Questions about kanji

[colorado723]

hello all, im a newb here and had a few questions to start:

when im readin my kanji book to study, how do i know which word that is written in hiragana is the correct word used in the language?

Also, are there any tips for learning kanji? there are so many, i just feel like some are more important than otherse.

thank you so much.

although i have a long road ahead of me learning japanese, i plan to be good eventually!

 

[Chidoriashi]

when im readin my kanji book to study, how do i know which word that is written in hiragana is the correct word used in the language?

Umm... what exactly are you talking about here?

 

[colorado723]

well i want to know how they say it in japanese but sometimes theres a few words written out in hiragana but i never know which one is the proper word.

 

[Glenn]

They're all right. It just depends on what you want to say.

 

[undrentide]

well i want to know how they say it in japanese but sometimes theres a few words written out in hiragana but i never know which one is the proper word.

I guess you're talking about homonym.
It also applies when we are speaking.
Basically people judge which one based on the context, so " It just depends on what you want to say" as Glenn san mentioned.

 

[Chidoriashi]

well i want to know how they say it in japanese but sometimes theres a few words written out in hiragana but i never know which one is the proper word.

It is still a bit unclear as to what you are referring to. Could you maybe paste, or type out an example?

 

[Glenn]

Yeah, examples would help clear up this confusion. 3 or 4 would be perfect.

 

[colorado723]

okay let me try.

i have this book called essential kanji, where i was planning to memorize these words but they have separate answers in hiragana and i didnt know which was the 'actual' word. you guys will probably understand this quick so here goes.

i dont have the ability to type the japanese character i want but lets talk about the symbol for water:

it says: Sui, Mizu, Water

is it sui? or mizu?

also at the bottom they use it in other words such as himizu and kasui.

i just want to know what water is so when somone asks, 'please say water', i can be like 'sui' or 'mizu' (whichever it is) and know the symbol.


or tree has two also moku, boku

mountain: san, yama :?

 

[colorado723]

its going to be extremely overwhelming to have to not only memorize the symbol and multiple meanings no?

how did you do it? since im self teaching i have no real methods.

 

[Glenn]

I ask you to check out these two posts:

I'm learning Kanji -- Need help with this. | Japan Forum

How do you know... ON/KUN and beyond | Japan Forum

If you read those and still have questions let us know. By the way, doesn't your book explain this at all?

 

[colorado723]

okay i remember now that there are kun and un yomi types of kanji,

is there both for every kanji?

 

[Glenn]

No, but for the vast majority of them there are, I believe.

 

[colorado723]

so i guess my final question is, when i study a certain kanji, should i know all about it before i move onto the next? or just
i want to broaden my knowledge of kanji before i begin my classes, and hopeing to get through them quick, but that wont happen if i have to remember 2 meanings and the symbol itself.

what do you suggest a good strategy is?

 

[Glenn]

I liked James Heisig's Remebering the Kanji, myself. It goes through all of the "common-use" characters plus some (2042 in all), and teaches you writings and meanings. It doesn't touch readings, though. The reason for that is because it's a bit much to learn all of that at once. You can pick the readings up by reading Japanese writing with furigana, or making a study of them later (although he does have a second book for learning the readings).

If you don't do it that way, it's suggested that you learn about the characters and how they're constructed first, so that you can see the parts that make them up and how they interact with each other and what functions they serve. For that you can start at the Wikipedia page on Chinese character classification, although it deals with Chinese. Still the character types are the same in Japanese as in Chinese, and the construction of them doesn't change based on the language. The page on radicals also focuses on Chinese, but again the principles are the same.

As you can see, there are parts that go together to make more complex characters, so learning the parts and what they mean and then learning the characters that they make up is helpful. 語, for instance, is a very common character, but it's a bit intimidating to just jump right into. But if you've learned 五, 口, (and then 吾 from them), and 言, you can easily see that it's 言 on the left and 吾 on the right, and you've just reduced a 14-stroke character into a 2-component character, with parts that mean something instead of just a bunch of seemingly meaningless strokes, and it becomes much easier to remember.

The Heisig book employs this building block strategy, and the order it introduces the characters in doesn't concern itself with frequency, so you get to see the parts coming together for all of the 2042 introduced therein. Lots of books introduce characters in their order of frequency, but it doesn't make sense to learn 話 before 舌 just because it's used more often, especially when putting 言 with 舌 pretty much gives you the meaning of 話. I don't know of any other books that use the building blocks principle aside from Heisig's, though.

 

[AJBryant]

My big thing is, don't stress on kanji.

Kanji are not a separate element of Japanese that can be divorced from the language for study. Learn kanji as the words come, rather than in isolation.

You're not studying/learning/memorizing KANJI. You're learning JAPANESE.

 

[Glenn]

But even Japanese people study kanji. And they spend years and years doing it in school. To me that sort of argument is like saying "don't practice hitting. Just practice baseball. Hitting is part of baseball." Kanji present a special challenge for the learner that doesn't exist in any other language (except other languages that use them, which really is only the Chineses at this point. Korean doesn't use them all that extensively).

I would agree with you if everyone just picked up kanji as they were reading Japanese, but how common is that? I would imagine most cases are where you get sick of seeing the same character and not remembering its reading or meaning, or not being able to write a character that you feel you should know because you've seen it before (even though this one is becoming less a factor with hand writing pretty much disappearing), or constantly confusing similar-looking characters. In that case isolating the problem and working on it in isolation is the best way to improve it. Just like with hitting, if you find a weakness and isolate it and work on strengthening it, it will only make you a better hitter (and overall player).

Aside from that, I studied them on their own, and even without readings until I got through the 2042 in RTK. Granted, I had learned a few hundred with readings before, but 2/3 of the ones I learned I initially learned only one meaning of, and no reading. Just the writing. In that sense they can be divorced from Japanese and studied on their own. Plus they're pretty divorced from Japanese in Chinese.

How did you learn them? Just from reading Japanese text? If so, how long did it take you to feel comfortable with them? Were you in Japan when you were learning them? It's not like in the US we see kanji all over the place without trying or going out of our ways to see them. If we were in Japan it may be different. What about people who are functionally illeterate in Japanese but are fluent speakers? They obviously didn't learn kanji as a matter of course of studying the language.

 

[Chidoriashi]

But even Japanese people study kanji. And they spend years and years doing it in school. To me that sort of argument is like saying "don't practice hitting. Just practice baseball. Hitting is part of baseball."

Umm I don't think that is what he is saying. Kanji can be overwhelming and difficult to memorize if you make it a separate part of your Japanese studies. And I do not think it makes sense to necessarily apply how natives learn to how non-natives should learn.

What I think he is saying and what I did to learn kanji is every time I learned a new vocabulary word I would learn its kanji. (granted this is after I had acquired 300-400 base kanji, but this was in school and on chapter by chapter basis, in which most of the kanji applied to words/topics we were learning anyway).

Anyway, I found it much easier to memorize kanji once I could apply it to something practical in the language. Something I use, and can take notice of when I see.

To me doing this takes away the overwhelming sensation of kanji, and allows learners to progress in the language much easier than grueling memorization of something they cannot or do not know how to properly apply yet.

 

[colorado723]

well my only concern with learning just kanji, is that if i am studying random kanji from my book in the order they have them, (which they are apparently 'systematically arranged') and they dont use them commonly, i feel like ill forget a ton.

but i suppose that goes with anything, if you reinforce, you probably wont remember.
whats probably the hardest part is starting from the complete beginning. i can properly pronounce hiragana and spell what i hear, i suppose thats a start.

 

[Chidoriashi]

well my only concern with learning just kanji, is that if i am studying random kanji from my book in the order they have them, (which they are apparently 'systematically arranged') and they dont use them commonly, i feel like ill forget a ton.

This is why I suggest you learn them as you learn vocabulary words that they can be applied to.

 

[colorado723]

aren't kanji pretty much used by themselves when you write japanese anway?

like arent they vocabulary words themselves? or are certain things in hiragana only ( i know theres katakana too, im just kinda getting a general idea).

 

[Half-n-Half]

To add to what Chidoriashi has already said, I also don't think it is fair to apply the way natives learn to non-native learners. After all, they have the advantage of already speaking and understanding the language before they learn kanji.

As for me, I learn most of my kanji through reading. This does nothing for writing, however, and I can recognize many more kanji than I know how to write. That's not to say I won't take a more formal approach to learning kanji later down the road. It's just for now, it is too boring for me to study on my own using any number of the conventional methods. I can easily do it in class when I'm forced to, but not on my own. If RTK worked for you that's awesome, I just get too bored of it, lol.

What about people who are functionally illeterate in Japanese but are fluent speakers? They obviously didn't learn kanji as a matter of course of studying the language.

Well, I think it is only fair to ask the question how many of those people actually studied the language aside from just speaking it every day, or making a conscious effort to read?

 

[Glenn]

I wasn't applying how natives learn to how non-natives learn. The point was that if even Japanese people, who are surrounded by kanji all the time, and already speak the language, have to study them, there's a pretty good chance non-Japanese people (especially those who didn't grow up having contact with them) will have to study them. I definitely don't think non-natives should study them the way the Japanese do. I'm not even so sure the Japanese should study them the way they do, but it works at any rate.

I actually did have a chance to see my study pay off practically, as when I would look at a Japanese website or see some kanji in a show I knew what they meant, even if I couldn't read them yet. That was a good pay-off for me. All of a sudden things that I knew nothing about I at least knew enough about to make sense out of what I was reading, even if I couldn't put a Japanese pronunciation to it. It was still an immediate real-world benefit.

I'm surprised to hear you say that learning them one at a time as they came along wasn't overwhelming. At least in my case, constantly coming across new characters and having to learn their readings and meanings would start to feel like too much. But I like to know where the end line is, so I'll know where I am and how much farther I'll have to go. I know that doesn't exist in real life (there'll always be some character you don't know), but in the sense that there's a finite set of characters prescribed for learning that you HAVE to achieve to be considered literate, there is a finish line. It may be a personality thing. I'd rather have boundaries than feel like I'm floating along, which is what the "pick them up as they come along" approach feels like to me.

Perhaps seeing the components of a character and how they come together to make it up is also a personality thing. I do know that after I tackled them on their own and saw things like 心 + 青 = 情 they became a lot easier to learn, and helped me to pick up things like 囀, 鬱, 轍, and 鍼. I don't doubt someone could just take one or all of those and learn them as they are, but I believe that building up to them by learning their components systematically is more effective and faster.

In the end, I learned them aside from the language. I isolated them and learned them on their own. Yet that didn't keep me from learning Japanese, because I was also learning Japanese. They were a special problem that required special attention for me. I assume they're that for most people. And I think the best way to deal with special problems is by isolating them and working on them. I guess that's all I wanted to say, even if I had to go through all of the above to do it. Plus, I did want to learn to write them by hand, and retain that knowledge. Perhaps it isn't necessary to isolate them if you're just aiming for reading ability.

 

[Chidoriashi]

aren't kanji pretty much used by themselves when you write japanese anway?
like arent they vocabulary words themselves? or are certain things in hiragana only ( i know theres katakana too, im just kinda getting a general idea).

Umm no many times (particularly for Chinese origin words) two or more Kanji are strung together to form one whole word. Now there are a number of Kanji that can be used as stand alone words, and there are a number of things that in modern times kanji use has faded and they are typically only written in hiragana/katakana now, but this should not be a problem since those words that are generally only hiragana will be presented to you in that way.

 

[Glenn]

aren't kanji pretty much used by themselves when you write japanese anway?
like arent they vocabulary words themselves? or are certain things in hiragana only ( i know theres katakana too, im just kinda getting a general idea).

They're more like morphemes.

Well, I think it is only fair to ask the question how many of those people actually studied the language aside from just speaking it every day, or making a conscious effort to read?

My main point was that if you can just pick them up by studying Japanese, then people who are fluent speakers should be able to just pick them up. But then again I'd have to see how many people in Japan are illiterate fluent speakers to really make this point. But given what Chidoriashi said above about learning kanji by just reading Japanese perhaps it's a moot point anyway. It seems I misunderstood what @AJBryant was saying in the first place. There are still Japanese who aren't good at kanji, though (18-year-olds who write 窶愿ｱ窶怒 instead of 窶愿ｺ窶怒 for example, although it may not be the best one...).

 

[Half-n-Half]

My main point was that if you can just pick them up by studying Japanese, then people who are fluent speakers should be able to just pick them up. But then again I'd have to see how many people in Japan are illiterate fluent speakers to really make this point. But given what Chidoriashi said above about learning kanji by just reading Japanese perhaps it's a moot point anyway. It seems I misunderstood what @AJBryant was saying in the first place. There are still Japanese who aren't good at kanji, though (18-year-olds who write 窶愿ｱ窶怒 instead of 窶愿ｺ窶怒 for example, although it may not be the best one...).

Yeah, I see your point now. Just out of curiosity, once you learned the meanings behind each kanji, how did you then learn their readings? Rote memorization plus lots of reading?