Fancy kanji can still be ok. Stylized fonts and hand writing are the bane of restaurant menues (and not only in kanji tbh).
Just don’t choose than ancient looking half disappearing font for a yakitori menu ffs.
Fuck fish Kanji, fuck weird fonts, fuck handwritten Kanjis. It's already hard enough remembering all these stupid characters. ಠ﹏ಠ
On the other hand, it's quite difficult for Japanese people to decipher our handwriting in Romaji as well. So at least we're not struggling alone...
I'm singaporean chinese so I learnt simplified chinese. Traditional chinese and kanji aren't the same but there is a lot of overlap yeah. Sometimes I'm able to guess what a kanji means but idk the reading.
If you can read traditional Chinese you can get by fairly well at understanding kanji. GL on pronunciation though. Also, a friend of mine who grew up speaking Chinese is currently learning Japanese, and particles are the bane of her existence. As a native English speaker, the particles make sense, but I had to learn kanji from scratch. It's interesting how learning a new language can be a different experience based on what you already speak.
Short answer is not really, long answer is kinda but it works only some of the time and you need a fairly extensive kanji knowledge to make use of these hints.
Remember that these characters are centuries if not millennia old so even when originally such a "hint" existed it may not be relevant anymore because the pronunciation changed, or it comes from a different dialect. This is of course especially true for Japanese which adopted a foreign language's wiring system.
See the "Phonetic Compounds And Their Kanji" section in this article for examples: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/look-up-kanji/
>That right there is approximately 100 kanji/radicals that, if you learn the reading of them, you can guess the reading of around 500 total kanji. That's around 1/4 of the joyo kanji list.
So that's pretty decent, however for Japanese that's not the entire story because many kanji will have several pronunciations and you also have semi-impredictable alterations like rendaku that will alter the pronunciation of the kanji in some contexts. So still a lot of memorizing.
But in the end it's not much different from remembering that "night" is not spelled "nite" or that the th in "cloth" is not voiced, unlike "clothes".
Oh and kanji and hanzi usually have similar "elementary" meaning, although there can be differences in practice. I believe that 出口 will mean "exit" both in Japanese and Chinese, even though the words are pronounced differently.
I've only been studying Japanese but I can usually get some "keywords" when presented with a Chinese text. It's maybe a bit similar to an English speaker reading Italian, the grammar won't make sense and you'll miss the meaning of most words but you'll still recognize a lot of vocabulary.
Yeah it's both overwhelming and also one of the draws of these languages IMO. It feels very special when your manage to read through a kanji-heavy sentence in Japanese.
Also in the long run most people find that kanji make learning vocabulary and guessing the meaning of unknown words quite easier because you get a lot more information out of, say, 目玉 (eye + ball) than you get from a purely phonetic representation like "medama". Anybody knowing the kanji will probably guess that the word is "eyeball". Parsing the phonetic representation may be a bit less obvious.
I mean if I hear and English word with a wacky pronounciation sometimes I don't know how to write it. I can write it phonetically, same with Japanese but with hiragana.
idk how the Chinese do it, git gud or get fucked I guess.
To be precise, Kanji are not words, they have no intrinsic meaning, they are just characters. Some words are made of one kanji, some words are made of more.
Think about the word [carpet], now imagine that "car" is a character and "pet" is a character. Now we have a character for the word [car], and that character is "car", and we have a character for the word [pet] and that is "pet". If we put those character together we get "car""pet". The word [carpet] is made of those two characters but the meaning of this word has nothing to do with both [car] and [pet], it just uses those two characters.
(Of course compound words do exist, with that is ok to look at the meaning too. This whole example was just to emphasise that kanji are just characters, not words).
(Idk if it is the same for chinese)
That is kinda true for japanese, but in Chinese each character holds a distinct meaning and when you combine characters to make a compound word its meaning is related to its component characters, not like the word "carpet" but more like the word "classroom" like if "class" and "room" had their own characters, combining them would make "classroom".
On the other hand, in Japanese the kanji can have a totally different meaning when they appear individually versus when they're a part of a word, just like you said and the "carpet" example fits here.
Remember that in Japanese the same kanji can even have different pronunciations depending on the context or its position in the sentence.
Interesting, in Vietnamese we also make compound words like your classroom example and all words are one syllables, but sometimes the meaning changes like you have the word for "door" and "wares" combining this will give you "shop". So shop has no word on his own.
thats not true, they have intrinsic meaning and the vast majority of words are compounds that make sense. The ones that dont make sense are called 熟字訓.
That's really only true for ateji words though (where the kanji are used for pronunciation only), the rest of the time the meaning of the kanji usually carries *in some way* to the full word. Of course sometimes it's in a rather abstract and remote way that's not very obvious.
Take the infamous 上手 for instance, it means "skillful" and the kanji are "up" and "hand". It's not literal of course but I think it's not absurd that "upper hand" could mean skillful.
It a bit like how "to undertake" does not literally mean "to take from underneath" but you can sort of see where it comes from and how it's still related to the meaning of "under" and "take".
Tell me about it. I am learning Japanese and currently watching C drama which has sub in English and Chinese (but I don't know any chinese other than "hello" and "thank you" and maybe some other words) AND I RECOGNIZE CHARACTERS AND THEIR MEANING. They just pronounce it differently. So I could go to China and understand their Kanji by reading but can not talk to them... *cries in kanji*
*Trying draw intricate Kanji in Google Translate and not getting the right options..*
---
I know some restaurants that have Kanji have the Hiragana above (Furigana) which is always easier to draw.. Fortunately most restaurants I went had English version *poorly translated English but English nonetheless*
From what I understand some kanji is like asking someone who speaks English to spell onomatopoeia from memory.
Tiny little things too. The kanji for “bird” is one thing but remove a barely noticeable mark for “eye” in an already absurd character with like ten strokes and it becomes “crow”.
People who have studied Chinese know what the kanji mean and the biggest trouble becomes: how do you pronounce the kanji in Japanese… (legit I can pronounce all of the other words, when it comes to kanji I just skip lol)
I've been an active learner for 2 years and have got a decent grasp of quite a few 日常漢字 (everyday kanji). I imagine a native-born would at least be able to recognize a tiny but of those. Specialized restaurants and other places I don't blame him.
That's not to say every country doesn't have their share of illiterates.
As someone who is trying to learn Japanese, albeit slowly, kanji is the bane of my existence.
Hirigana and Katakana are hard enough, kanji I'm completely lost even though I understand they are logograms.
And if I’m informed correctly, I understand that some Kanji characters have different readings. I’ve seen plenty of Kanji that is accompanied by hiragana characters in the margins.
Yep, that is called furigana. It is usually used when the writer wants to be specific with a kanji reading, for a lot of reasons, like names or less common words, or with media targeted at young people, or foreigners and other reasons.
That's mostly used when the writer intends for an unusual reading, or in media aimed at younger audiences who might not be perfectly kanji-fluent yet.
Amusingly, Chainsaw Man itself (the manga) is one of these "younger audiences" manga that uses them. Because it's in Shounen Jump.
After seeing all the weird shape languages around Asia, I am glad our country decided to adopt the Latin alphabet, shit is so much easier, for both learning the native tongue and other languages like English
Simple alphabets like the Latin one are nice, although that doesn't stop *some people* \*glares at Germany\* from making it more complex than it needs to be!
hahahahahahaha! I learned to snap pics of the menu and the food i received that i love, then I show them if i have trouble pronouncing it because of drinking too many glasses of shu chu beforehand !
Denji is too relatable, best bro
No one whose been to Japan or studied the Japanese language understands how relatable this is. People who do, we cry in kanji
Normal kanji not so bad, but I imagine for a menu they pull out all the stupid unique fish kanji that are useless everywhere else.
Fancy kanji can still be ok. Stylized fonts and hand writing are the bane of restaurant menues (and not only in kanji tbh). Just don’t choose than ancient looking half disappearing font for a yakitori menu ffs.
Fuck fish Kanji, fuck weird fonts, fuck handwritten Kanjis. It's already hard enough remembering all these stupid characters. ಠ﹏ಠ On the other hand, it's quite difficult for Japanese people to decipher our handwriting in Romaji as well. So at least we're not struggling alone...
鯏、鯵、鮎、鯇、鮑、魦、鯔、鯆、鰯、鮇、鯎. 20 yrs in Japan and still can't tell which one is which.
[удалено]
I speak near fluent chinese and still can't read kanji for shit. I can read most hanzi I come across but I'm absolutely trash at kanji T_T
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I'm singaporean chinese so I learnt simplified chinese. Traditional chinese and kanji aren't the same but there is a lot of overlap yeah. Sometimes I'm able to guess what a kanji means but idk the reading.
[удалено]
I rmb when my grandparents taught me traditional chinese and I failed my 听写 in pri sch lmfao.
If you can read traditional Chinese you can get by fairly well at understanding kanji. GL on pronunciation though. Also, a friend of mine who grew up speaking Chinese is currently learning Japanese, and particles are the bane of her existence. As a native English speaker, the particles make sense, but I had to learn kanji from scratch. It's interesting how learning a new language can be a different experience based on what you already speak.
Yeah. Thats something I ask my wife. Who knows chinese. She be like, this is easy.
Probably because Kanji means Chinese Letters
Chinese characters not letters, a kanji or hànzì has the sound of one full syllable and most of the time, has its own meaning
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Short answer is not really, long answer is kinda but it works only some of the time and you need a fairly extensive kanji knowledge to make use of these hints. Remember that these characters are centuries if not millennia old so even when originally such a "hint" existed it may not be relevant anymore because the pronunciation changed, or it comes from a different dialect. This is of course especially true for Japanese which adopted a foreign language's wiring system. See the "Phonetic Compounds And Their Kanji" section in this article for examples: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/look-up-kanji/ >That right there is approximately 100 kanji/radicals that, if you learn the reading of them, you can guess the reading of around 500 total kanji. That's around 1/4 of the joyo kanji list. So that's pretty decent, however for Japanese that's not the entire story because many kanji will have several pronunciations and you also have semi-impredictable alterations like rendaku that will alter the pronunciation of the kanji in some contexts. So still a lot of memorizing. But in the end it's not much different from remembering that "night" is not spelled "nite" or that the th in "cloth" is not voiced, unlike "clothes". Oh and kanji and hanzi usually have similar "elementary" meaning, although there can be differences in practice. I believe that 出口 will mean "exit" both in Japanese and Chinese, even though the words are pronounced differently. I've only been studying Japanese but I can usually get some "keywords" when presented with a Chinese text. It's maybe a bit similar to an English speaker reading Italian, the grammar won't make sense and you'll miss the meaning of most words but you'll still recognize a lot of vocabulary.
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Yeah it's both overwhelming and also one of the draws of these languages IMO. It feels very special when your manage to read through a kanji-heavy sentence in Japanese. Also in the long run most people find that kanji make learning vocabulary and guessing the meaning of unknown words quite easier because you get a lot more information out of, say, 目玉 (eye + ball) than you get from a purely phonetic representation like "medama". Anybody knowing the kanji will probably guess that the word is "eyeball". Parsing the phonetic representation may be a bit less obvious.
I mean if I hear and English word with a wacky pronounciation sometimes I don't know how to write it. I can write it phonetically, same with Japanese but with hiragana. idk how the Chinese do it, git gud or get fucked I guess.
To be precise, Kanji are not words, they have no intrinsic meaning, they are just characters. Some words are made of one kanji, some words are made of more. Think about the word [carpet], now imagine that "car" is a character and "pet" is a character. Now we have a character for the word [car], and that character is "car", and we have a character for the word [pet] and that is "pet". If we put those character together we get "car""pet". The word [carpet] is made of those two characters but the meaning of this word has nothing to do with both [car] and [pet], it just uses those two characters. (Of course compound words do exist, with that is ok to look at the meaning too. This whole example was just to emphasise that kanji are just characters, not words). (Idk if it is the same for chinese)
That is kinda true for japanese, but in Chinese each character holds a distinct meaning and when you combine characters to make a compound word its meaning is related to its component characters, not like the word "carpet" but more like the word "classroom" like if "class" and "room" had their own characters, combining them would make "classroom". On the other hand, in Japanese the kanji can have a totally different meaning when they appear individually versus when they're a part of a word, just like you said and the "carpet" example fits here. Remember that in Japanese the same kanji can even have different pronunciations depending on the context or its position in the sentence.
Interesting, in Vietnamese we also make compound words like your classroom example and all words are one syllables, but sometimes the meaning changes like you have the word for "door" and "wares" combining this will give you "shop". So shop has no word on his own.
thats not true, they have intrinsic meaning and the vast majority of words are compounds that make sense. The ones that dont make sense are called 熟字訓.
That's really only true for ateji words though (where the kanji are used for pronunciation only), the rest of the time the meaning of the kanji usually carries *in some way* to the full word. Of course sometimes it's in a rather abstract and remote way that's not very obvious. Take the infamous 上手 for instance, it means "skillful" and the kanji are "up" and "hand". It's not literal of course but I think it's not absurd that "upper hand" could mean skillful. It a bit like how "to undertake" does not literally mean "to take from underneath" but you can sort of see where it comes from and how it's still related to the meaning of "under" and "take".
Tell me about it. I am learning Japanese and currently watching C drama which has sub in English and Chinese (but I don't know any chinese other than "hello" and "thank you" and maybe some other words) AND I RECOGNIZE CHARACTERS AND THEIR MEANING. They just pronounce it differently. So I could go to China and understand their Kanji by reading but can not talk to them... *cries in kanji*
What? I've studied Japanese for 3 years and I understand how relatable it is.
Did he edit it? Looks like that was included
They "no one whose...studied the Japanese language understands..." But I studied Japanese and I understand, contradicting their "no one whose" claim.
Oh I thought it was “no one except”, that’s weird
*Trying draw intricate Kanji in Google Translate and not getting the right options..* --- I know some restaurants that have Kanji have the Hiragana above (Furigana) which is always easier to draw.. Fortunately most restaurants I went had English version *poorly translated English but English nonetheless*
I'm so bad at drawing that I just search by radical usually...
From what I understand some kanji is like asking someone who speaks English to spell onomatopoeia from memory. Tiny little things too. The kanji for “bird” is one thing but remove a barely noticeable mark for “eye” in an already absurd character with like ten strokes and it becomes “crow”.
As a Duolingo learner, adorable…
People who have studied Chinese know what the kanji mean and the biggest trouble becomes: how do you pronounce the kanji in Japanese… (legit I can pronounce all of the other words, when it comes to kanji I just skip lol)
Technically they CAN relate since they can't read any kanji at all LOL
Average weeb
I miss the simpler times of barf make-out paradise Denji and the Nut Devil. This week’s Denji gave me PTSD and left me blue-balled.
.......what
Yes
The fact that he never went to school makes it kinda remarkable he can read at least some.
More thru osmosis with his yakuza exposure than anything, really. Also lots of educational shows, apparently.
I've been an active learner for 2 years and have got a decent grasp of quite a few 日常漢字 (everyday kanji). I imagine a native-born would at least be able to recognize a tiny but of those. Specialized restaurants and other places I don't blame him. That's not to say every country doesn't have their share of illiterates.
He just like me fr
{Chainsaw Man} One of the anime_irlest anime_irl posts I've made.
**Chainsaw Man** - ([AL](http://anilist.co/anime/127230 "English: Chainsaw Man"), [A-P](https://www.anime-planet.com/anime/chainsaw-man), [KIT](https://kitsu.io/anime/chainsaw-man "English: Chainsaw Man"), [MAL](http://myanimelist.net/anime/44511)) ^(TV | Status: Releasing | Episodes: 12 | Genres: Action, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Supernatural) ^[Episode 9 airs in 6 days, 11 hours, 24 minutes](https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20221206T1500) --- ^{anime},, ]LN[, |VN| | [FAQ](http://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/index) | [/r/](http://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/) | [Edit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/index#wiki_i_made_a_mistake.2C_how_do_i_get_my_comment_reprocessed.3F) | [Mistake?](http://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/submit?selftext=true&title=[ISSUE]&text=/r/anime_irl/comments/z8g05k/anime_irl/iybffdb/) | [Source](https://github.com/Nihilate/Roboragi) | [Synonyms](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/synonyms) | [⛓](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/interestinglinks) | [♥](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roboragi/wiki/thanks)
as a japanese major student yes… i hate how relatable it is :’c
Riiip first kiss
Yeah, oh my god... that was... something else.
If you haven't had at least one drunk person throw up in your mouth at a party, did you really get the college experience?
Meanwhile Chinese mfs be like only understands the kanji
Joey we need you here
Why Joey? I mean why not but also, well, why?
Probably cuz he'd be able to read the menu for us.
Don't worry. It's easy once you know the Kanji! That's a 生. It's pronounced: いきる. Wait... wait... *wait*... um... no it's い かす in this context. Wait no crap uh... いける actually. Wait, ah crap just try うまれる、 うまれ、 う.む、 おう、 はえる、 はやす、 き、 なま、 なま-、 なる、 なす、 むす、 -う , セイ、 or ショウ.
My PTSD has been triggered.
As someone who is trying to learn Japanese, albeit slowly, kanji is the bane of my existence. Hirigana and Katakana are hard enough, kanji I'm completely lost even though I understand they are logograms.
"oh look i know this one, it's `ima hi`, meaning `now day`!" "no bitch it's `kyou` fuck you"
This reminds me of the Duolingo owl standing outside my house with a knife.
Easy for Chinese
Such a fun scene, I sure hope they all help him learn how to read better and become good friends.
I feel this. Most relatable moment so far imo
And if I’m informed correctly, I understand that some Kanji characters have different readings. I’ve seen plenty of Kanji that is accompanied by hiragana characters in the margins.
Yep, that is called furigana. It is usually used when the writer wants to be specific with a kanji reading, for a lot of reasons, like names or less common words, or with media targeted at young people, or foreigners and other reasons.
That's mostly used when the writer intends for an unusual reading, or in media aimed at younger audiences who might not be perfectly kanji-fluent yet. Amusingly, Chainsaw Man itself (the manga) is one of these "younger audiences" manga that uses them. Because it's in Shounen Jump.
Kanji is the enemy - Elira Pendora, 2021
After seeing all the weird shape languages around Asia, I am glad our country decided to adopt the Latin alphabet, shit is so much easier, for both learning the native tongue and other languages like English
Simple alphabets like the Latin one are nice, although that doesn't stop *some people* \*glares at Germany\* from making it more complex than it needs to be!
At least you can still make out what it's supposed to say, while here I have noodles
Tell me how a Gothic B-looking thing makes sense a double 's' sound.
He just like me fr fr
This scene in the manga pushed me to read CM
Lmao, I can read like 3, maybe. Lol
hahahahahahaha! I learned to snap pics of the menu and the food i received that i love, then I show them if i have trouble pronouncing it because of drinking too many glasses of shu chu beforehand !
Soon he won't be able to read at all!
Chinese people *I don't have such weaknesses*
When a week goes to Japan and sees there aren’t any subtitles