It seems odd because it is. I live in Japan, tried to learn Japanese like I did learn English and German: through reading, as the true asocial geek I am. Well, that's not possible unless you know about 1000 kanjis, unless you stick with kids book or some mangas (which, actually, I am not that interested in)
To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first.
I stopped caring about kanjis wen I realized that a 15 year old, top of her class, was having difficulties reading news articles because of some words she did not know.
That's polemical and I would not tell it that upfront to my Japanese friends but I feel like kanjis are a vastly inferior writing system compared to the alphabets they have. The reason why it still exists is to create an educational hierarchy: the more kanjis you know, the more educated you are.
Kanjis are of Chinese origin, they occupy a similar place in Japanese culture than Latin does in European cultures. I wish they would do like Koreans and get rid of it altogether, but it will never happen. The culture here is far too conservative for such a brutal change. They even call the furikana (kanji "subtitles" that explicit the pronunciation) as a dumbing down.
This is an example where obfuscation is confused for depth.
And as a counter example, I like kanji and learned Japanese by reading (though I also like manga, so perhaps it was helpful). I find kanji very helpful in learning vocabulary. In fact, I actually measured how fast I could learn vocabulary containing kanji I didn't know by learning the kanji first, versus learning the vocabulary phonetically. It was about the same. However, as there are only about 2200 kanji in the list of commonly used kanji and there are about 20,000 words you need for adult level proficiency, it means that each kanji is used in, on average 10 words. Actually, it's even better than that because the first 1000 most common kanji are used in 90% of the words you will encounter. I can learn vocabulary with kanji I know dramatically faster than vocabulary with phonetics alone. Ironically, I think it's even more helpful in Japanese than it is in Chinese because there are so many readings for the character that if you learn the word phonetically, you may have no idea what the root of the word is.
Kanji is frustrating to write, but a joy to read, IMHO. Yes, you need to learn 2000 (or so) characters, but, let's face it -- you've got years to do it. I can now read words that I don't know and have a pretty good idea what they mean -- something that would be practically impossible phonetically in Japanese. In fact, when I'm faced with new vocabulary, I often ask people to write it for me (just in the air) -- as soon as I see the kanji I almost always know what the word means.
I've often thought how superior this writing system is from roman phonetic characters (which bizarre historical spelling anachronisms to boot) ;-) I appreciate that you don't agree, but I hope you'll also understand that I have no intention of grading your education level on the number of kanji you know.
Kanji has aided in my study of the Japanese language in ways I couldn't fathom before trying to do so. I made it to N5-level proficiency [1] after a few semesters of study and only begrudgingly studied Kanji because it was required by the text. I hated it and really only wanted to speak and understand spoken Japanese.
Then I discovered Wanikani [2], a spaced repetition service that focuses on teaching Kanji reading. Unlike Anki decks, Kanji is literally the only thing Wanikani focuses on, but it does so incredibly well. With diligence it's even possible to learn all Joyo Kanji within about a year.
After taking Kanji seriously I began to understand the root meanings of the vocabulary I had known all along. It let me form associations I previously wasn't privy to and enabled a much faster uptake of new vocabulary. Instead of remembering why the syllables さいこう (saikou, pronounced "sigh co") means "best" or "utmost", I can simply recall the kanji: 最高. The character 最 means "most" and the character 高 means "tall". "most tall" = "utmost".
Japanese is extremely logical like this, as is their grammar. For fans of logic it's really top-notch.
If you're learning Japanese, please don't do yourself a disservice by skipping Kanji. A fully-integrated learning approach that includes reading will yield dividends in the long term.
I learned just over 17,000 words and for that needed to know somewhere north of 3000 kanji. ~2200 is just the joyou list but once you get into novels and the like you can expect to encounter i'd say around 3500 would be close to maxing it out with the last 0.01% being another couple of thousand, but that's getting in to really obscure shit that only a smattering of the general population know.
I learned kanji first before speaking. Learned to read and listen for about a year before venturing out to conversation clubs and the like. Without a shadow of a doubt reading massively, massively, massively boosted my ability in all other areas. Fastest way to learn new vocabulary.
But I gotta be honest - I used to love kanji and found joy in it. These days I think Korean really got it right with their writing system. That shit is super logical. Kanji is a giant, beautiful pain in the ass.
I love that I can see a word I don't know and get good grasp of its meaning (you can somewhat do that in Latin languages if you have a good grasp of latin and greek roots, but not as reliably). However I still cannot read it since I don't know with any certainty how to pronounce it if I've never heard it before.
And in the old analog days, even if you're an expert with keys and stroke counts, it was still much faster to search a roman character word in a dictionary than a Japanese word you don't know the pronunciation of.
Agreed. In a pure utilitarian sense, Kanji might not be that helpful, but it has undeniable cultural value.
The same ambiguity mentioned in this article that makes it hard to learn and approach for beginners can be and has been wielded to great effect by writers in both literary and comedic works in ways that have no real equivalent in languages without similar mechanisms.
It's yet another one of those things that makes Japanese such a joy to learn.
I’ll back you up on this and add one additional point: even in the West where we have our Roman alphabet which largely works fine, and our Arabic numerals which also work fine, I’ve often thought adopting a limited number of kanji, literally less than 10, could add some important precision to our own writing. The rest of this post isn’t really for you specifically, but anyone reading through this comment thread with an open mind.
Date formats would really only require three:
- 年: year
- 月: month
- 日: day
We debate about both separators and order of presentation, but using three characters as suffixes would add some semantics where none really existed, and you might have to make some assumptions about which way the day goes and which way the month goes.
For those that don’t know, 3月 is March, 12月 is December, 31日 is the 31st day and 2019年 is the current year. So April 12th 2019 which might be presented as 2019.04.12, 4/12/2019 or 12/4/2019 would instead be written as 2019年4月12日 or 12日4月2019年 or even 4月12日2019年.
The beauty here is the ideographs provide enough semantic meaning on their own that the order of presentation stops mattering and they are perfectly fine date separators. They are always appended as suffixes to the numeric designator and they don’t add much to the cognitive burden for anyone learning how to read. We already mix Arabic numerals into just about every writing system, Latin, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, et cetera, we have distinct punctuation marks in most writing systems, and we pretty much all know the difference between $12.34 and £12.34 and how 56¢ differs from 56%.
This is a small example, but I hope it provides some context to some who don’t know any kanji the power and precision that ideographs can provide at a glance.
One more thing, while I offered up these three specific ideographs specifically as date separators, they do provide standalone meanings as well.
年 is a counting word for years. It doesn’t have to be AD, and in Japanese or Chinese they do have their own calendars, but 2019年 is still unambiguously understood to be 2019 anno domini.
月 is a standalone word for the moon, which is functionally why it is used as a month counter. 日 is a standalone word for the Sun. This perfectly preserves the association between months to the moon cycle and days to the solar cycle, which I think is pretty cool, and it certainly does so a lot better than mere dots or slashes or dashes.
And, seriously, the rest of the world considers it totally illogical to use MM-DD-YYYY. In almost any country, MM are the middle digits. 4月12日2019年 is a format I have never seen used.
It’s not a format I’ve seen used either, but it isn’t as if the Japanese perfectly retained Chinese conventions for ideograph usage either. They derived Katakana from Kanji, Hiragana from Katakana, integrated them all into a cohesive written Japanese grammar, formalized the stroke order into a strict system propagated through their school system and from that, developed the SKIP dictionary lookup method which is the only lookup system for Kanji that ever made sense to my foreign brain.
My point? Writing systems are flexible, and more so the more semantic notations you can integrate and propagate through society. You would never see 4月12日2019年 today, but hypothetically it wouldn’t matter if you did because it is inherently unambiguous so long as you understand the meaning of the Kanji involved.
Besides that, while you won’t see 4月12日2019年, you still might see 4月12日.
I’ve actually tried that and variations of that, and I’m not going to lie, it’s about as aesthetically pleasing to the eye as going back to Roman numerals.
You know, I started by loving kanjis too. I like the way they combine, the stories they tell. And I can imagine that when becoming proficient with them, they form a nice cozy system.
But face it: you say I have years to learn them. I could learn 3 languages with the effort wasted to learn kanjis (which are half a language because then you also need to learn the pronunciation of words). No, I'll perfect my English instead and learn spoken Japanese, as it is almost a separate language.
In terms of communication, evolution, ease to learn and use, kanjis are an inferior system. It took me a long time to accept saying that, because I am of course biased as a lazy gaijin, but really, seeing how easy Korean feels compared to Japanese was the nail that convinced me that there is a fundamental truth in that.
Interestingly, hangul (the Korean alphabet) was adopted to replace chinese characters and was opposed on the ground that it made the written language to easy to learn. Hah.
I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. You either pick them up without intending to (enough to read anyway, if not write), or you don't get proficient.
The issue being that proficiency in Japanese means navigating endless homophones and kanji compounds, and kanji are what disambiguates that process. Japanese vocabulary has a huge variety of words whose readings are all permutations of a handful of syllables - words like koutai, koutei, taikou, teikou, keitai, koukei, taitei, etc, etc.. And it's not just a matter of keeping them all separate - a proficient speaker might know two or three unrelated meanings for any given reading. Kanji are what makes that possible. I mean, it's challenging to learn even 10 kanji, but once you do it's far easier to learn 100 or 1000 compounds made out of them.
So if you want to say kanji are annoying or not worth your time, that's obviously fair enough - but they're not useless and they're not just there to obfuscate things.
> I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point.
Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. How did they learn?
(Of course, let me know if both my assumptions are false—I don't know much about Japanese history beyond a single class in college, which focused on the modern era.)
> Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system
Its roots do, naturally, but the kanji compounds I mentioned don't. They're words made from kanji, not words that kanji were created to write down.
It's a hugely messy topic and I'm no expert, but the broad strokes are that Japanese derives from an "original" language (which had no writing system), which was greatly affected by multiple waves of Chinese influence over many centuries, and much of what seems complex in Japanese is the result. Anyway suffice to say that my comment was about Japanese today, not 1500 years ago before there was a writing system ;)
> Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it.
You're correct. Prior to the industrial era, most societies had very low literacy rates. But nearly everyone could speak, and many people who were illiterate could even excel at speech and language related tasks.
Among the worlds most grammatically complex languages are the Inuit languages of the far north areas. These languages were completely unwritten until very recently.
I completely disagree. Learning Korean vocabulary is so much easier than Japanese.
With somewhat phonetic spellings you can link vocabulary you read to vocabulary you hear.
In Korean (just like English) you can much more easily misspell a word and be understood. In Japanese you often times cannot even “give it a go”, unless you are aided by a IME, which is essentially phonetic.
> The reason why it still exists is to create an educational hierarchy: the more kanjis you know, the more educated you are.
Things are nowhere near this simple. If there was any value to abandoning kanji it could be done tomorrow, but the reality is that all-kana text is incredibly hard to read, and trying to learn Japanese's myriad homophones would be nigh-impossible without kanji to disambiguate them.
Kanji are complex and archaic, sure, but it's not just conservative values keeping them around. The Japanese language just isn't feasible to learn or to use without them.
>That's polemical and I would not tell it that upfront to my Japanese friends but I feel like kanjis are a vastly inferior writing system compared to the alphabets they have.
The reason Kanji are used instead of Kana are due to the vast number of homophones from a language limited in the number of phonetic sounds it has. It is how you can tell はし「橋」 from はし「端」 from はし「箸」. Sure, context would almost always let you know which word is used but that requires some additional parsing. Other languages have more sounds, thus fewer homophones, and this becomes less of a problem to determine which witch is which. Or as just shown - "witch" and "which" can be spelled differently even when they sound the same, something less possible with kana. Japanese has an insane number of homophones and reading kana-only sentences quickly becomes a headache because of it.
I don't "read" sentences that contain kanji. I glance over the sentence and understand what it is saying. It's like watching someone act out a scene vs reading the scene's script. Although I am still learning Japanese, for sentences where I know all of the kanji, I can understand the Japanese much faster than the English translation (my native language).
Kanji are not obfuscation, they are useful mostly because Japanese has many homonyms. Without them, text is far more obfuscated! I'm sure you've read kana only text before.
> To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first.
Well, to be fair, that's true for any language. Learning English by reading does not work: ask any Korean (or Japanese) who went through public English education in the 80s or before.
To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first.
I stopped caring about kanjis wen I realized that a 15 year old, top of her class, was having difficulties reading news articles because of some words she did not know.
That's polemical and I would not tell it that upfront to my Japanese friends but I feel like kanjis are a vastly inferior writing system compared to the alphabets they have. The reason why it still exists is to create an educational hierarchy: the more kanjis you know, the more educated you are.
Kanjis are of Chinese origin, they occupy a similar place in Japanese culture than Latin does in European cultures. I wish they would do like Koreans and get rid of it altogether, but it will never happen. The culture here is far too conservative for such a brutal change. They even call the furikana (kanji "subtitles" that explicit the pronunciation) as a dumbing down.
This is an example where obfuscation is confused for depth.