I mean, think of it this way: it comes down to how often you come across words in any language including English (even in ENG: you may forget how to spell words correctly if you don’t use or encounter them often), kind of the same logic with Kanji: a Japanese person doesn’t know all Kanji in the same way English speakers doesn’t know every single word that exists in ENG.
There are over 5000 Kanji but only about half of that is used in Japanese or closer to 2136 while the remainder consist of ones only present within technical jargon (medicine, science, politics, etc.). or certain Kanji only has limited uses in some words (but mostly written in kana). That is also accounting for grammar being “straight forward” more than English or Euro languages.
The “real” hard part is numerous readings (depending whether it’s paired with kana or another kanji, reflected from kunyomi & onyomi plus nanori when applied in people’s names). What I hate about most online translators is that it often gets lost in translation (like words used in the wrong context but on their own it’s correct, however not right for the situation or topic at hand).
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I once tried to learn to count in Japanese, but had to stop because I got an itchy knee.
I also told my wife about my itchy knees and she go lookin’ in a hot jacuzzi.
(best I could improvise… The jacuzzi is a bit off though)
I’ve been studying Japanese for almost six years now and I would say YES kanji is difficult, but it’s not insurmountable. It’s also one of the most interesting and fulfilling parts of learning the language.
There’s a certain level of “you have to know the rules before you know how to break the rules” but kanji can often be used in interesting nonstandard ways in literature & manga and just in general carry so much meaning and depth.
There’s always something new to learn. Did you know that there’s another version of 探す (to search) that has a slightly different connotation? 探す is usually used to search for something you want, but 捜す is used to search for something that’s missing.By the way, do we have a Japanese learning community on Lemmy?
Yes: It seems very complicated.
To counter your argument about English: English is very complicated, reportedly it’s one of the hardest languages to learn because of all the exceptions to rules and the fact that it’s actually a bunch of different languages melded together (hence the many exceptions).
Kanji is easy.
(I went to school in China till 2nd grade 😉 close enough lol)
And you consider Japanese Kanji easy (context of the post)? What I heard from Chinese friends is that it’s just a chaotic mess
The chaotic mess is mostly hiragana/katagana
Japanese writing is mixed of 3, Japanese does not use Kanji for everything, so I cant read an average Japanese wikipedia page…
But this question says specifically Kanji so…
Its basically just Chinese characters… (for the most part)
Edit: I mean pure meaning only, the sounds are a whole different thing…
No. Studying it was entertaining. I remember plastering my walls at home - the whole apartment - with kanji, it’s readings and an example sentence. Every time I went by such a paper, I made it a rule to read it out loud. I also remember filling out whole notebooks with kanji. I also remember learning calligraphy, not because I wanted to learn calligraphy, but because writing kanji with a brush gives you a deeper understanding of why they are written in the way they are. Since I wasn’t living in Japan at the time, I needed a way to immerse myself. This was my way.
Have you ever read subtitles (日本語字幕) without pausing? Whenever I watch a non-Japanese movie, I just enable JP subs and you need a very good grasp on reading Kanji in real time since you’re reading translated dialog, and sometimes you can notice translation mistakes if you know where to look based on visual context within the scene. For Japanese movies: I sometimes enable closed captions to understand clearly what they’re saying.
Once you learn the 2000-ish necessary ones, kanji will actually be easier to read than kana and even the roman alphabet, because kanji are ideograms and pictograms, meaning, you won’t have to actually read it out loud in your head, you’ll just see an idea or a picture of something. It’s like reading “car” versus seeing “🚗”.
Is it that much harder than remembering that some emojis now map onto secondary meanings, like 🍆 meaning penis and 💀 meaning “I find this to be very funny”? Or even the primary meanings of emojis, where you’d totally understand what someone is saying when they type ✈️🇯🇵🍣🍜?
The difficulty comes from the sheer number of them, but human communication is full of things where meaning comes from non-alphabetical symbols.
Native Chinese speaker who is quite decent at Japanese and should in theory find Kanji quite easy, because of Chinese… YES
Not that the other parts of the language is easy, I find the keigo system quite complex so
?
Kanji is same as Chinese?
The only problem to me is more like the “Broken Characters” (aka: katakana/hiragana)
Yes… Until when you’d have to pronounce it 😭 And then there’s a ridiculous amount of Japanese names that seem to follow no rules whatsoever for their pronunciations. And then there’s online JP users who would put the weirdest pronunciations for Kanjis, sometimes they are so weird that they have to annotate the pronunciation themselves
… Anyways, Japanese is difficult
Oh pronunciation… forgot about that…
But the meaning is the same, no?
Then just mentally map a sound to the Chinese version of the sound…
I already do that for Cantonese and Mandarin lol, remembering Japanese sounds would just be like another “dialect” isn’t it? 🤔
I mean like if they wrote entire sentences in Kanji and not the hiragana katagana stuff, you can decipher the meaning right?
For the most part yeah. I think that’s unironically how I “cheated” my old JLPT exams and got way higher grades than I should. And really high-level Japanese (such as political news, debates, legal matter) are mostly Kanji, and by that point you’d fully understand all the non-Kanji parts anyways so
But in real life you still have to actually say the words out loud…
But the Question asked “Do you consider Kanji difficult?” not “Do you consider the Japanese Language difficult?” 😉
In real life I could just Google Translator xD
The Japanese changed a lot of hanzi to make it easier. The Chinese reaaaally simplified their hanzi to a point that I, as a native Japanese speaker, find it hard to decipher. With traditional Chinese, even with the more complex strokes, I can sorta make sense of signs and even some snippets from a newspaper article.
Also note that even though each character might have the same-ish meaning across languages, we might use different combinations to describe a word.
No duh, it’s literally Chinese
It seems simple enough that I could use it if I really needed to, but complicated enough that it would be difficult to learn without consistent reinforcement.
No, I think its logical and precise. I enjoy it very much. Therefore, I love Chinese more than Japanese.
I find it hard even though I am somewhat used to them since my first language is Korean. Hardest part for me is remembering the character shape and their associated sound. The general concept (kunyomi and onyomi, how they form words) makes sense though.
I successfully read one recently! I was watching sumo, and they show the wrestlers names first in kanji, than add the romaji later, and I saw that trident looking one at the end of a name and I thought -i know that one, that’s mountain, so could be -yama, or maybe -zan, at the end of the guy’s name, and tried to guess who was coming out next. Turned out it was Kinbozan, so i was right, but also meh.
romaji
Relying too much on romaji is bad, try to read using furigana (which is a hiragana transliteration on top of Kanji).
