I love that shit. The more kanji I see the faster I can read lol Pronunciation is a different story though. 音読み/訓読み is wild 💀
I adore them. It‘s like a personal collection of trading cards that I can expand by learning more Japanese.
I think it’s just because people learn it wrong. In my experience it takes everyone a long time to find a method that actually works for them.
I don't hate kanji, but I feel it is the single biggest obstacle to my Japanese learning and were kanji not required, as in many other languages, I would have progressed much faster.
As a beginner, Wanikani has really made me enjoy learning kanji. Being taught with mnemonics (that I don’t have to spent time making up myself) has been a HUGE game changer.
My Japanese housemates all liked the kanji. Especially the ability to skim a document for a few seconds and have a reasonable understanding. Many had favourite kanji too.
They laughed and sometimes complained about forgetting the writing of some kanji but hand wrote notes all the time for work, study, etc.
Kanji is beautiful and fascinating. I wish I was better at learning it
Rule #1 of learning anything: don't listen to the so-called "people".
It’s very interesting, but you have a learn a lot of them before things really start making sense in the wild. Where as kana is more of an immediate “reward” in the sense you can read them easily after a short amount of time.
I definitely don’t hate it though or find it to be endless torture lol
Kanji is okay, I'm learning it, it's not too bad. But it is very frustrating at the same time. Kanji can be very efficient for reading but it is brutally inefficient for learning. English is obviously not completely phonetic but I can at least sound out a word I don't know. Kanji is you either know it, or you don't, and you're kinda screwed if you don't. So, the extremely steep learning curve is frustrating.
I think it’s probably because it is a lot of tedious work learning them. I mean, you already knew that, didn’t you?
But the fact that people dress it up with orientalist nonsense about how the unique nature of Japanese requires their writing system (rather than the reality that historical accident ended up with them having a uniquely difficult-to-learn one) is tiresome.
I'm enjoying kanji too, people are just lazy.
My daughter hated weekend Chinese school ( I even hated it!!) and learning to write Chinese characters. So in High school she picked Japanese because it uses 2 alphabet systems and no more Chinese characters and brushstrokes….surprise surprise it’s called Kanji….lol
She’s taken 4 years of HS and 1 yr AP Japanese now and has to admit all those hated weekends of Chinese school really did help out .
I love them too. But I also get why people hate them. It’s overwhelming. And, I can’t believe anyone would consider trying to teach them without starting with radicals and learning associated meanings of the components. That’s how they make sense, and that’s what makes them fascinating. Each one is its own little poem!
(I started learning on Duolingo and they try to teach kanji through just repeatedly tracing the strokes without learning the components. . . So the character is presented as totally arbitrary. Idiotic!)
I enjoy it well enough, but the main issues are:
1) Onyomi and kunyomi
2) Multiple different onyomi and kunyomi
3) Ateji
4) Random other exceptions/additional pronunciations
5) A huge amount of Chinese characters are picto-phonetic: it combines a radical, to indicate meaning, while the rest indicates the sound. This makes the etymology of most characters quite boring. Also, because Japanese pronunciations vary so wildly, it makes the sound hint useless 99% of the time, so most kanji are just a hard-to-memorize random assortment of symbols.
Also worth considering that you are might study this alphabet for years and years but still won't be able to just pick up a book and pronounce the words.
Traditional Chinese is my first language, so I kinda got the upper hand
I am almost at 1500 of RTK. I do not hate kanji. It is a bit of a pain, but it is also a meditative exercise at the end of the day, and I just make sure I do at least a little bit every single day. Could be 5, could be 15. One time I just did 1.
Worth it to be literate.
I mean what is there to hate? It is just a fact of the Japanese language that it exists.
I hate kanji with a vengeance.
I have aphantasia. I cannot visualize images in my head. As such trying to recall kanji that are visually highly complex and often very similar to other kanji is often nigh impossible. So usually this leads to seeing a kanji I've seen hundreds of times of before and again having no idea what it means.
And don't even get me started with pronunciations. With hiragana and katakana I can at least see a new word and read it out loud. With kanji I have no such luxury, thanks to each of the damn things having multiple possible pronunciations. And some having even more.
With all the time I've already spent on kanji I'd likely be nearly fluent in some other language but with Japanese my progress is still slow as hell.
I love learning kanji. Been using Wanikani, learned 270 in three months, it’s really fun and actually easy.
Honestly I think the people who complain about kanji are weebs who only know how to type anime nonsense like dattebayo ! wareware in Romaji, and maybe in hiragana if they’re not completely brain rotted.
As someone who studies Japanese at university, most students feel indifferent about kanji or really like it. The only students I know who don’t like it are ones that don’t study at all, and they only don’t like it because they can’t read or write it. Everyone who puts in moderate effort doesn’t mind kanji. I personally really like it. I actually did a presentation this semester on why Japan should continue to use kanji (discussing claims that Japan should abolish kanji)
Kanji is way easier to read than pure kana, and they’re so fun to learn.
Nah, Kanji are a lot of fun. The hard part for me is learning collocations, such as what verbs go with what nouns. For example in English we say "pitch a tent", not "build a tent."
I love kanji, who wouldn't love characters that have been evolving for over 3,000 years? So much rich history and they just look plain awesome!
Japanese was the first language I tried to learn by myself. I had gotten fairly good at basic stuff and could participate in some very basic conversations. Then I started German. Even though I had just started, I recognized words everywhere and found it easy to memorize them. I think it's honestly the frustration in the early stages about seeing a large text and seeing all that heart-attack threatening Kanji. But at the end of the day, you chose this, so you gotta do it.
Actually it's only insane non-natives on the internet that tell you that you have to learn Japanese by forcing yourself to read from day 1. No hone has to do anything when self-learning. Japanese children start learning kanji only when they are already fluent in the language and I firmly believe that non-native learners should follow the same path and start learning kanji only when they are well into intermediate level with the spoken language.
I've learnt Spanish enough to get through a vacation, Norwegian enough to read a novel with a dictionary, English to fluency all with minimal studying (almost failed English in school).
Kanji is the exact opposite. Kanji makes it incredibly difficult to go about learning Japanese with methods that are proven to work for my brain because what you see on the paper is just impossible to understand without having spent a lot of time to give those angry scribbles and meaning.
I have had the most success with random kanji apps during a time of my life where I don't have time to overthink it. Otherwise I try to just get it over with and before I realize my mistake my "I'll just do Anki on the toilet" turns into "I've been here for 1 1/2 hours, can't feel my legs and still have 150 reviews to do"
To be honest, I really like kanji! It's something I really enjoy and I feel like it really opens up the language a lot. There's nothing better than being able to read something you couldn't before because you studied that kanji.
I find it far far easier to read Kanji than an equivalent string of Hiragana. It just sort of automatically turns stuff into sight words for me.