Kanji ... I just don't get it!

[SafiMoyo]

I'm having a hard time pushing myself to learn Kanji. Not really because there's so many, but because I... well, there are still things I don't get...

So most Kanji have an On and a Kun reading, right? And a good number of those have multiple readings for both? And then even multiple meanings, right?

Basically... what should I know? Should I study the On reading? When do I pernounce the On reading instead of the Kun reading? How many different readings for each Kanji should I learn at this point as a beginner?

Furthermore, how in the world do I look Kanji up? Are there Kanji dictionaries? How would you look up Kanji--by number of strokes and then stroke direction?

Then! When two Kanji are stuck next to each other, they mean something completely different than the Kanji that are by themselves. How do you know what it means?

ども ありがとう ございます！

Edit: Eh? I swear I posted this in the Kanji section, oops! Sorry!

 

[northsider1983]

I feel your pain. When I started to learn Japanese I learned hiragana and katakana. I thought these were pretty easy because you can just "spell" the words you are learning and such. And then...BAM, kanji. When I got the courage to start learning kanji, I knew that there would be mulitple meaning for each kanji...what I didnt know was the kun/on readings. Very confusing.

I dont know a whole lot about kanji, but I feel your pain. kanji alone will get rid of those who are not serious about learning Japanese. What is really throwing me in a loop is when two kanji are together and means something totally different. I suppose, like everything else, this will come with practice...but ohh is it so confusing. Hopefully someone who knows what they are talking about can shed some light on this. :-]

 

[tanhql]

due to my chinese and english background, learning japanese, even the kanji, has been rather smooth sailing for me, as i have 2 languages to learn japanese from. it's also easy for me to guess the meanings of 'combined' kanji even if i didn't study them before, because most of the time the same combination exists in chinese too. the only thing bothering me are the readings for the kanji, which i felt best if studied on a case by case basis, though most of the time 1 on and 1 kun reading would suffice.

 

[epigene]

The use of kanji cannot be avoided if you want to learn the language. The Chinese student of Japanese had the advantage because kanji had been borrowed from China. However, in the assimilation of kanji into the Japanese language, the characters have undergone hybridization, with the "meaning" of each character applied and matched with corresponding native Japanese terms ('kun" reading) and the original pronunciation of each character in Chinese retained in the "on" reading. Of course, this applied to the kanji characters in general, and there are exceptions.

The only way to go is to start a little at a time. You can't expect to master the kanjis like you would hiragana and katakana. Although this comparison may not necessarily be valid, you can say that learning hiragana/katakana is like learning to write the ABCs in English--something you master by 1st grade. Learning kanji is like building your vocabulary in English--which continues on up to high school and further, as you pursue your studies.

So, be patient in learning kanji. You must accept and master both "on" and "kun' readings for each kanji you learn, though some characters may have only one reading and some have multiple readings (as a result of hybridization and evolution of the Japanese language).

Explaining this can go on and on, so I'd like to post a long comment on this topic made by Mr. Shinji Takasugi. This had been posted here in JREF in the past. Glad I had it bookmarked!

Why Use Kanji?

Kanji are very useful because they provide an organized vocabulary.

As you know, a modern language has many words of philosophy, science, economy, etc., and we have to memorize them in order to live in a modern society. It's good if we have an organized vocabulary - a set of complex words that can be derived from simple words, so that we can memorize words easier and guess the meaning of words we haven't seen before. English is not a good language in this way, because it has imported many French, Latin, and Greek words, which are often difficult to guess meaning, even though you usually need a large vocabulary when you use English. German, for example, has a more organized vocabulary. Compare the English word television and the German word Fernsehen (Fern = far, sehen = to see).

Having an organized vocabulary has a problem, though. Complex words tend to be long because they consist of several morphemes (word elements), which is not good for our fast-moving society. Chinese have solved this problem by using Han characters (kanji), each of which has a simple syllable, and pairing them produces immense words. There is a risk of having homophones because there are many more characters than possible syllables, but logograms help you distinguish words correctly.

Japanese is a unique language that has succeeded in internalizing foreign logograms. Importing words can deteriorate the organized vocabulary system because understanding of morphemes can be lost, but Japanese enjoy the benefit of having organized and short words imported from Chinese and still deeply understand meanings of morphemes, i.e. kanji. The key is the combination of an on-reading and a kun-reading of a kanji. You can usually guess the meaning of a kanji compound if you know the kun-readings of the kanji. Remember we are not computers but humans, and we need associations to properly memorize. The tight relationships of on-readings and kun-readings help you understand sophisticated words. Again, English doesn't have a good vocabulary system, because it doesn't tell you meaning of foreign-origin morphemes. See an English thesaurus to find words for an excellent artistic work and you'll find masterpiece, magnum opus, tour de force, chef d'oeuvre, acme of perfection, etc. In Japanese, the list will be: 傑作 (けっさく), 名作 (めいさく), 力作 (りきさく), 佳作 (かさく), 秀作 (しゅうさく), etc. It's clear the Japanese vocabulary is more organized.

You might think Chinese is much better than Japanese if its vocabulary system is so efficient. Maybe that is true, but since Japan is economically and culturally more interesting than China now, it's good to study its official language. In addition, you can't write what you want to write in Chinese unless you master enough kanji, while you can use kana in Japanese if you don't know kanji.

Throwing away on-readings and using only kun-readings may seem to work, but actually it wouldn't work, because we would lose complex short words. The Japanese language achieves fast speech speed by its simple syllable structure, which easily results in having long words. Japanese avoid this by on-readings, accepting having many homophones. Homophones are not a big problem if logograms are used.

> I just thought it was up that a modern nation like Japan would insist on using ideograms when countries like Korea, for example, use entirely phonetic scripts. Plus, Japan actually does have a phonetic script, that's been around for 800 years or so, so it seems odd to me, I guess.

It's a common misunderstanding that logograms are obsolete and phonograms are modern. In fact, linguists have proven that a human being can read logograms faster than phonograms if trained to read. There are some Japanese who have been trying to write Japanese only in kana or only in alphabets with no success. If you write Japanese without kanji, you will forget the meanings of morphemes. The disadvantage of logograms is their difficulty to learn, but the fact that developed nations such as Japan and Taiwan have a very low illiteracy rate indicates it is not so hard to learn kanji as you might think, if good education is available.

The reason why most people in the world don't use logograms is that it needs hundreds of years to build a writing system based on logograms. Ancient people who invented first characters had a plenty of time, and the Japanese are the only major people who have successfully integrated foreign logograms into their native language. On the other hand, importing phonograms is very easy. The problem of using phonograms is the gap between spelling and pronunciation caused by inevitable pronunciation change. Do you know Japan had a different orthography of kana before World War II? Japan easily changed its orthography of kana after the war because that didn't affect most words that have kanji. If Japanese had given up kanji long ago and used only kana, the orthography wouldn't have been changed, and the sentence "今日 (きょう) 東京 (とうきょう) で洋服 (ようふく) を買 (か) った" (I bought clothes in Tôkyô today) would be: けふ とうきやうで やうふくを かつた. The gap between spelling and pronunciation would be wide.

 

[cacawate]

And then even multiple meanings, right?

This school of thought will be your biggest hurdle in the learning of not only Kanji, but the language itself.

The words do not have multiple meanings unless you attempt to translate them into your own language, where they can be used in multiple instances and have to be translated as different words for each instance.

As I am obviously not good at explaining things let me give you an example:

【やさしい】 (adj) tender; kind; gentle; graceful; affectionate; amiable; suave; (P)

Not knowing the word, your first instinct would be to memorize all of the translations for it and then try to put it to use. You only have one word to memorize here, though. That word is やさしい. Find the contexts that it's used in and build from there. This is how you learned English, isn't it?

"That person over there just let me go in front of them at the market. They are very やさしい, aren't they?"

"That child over there doesn't hit the dog like the other kids, how やさしい."

This is the way I try to learn words, and I hope it works for you. Make it like you are learning a whole new word and I think it will be much easier for you.

I apologize for semi-derailing the thread. As you were.

 

[northsider1983]

Thanks for the info both of you. Cacawate, I like the way you think...this will definitely help me in my studies, context is so much easier to learn that brutal meaning memorization. :-]

 

[bakaKanadajin]

I feel your pain, Kanji is a difficult thing to wrap your head around. Even more difficult is writing, proper strokes and all. But as I understand it, even that is becoming lost among today's youth due to the emergence of pre-emptive text in cell phones. So its not just difficult for us gaijin

I think practical usage really helps. Something that helps me is reading childrens books, those usually have the furigana beside the Kanji so since you know your hiragana you can at least read aloud seamlessly and then go back later and figure out what you couldn't get from context. I think seeing Kanji in context (even train station names!) helps, vs. trying to remember Kanji just by themselves from a textbook. Like if you read one Kanji, and beat it to death, know all its various readings, meanings, etc., what good is that if you still stumble over it in a book or article and you can't figure out what its supposed to MEAN right then and there. As cacawate pointed out, seeing the context and getting to know things through repetition is important much in the same way as it was learning English.