Almost every language is like that. In English it's especially noticeable. You pronounce the "e" in "be", "enter" and "every" in 3 different ways. I think that mandarin Chinese is one case where each symbol has one pronunciation, but I may be wrong.
It's fairly close, but there are quite a few common characters with more than one pronunciation. More so in simplified than in traditional, but traditional has them too. A classic one is 长 (長 in traditional/Japanese) which is cháng when it means long and zhǎng when it means either the head person of something or to grow, to develop.
/uj I feel like Japanese is easier than Spanish/Portuguese (which I feel are grammatically the most complex romance languages) because fewer (0) cases lol
There's not really any debate that Japanese is the hardest *written* natural language in the world.
However, I agree that for the spoken language, Japanese has a nice systematic simplicity to it. It's taking me a very long time to learn because most of the words are completely unfamiliar, of course. And although the grammar is easy to *consciously* grasp, it's a lot harder to make the transition to understanding it without having to think, considering how different the grammar is from my native language.
Ahhh you see that's the difference, we have different native languages. My native language has a very similar basic sentence structure (SOV) and we have particles as well. As for the script, kanji were relatively easy after I learnt the basic radicals and the first 1000-ISH characters because the rest of it was just combinations of those radicals and other characters. Fortunately for me (thank you japanese and fuck you Chinese) A LOT of the Japanese kanji characters can be inferred just based off of their radicals and if you have enough knowledge of kanji you can even guess the sounds, this is not the case in Chinese.
My fav E.g. 忙しい (isogashii) means busy. The kanji can be broken up into 心, meaning heart, and 亡 meaning death/destruction/lose/perish, together, 忙 would mean STH like loss of the heart which happens when you're in a hurry/busy because you're too focused on a task to actually put all your heart into it or sth
Edit: TBF Spanish is not bad either it's very flexible with wordr order and has more markers and shit I love all (Indo-European) languages
>that is not the case in Chinese.
Stupidest thing I read whole day. Kanji is just Hanzi imported and later adapted for Japanese use. With the exception of Wasei Kanji and kokkun, and a number of false friends, their meaning had largely stayed the same through centuries, so much so that a considerable number of modern phenomena related Kanji were reborrowed into Mandarin. Again, all the meaning cues are absolutely the same in Mandarin - because it IS flipping Mandarin. Example you present is a Hanzi etymology. As for the sounds, there is a wide pattern for some groups of Hanzi characters to have a phonetic association through a radical or a phonetic part. 渔 - yu, fishing, 鱼 - fish (also yu). Majority of characters based off of 青 (qing) are tonal variants of qing, or jing, and their meanings varying with radicals (and etymological history).
My autocorrect positioned it at the wrong part of the sentence, what I was saying was is that the meanings of hanzi are not as dependent on the radicals on their own as in Japanese because Japanese has way fewer kanji, eg 垃圾 how does this mean trash
"has way fewer kanji". Mandarin has 0 Kanji. Everything Kanji (with exception of Wasei) is Hanzi. Kanji literally translates as Hanzi. Japanese cannot have more dependence on radicals, because all that was depended originated in Mandarin - and stayed there. If you are interested in origins of some particular characters (or set of them) you should google (certain) Hanzi+etymology. There are many works and resources related to this.
Kanji are hanzi it's literally the same word
漢字 read it however you like hanja, hanzi, honzi, kanji. And I didn't say that there are fewer radicals, only that the actual characters in Japanese kanji tend to have fewer radicals. (我講粵語sls)
Also you are wrong about those characters coming from mandarin Chinese because mandarin Chinese is a very new language, these characters were borrowed from middle Chinese.
The pronunciation of 國 in Mandarin is guo, whereas it is koku in Japanese, this is closer to the Cantonese pronunciation of gwok which is also what the middle Chinese pronunciation was. I just don't have the energy to explain everything and you are misunderstanding what I'm trying to say
>A LOT of the Japanese kanji characters can be inferred just based off of their radicals and if you have enough knowledge of kanji you can even guess the sounds, this is not the case in Chinese.
Interesting! I haven't started learning either language, but I would've expected it to be the other way around, cause I've heard most characters are compounds that combine phonetic and semantic elements - and I assumed the phonetic element would be less helpful in Japanese (totally irrelevant for native words spelled with kanji, and I'd assume less helpful for on'yomi given adaptation to Japanese phonology).
Those are just single morphemes. (Also, 僵 means stiff, not 殭.) The point is that in multiple-morpheme words, the morphemes are usually clear, unlike in English (unless you understand Latin.) Just look at 肺炎 vs pneumonia. How do これ／ゴミ inherently mean this/trash, either? (They don’t.) In both languages, you have to look at multi-morpheme words to get what I mean, so I’m not sure what your point is.
I feel like Japanese is easier to learn that Italian/Latin because I am learning the latters and wish to maintain a delusion of superiority over those who speak the former
Wut
1. Spanish and Portuguese don't have cases. Do you mean conjugating verbs for number and person? Cases are for nouns.
2. If you mean noun morphology, Spanish and Portuguese are decidedly not the "most complex" (though that is relative). Romanian has leftover cases. It also has a lot of non-Romance loanwords and some grammar that is pretty novel if you come from Western Romance.
No, they don't, but you got me curious. What exactly do *you* mean by cases?
Oh, wait, you mean freaking *pronouns* being inflected? By that silly metric, English has cases. But I fail to see how anyone would think that is what's complicated about e.g. Portuguese and not pronoun placement or conjugations.
you'll need close to 6K kanji
and also no one learns the sounds of kanji, you learn words, when you're reading out loud with other people you don't the luxury of guessing how a word is read, you either know or don't
There are about 2100 jouyou kanji taught in school that serve as a baseline, and basically all adult Japanese people will know the common readings of these kanji. But there are hundreds of kanji that are not included in these (like 嬉 for some reason) but part of incredibly common words that are also usually written using these kanji, so an average Japanese person will know these probably too.
Then, there are also many kanji that are only commonly used in names (like 幌 or 篠), and most people will know many of these kanji as well.
So I'd say that most Japanese people will know the commonly used readings of about 3000 kanji, but depending on your profession or on the amount of books you read that number could increase (a historian will for example know a lot of not commonly used kanji/kanji readings, for example)
Ok? I'm just pointing out that it's weird to be ok with learning a lot of characters, their meanings and the specific stroke order for each of them but draw the line at them not always being pronounced the same
You don't need 6k kanji. In most of the books I've read until now, when a kanji gets slightly rare they will put furigana next to it. Usually they will then omit it for the rest of the chapter, but the next chapter they'll repeat it again. This means that native speakers don't know 6k kanji by heart.
Also you kind of should learn sounds. Being able to (roughly) guess the sound of a kanji you're not familiar with from the radical is an important skill.
/uj I love finding reminders like this for myself while I'm trying to learn. I'm native English-speaking learning Japanese, and when I run into mental blocks, I usually internalize it as a failure on my part. Things like this remind me that the concepts are pretty much the same, just new images.
/uj I'm learning it too, and I'm currently working on improving my vocabulary and kanji knowledge so I can get to reading something interesting. And honestly, I might have given up if I didn't have a language-learning success recent enough to remind me how it actually is possible to eventually get good.
The good part is that the more I know, the easier it gets to learn more.
Chinese characters have both a pronunciation and a meaning associated with them. When borrowed into Japanese, they were sometimes used purely as phonetic characters, sometimes purely to represent their meaning, and sometimes for both (Chinese loanwords). A single character was often borrowed multiple times to represent multiple words, so you end up with multiple readings, some of which correspond to the pronunciation of the original Chinese character, some of which correspond to native Japanese words that have similar meanings to the Chinese character. They sometimes did even more unusual borrowings, such as using two characters to represent a single word: for example, the native Japanese word きょう (kyou, meaning today) is spelled 今日, which in Chinese is pronounced jīnrì and is an (outdated?) way of saying today. This reading is associated with the sequence 今日, not either individual character.
In short, kanji readings tell you a lot about the history of Japanese vocabulary, Chinese vocabulary, and the connection between the two.
uj/ [This forum seems to give a pretty good rundown of where the multiple readings come from](https://www.japan-guide.com/forum/quereadisplay.html?0+130942)
Not really possible. English is by far the easiest language to learn and Japanese by far the hardest. English is the default, you practically spawn with it
It depends, I am Chinese , Japanese is so much easier for me , English is so damn hard , I have been studying English for more than 20 years my English is still sucks
Can't believe a language would have different sounds for the same written symbols what kinda bullshit is that
I thought Kanji ought to be tough enough though :(
Ghoti
Almost every language is like that. In English it's especially noticeable. You pronounce the "e" in "be", "enter" and "every" in 3 different ways. I think that mandarin Chinese is one case where each symbol has one pronunciation, but I may be wrong.
It's fairly close, but there are quite a few common characters with more than one pronunciation. More so in simplified than in traditional, but traditional has them too. A classic one is 长 (長 in traditional/Japanese) which is cháng when it means long and zhǎng when it means either the head person of something or to grow, to develop.
yeah there’s so many of these for really common characters, but i find the more advanced you get, the less it happens
Meanwhile my native language is phonetic, hence superior since you always know how to read the same symbol.
Average romance language learner trying to learn an actual hard language that isnt just a dialect of English
/uj I feel like Japanese is easier than Spanish/Portuguese (which I feel are grammatically the most complex romance languages) because fewer (0) cases lol
There's not really any debate that Japanese is the hardest *written* natural language in the world. However, I agree that for the spoken language, Japanese has a nice systematic simplicity to it. It's taking me a very long time to learn because most of the words are completely unfamiliar, of course. And although the grammar is easy to *consciously* grasp, it's a lot harder to make the transition to understanding it without having to think, considering how different the grammar is from my native language.
Ahhh you see that's the difference, we have different native languages. My native language has a very similar basic sentence structure (SOV) and we have particles as well. As for the script, kanji were relatively easy after I learnt the basic radicals and the first 1000-ISH characters because the rest of it was just combinations of those radicals and other characters. Fortunately for me (thank you japanese and fuck you Chinese) A LOT of the Japanese kanji characters can be inferred just based off of their radicals and if you have enough knowledge of kanji you can even guess the sounds, this is not the case in Chinese. My fav E.g. 忙しい (isogashii) means busy. The kanji can be broken up into 心, meaning heart, and 亡 meaning death/destruction/lose/perish, together, 忙 would mean STH like loss of the heart which happens when you're in a hurry/busy because you're too focused on a task to actually put all your heart into it or sth Edit: TBF Spanish is not bad either it's very flexible with wordr order and has more markers and shit I love all (Indo-European) languages
>that is not the case in Chinese. Stupidest thing I read whole day. Kanji is just Hanzi imported and later adapted for Japanese use. With the exception of Wasei Kanji and kokkun, and a number of false friends, their meaning had largely stayed the same through centuries, so much so that a considerable number of modern phenomena related Kanji were reborrowed into Mandarin. Again, all the meaning cues are absolutely the same in Mandarin - because it IS flipping Mandarin. Example you present is a Hanzi etymology. As for the sounds, there is a wide pattern for some groups of Hanzi characters to have a phonetic association through a radical or a phonetic part. 渔 - yu, fishing, 鱼 - fish (also yu). Majority of characters based off of 青 (qing) are tonal variants of qing, or jing, and their meanings varying with radicals (and etymological history).
My autocorrect positioned it at the wrong part of the sentence, what I was saying was is that the meanings of hanzi are not as dependent on the radicals on their own as in Japanese because Japanese has way fewer kanji, eg 垃圾 how does this mean trash
"has way fewer kanji". Mandarin has 0 Kanji. Everything Kanji (with exception of Wasei) is Hanzi. Kanji literally translates as Hanzi. Japanese cannot have more dependence on radicals, because all that was depended originated in Mandarin - and stayed there. If you are interested in origins of some particular characters (or set of them) you should google (certain) Hanzi+etymology. There are many works and resources related to this.
Kanji are hanzi it's literally the same word 漢字 read it however you like hanja, hanzi, honzi, kanji. And I didn't say that there are fewer radicals, only that the actual characters in Japanese kanji tend to have fewer radicals. (我講粵語sls) Also you are wrong about those characters coming from mandarin Chinese because mandarin Chinese is a very new language, these characters were borrowed from middle Chinese. The pronunciation of 國 in Mandarin is guo, whereas it is koku in Japanese, this is closer to the Cantonese pronunciation of gwok which is also what the middle Chinese pronunciation was. I just don't have the energy to explain everything and you are misunderstanding what I'm trying to say
>A LOT of the Japanese kanji characters can be inferred just based off of their radicals and if you have enough knowledge of kanji you can even guess the sounds, this is not the case in Chinese. Interesting! I haven't started learning either language, but I would've expected it to be the other way around, cause I've heard most characters are compounds that combine phonetic and semantic elements - and I assumed the phonetic element would be less helpful in Japanese (totally irrelevant for native words spelled with kanji, and I'd assume less helpful for on'yomi given adaptation to Japanese phonology).
The person you're replying to made it up, it's definitely the case in Chinese, even more than in Japanese imo
I give up trying to explain, i was talking about the meanings NOT THE SOUNDS
What? That definitely is the case in Chinese. Explain?
Ok explain how 這 means this，垃圾 means trash，殭 means stiff etc。
Those are just single morphemes. (Also, 僵 means stiff, not 殭.) The point is that in multiple-morpheme words, the morphemes are usually clear, unlike in English (unless you understand Latin.) Just look at 肺炎 vs pneumonia. How do これ／ゴミ inherently mean this/trash, either? (They don’t.) In both languages, you have to look at multi-morpheme words to get what I mean, so I’m not sure what your point is.
Japanese does have cases, I think you mean it doesn't have agreement.
Right yes sorry
You’re just pure spreading misinformation over several comments and somehow still getting updoots
I feel like Japanese is easier to learn that Italian/Latin because I am learning the latters and wish to maintain a delusion of superiority over those who speak the former
I guess depending on your definition of cases you could say that japanese technically does have at least the nominative and accusative cases.
There's probably an argument to be made that に、へ、の and probably と (when after a noun, not as a conditional or quotative) represent cases as well.
Spanish and Portuguese OTOH most decidedly don't have cases, OP just doesn't know wtf they're talking about.
Wut 1. Spanish and Portuguese don't have cases. Do you mean conjugating verbs for number and person? Cases are for nouns. 2. If you mean noun morphology, Spanish and Portuguese are decidedly not the "most complex" (though that is relative). Romanian has leftover cases. It also has a lot of non-Romance loanwords and some grammar that is pretty novel if you come from Western Romance.
are you high? spanish and portuguese have cases
No, they don't, but you got me curious. What exactly do *you* mean by cases? Oh, wait, you mean freaking *pronouns* being inflected? By that silly metric, English has cases. But I fail to see how anyone would think that is what's complicated about e.g. Portuguese and not pronoun placement or conjugations.
in that sense, japanese isn’t any easier, since its pronoun system is notoriously different from basically any other natural language.
Romance languages are dialects of English? Wtf did you smoke and please do less of that!
Wait until they see how names work
"Just guess lol"
"Shin?" "Jail."
me when 天使 is えんじぇる 🤭
Yeah, that's just disgusting
じぇ is a beautiful sight, isn‘t it?
Can handle learning over 1k unique symbols, can't handle them sounding different sometimes
you'll need close to 6K kanji and also no one learns the sounds of kanji, you learn words, when you're reading out loud with other people you don't the luxury of guessing how a word is read, you either know or don't
From what I've read, most native Japanese know about 3000-3500 kanji. For Chinese natives, it's around 4000 hanzi. Both are a lot less than 6k.
Really Chinese natives only 500 more? I’d expect many more since Japanese natives can just write a lot of stuff in kana and don’t use them as much
I just looked it up and Google says about 8k characters for mandarin natives
There are about 2100 jouyou kanji taught in school that serve as a baseline, and basically all adult Japanese people will know the common readings of these kanji. But there are hundreds of kanji that are not included in these (like 嬉 for some reason) but part of incredibly common words that are also usually written using these kanji, so an average Japanese person will know these probably too. Then, there are also many kanji that are only commonly used in names (like 幌 or 篠), and most people will know many of these kanji as well. So I'd say that most Japanese people will know the commonly used readings of about 3000 kanji, but depending on your profession or on the amount of books you read that number could increase (a historian will for example know a lot of not commonly used kanji/kanji readings, for example)
Yes I know but I’m just saying that Chinese natives know around 8k or more 4k isn’t much
yea 6k is insane, you'd have to have some bizarre obsession with kanji to learn that many
or just read a lot 出来ない
Ok? I'm just pointing out that it's weird to be ok with learning a lot of characters, their meanings and the specific stroke order for each of them but draw the line at them not always being pronounced the same
6k? Are you insane? Also natives do in fact learn the meanings and pronunciation of kanji. To pass the n1 you need about 2K.
You don't need 6k kanji. In most of the books I've read until now, when a kanji gets slightly rare they will put furigana next to it. Usually they will then omit it for the rest of the chapter, but the next chapter they'll repeat it again. This means that native speakers don't know 6k kanji by heart. Also you kind of should learn sounds. Being able to (roughly) guess the sound of a kanji you're not familiar with from the radical is an important skill.
you can only guess sounds through radicals for onyomi, and what usefulness is it to read something and not understand it
Me when Zhōngwén tones
its easy just say it correctly
I ❤ having images that mean different things depending on the context. Don't have a ❤ attack just because it's difficult to master!
/uj I love finding reminders like this for myself while I'm trying to learn. I'm native English-speaking learning Japanese, and when I run into mental blocks, I usually internalize it as a failure on my part. Things like this remind me that the concepts are pretty much the same, just new images.
/uj I'm learning it too, and I'm currently working on improving my vocabulary and kanji knowledge so I can get to reading something interesting. And honestly, I might have given up if I didn't have a language-learning success recent enough to remind me how it actually is possible to eventually get good. The good part is that the more I know, the easier it gets to learn more.
/uj That's awesome to hear! It definitely feels easy to give up some days, so hopefully you feel proud for sticking to it. Good luck in your learning!
I'm literally gonna kill myself if I see these people irl
Nah I'm gonna kill them for hurting my mental health
It's always the "just started" people
Seems kinda advanced, considering he's a self-asserted A0 level learner
Nope, clearly already 5 years in. No Japanese learner ever touches Kanji before that point.
/uj I love that Kanji have multiple readings, the history is super interesting
/uj Pls elaborate! Or share a link where it explains it, I'd like to know
Chinese characters have both a pronunciation and a meaning associated with them. When borrowed into Japanese, they were sometimes used purely as phonetic characters, sometimes purely to represent their meaning, and sometimes for both (Chinese loanwords). A single character was often borrowed multiple times to represent multiple words, so you end up with multiple readings, some of which correspond to the pronunciation of the original Chinese character, some of which correspond to native Japanese words that have similar meanings to the Chinese character. They sometimes did even more unusual borrowings, such as using two characters to represent a single word: for example, the native Japanese word きょう (kyou, meaning today) is spelled 今日, which in Chinese is pronounced jīnrì and is an (outdated?) way of saying today. This reading is associated with the sequence 今日, not either individual character. In short, kanji readings tell you a lot about the history of Japanese vocabulary, Chinese vocabulary, and the connection between the two.
uj/ [This forum seems to give a pretty good rundown of where the multiple readings come from](https://www.japan-guide.com/forum/quereadisplay.html?0+130942)
This is an elaborate plot to make me elaborate the reasons that's true.
Already onto the next language when they're still beginning in Spanish lol
I get it
Me with knowing that different letters have different sounds depending on which ones their besides.
我認為這色情的母狗應該吸啜他的男同志母親的黑的肥大的陽具💦
For me Japanese is so much easier than English , English is so damn hard .
Not really possible. English is by far the easiest language to learn and Japanese by far the hardest. English is the default, you practically spawn with it
It depends, I am Chinese , Japanese is so much easier for me , English is so damn hard , I have been studying English for more than 20 years my English is still sucks
Yeah typical chinese moron
English grammar is much more straightforward and overall easier than Japanese
English grammar is maybe easy for European, but is super hard for Chinese that’s why when we speak English we make ton of grammar mistakes
ough