/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Learn japanese and you will understand

Because you don't know shit about how the language works.

>>8356065
What this anon said.

>>8356068
when did I claim to know shit

I'm just asking a question, not claiming to be better at japanese than you

Why does English bother with uppercase? It literally has zero effect on meaning, unlike kanji.

>>8356065
why not, that's how the coreans do it

Studying kanji is shit, but reading hiragana-only is even shittier

>>8356078
>that's how the coreans do it
No the Koreans had the foresight to make a combined alphabetical-syllabic language from scratch and throw off all that Chinese bullshit.

>>8356077
uppercase is pretty stupid, if it's the equivalent of uppercase.. learning 20000 of them just to read? that's fucking stupid

Imagine if we spelled all same-sounding words the same. Theirs eventually a point wear your going too get really confused.

Cultural inertia and poor phonetic variety.

>>8356079
Fucking this. The Pokemon games, for example, until recently did exactly what the OP is proposing and they're painful to read.

>>8356084
>20000
I don't think that many kanji even exist.

Do you realize that English has several times over more ridiculously redundant and useless rules/inconsistencies/exceptions/bullshit, to learn than a mere 2000 kanji?

>>8356065
>>8356065
>>8356065
>>8356065
>>8356065
>>8356065
>>8356065
>>8356065

>>8356100
>only knowing 2000 kanji

Before learning Kanji:
"What the fuck why do I need to do this"

After learning Kanji:
"Jesus fuck, Japanese is hell to read without it"

>>8356100

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Total_number_of_kanji

>>8356095
I'm image of we had different meanings to the same words that would be so confusing! oh wait. The only reason it's confusing when you switch the spelling of homophones is because the spelling is associated with the wrong meaning, if the sentence was spoken you'd have no problem understanding it.

>>8356100
There are over 20,000.
Actually there are about 50,000.

>>8356129
The same with spoken Japanese.

>>8356124
>>8356130
Wikipedia knowledge?

You two are confirmed for not knowing a smidgen of Japanese. Most Japanese natives are lucky to know 3000. 2000 is perfectly acceptable, and 2500 give or take a few 100 is the average. Even Chinese people don't really use more than 4 or 5 thousand. Nobody knows 20,000 kanji by memory. Nobody that isn't a savant, that is.

>>8356143

The question was how many kanji exist, not how many the average Japanese person uses.

>You two are confirmed for not knowing a smidgen of Japanese.

That's quite a leap in logic.

>>8356062
One reason is so you can understand words' meanings based on the kanji rather than the context of the word. It is easier to associate a pictography with a meaning than it is with a series of characters.

>>8356129
I think that, puns and rare exceptions aside, that holds true for pretty much any language

>>8356143
Bullshit. Maybe if you're talking about active using and writing kanji 2000 is an alright number, but every normal adult should be able to read at least around 5000

>>8356156

To your eye, a series of characters isn't any different than a series of radicals. Few people beyond elementary school read books by sounding out the letters of each individual word, and it's mostly useless in English orthography anyhow.

>>8356165
atleast with english if you've never seen the word before you can atleast read it

>>8356164
>able to read at least around 5000
No. Being able to "read" and "knowing" is different. You can infer the purpose/meaning/reading of kanji easily by using the radicals. But if you ask someone how to write each and every one of those 5000 kanji, I'd wager that the vast majority of people would fail pretty badly. Even in reading, if you don't have context and okurigana, you're pretty much fucked with unfamiliar kanji outside of the sub-3000-ish range.

"Most people can figure out 5000" is probably more accurate. Especially the younger generation, since they're especially terrible at recall/writing.

>>8356171

That isn't reliably true in English, nor is it reliably false in Japanese. I correctly pronounce kanji I've never seen before all the time due to confusing them with ones I've already learned due to them sharing pronunciation in line with their main radicals.

>>8356179
> You can infer the purpose/meaning/reading of kanji easily by using the radicals

that makes it a little better.

>>8356190
And in English many words have roots in other languages which you can use to discern the meaning in more-or-less the same way.

>>8356190
To be honest, you only need to know up to 4th grade kanji or so to understand most VNs and LNs if you have a firm understanding of grammar and some familiarity with how radicals work. 80% comprehension or so.

>>8356179
Did you even try reading what I wrote?
I was talking about reading them from the start off. Differentiation between reading and recognizing is splitting hairs at best, and even then I'd still claim _adults_ would be able to, no problem.

>>8356179
>You can infer the purpose/meaning/reading of kanji easily by using the radicals.

There's no consistancy or rule for this and it will mislead people more than not. "Guess sloppily" is probably a better choice of words than "infer".

>>8356201
>I'd still claim _adults_ would be able to, no problem.
Write 5000 kanji no problem? Are you serious? You must know a fuckton of 1kyu kanji kentei people or something, but this isn't true for most normal adults.

>>8356218
Read, goddamit, READ! Do you have some sort of reading impairment?!
You're not even trying, are you?

>>8356229
So are you telling me that kanji kentei jun 1kyuu is the average skill level of Japanese people? Get real.

I want to learn japanese but i always feel overwhelmed. How did you start?

Help me /jp/

>>8356954
No, we should really have a sticky on this.

>>8356954
Go here:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/all-japanese-all-the-time-ajatt-how-to-learn-japanese-on-y
our-own-having-fun-and-to-fluency

Come back in 3 weeks.

>>8356972
When exactly does he start teaching you japanese or is he gonna blabber on about pointless stuff for the entire thing?

Because Kanji makes it easier. For the Japanese, that is.

>>8357127
>is he gonna blabber on about pointless stuff for the entire thing?
Pretty much. It's just rambling on about his philosophy on language study techniques. You can get some lessons out of it, but use your own judgment, don't get obsessed with his idea.

>>8357145
Alright thats what i thought, to be honest i think that guy goes on a bit too much when i already got his point pretty early on.

if koreans are so inferior how come they were able to invent a non-retarded writing system when glorious nippon couldn't? answer me that weeaboos.

Kanji is used to help with stuff like this. Which of the following is easier to read?

中庭の中には二羽鶏がいる。

nakaniwa no naka niwa niwa niwatori ga iru.

Because 帰る has nothing in common with 変える. They even have different transitiveness for fuck 酒.

>>8357157
The Japanese wil come to it eventually but it takes time. How many centuries did it take Hangul to take off?

>>8357157
You don't need a particularly complicated writing system to write down the series of grunts that is the barbaric Korean language.

The Japanese language is highly sophisticated and complicated, thus requiring an equally complicated writing system. The Japanese people do not have a problem with this, because learning kanji is no challenge for the intellect of the average Japanese person. Only stupid foreigners have a problem with learning Japanese.

Look the word "kami" up and you'll understand.

>>8357165
it was put into use immediately because it was the king's invention and you can't say no to the king. if you mean how long for it to completely take over I guess 3 or 4 hundred years.

>>8357167
>sophisticated and complicated

No, it isn't. It's a pretty easy language. As long as it is spoken, that is.

>>8356062

Actually, they use to (minus the spaces part), Then, China came along and Japan wanted to suck their cock for a bit, so they mashed Kanji into their sentences (once they had them) to be like China. Except, that it doesn't really work that well, so we get the mess that Kanji are (somewhat rectified when they simplified the kanji a few decades ago, but still messy)

If you happen to have Samurai Shamploo around, you'll notice that Fuu actually writes in hiragana exclusively, which was the custom of the time. If you want to see what Japanese was like before the Kanji, look for women's writing from that time.

Also, complicated sentences get hellva hard to read if they're all in hiragana.

Now, if you really want to shit bricks, look at Japanese when they first adopted Kanji. They simply wrote the sentence in straight Chinese, then 'earmarked' the sentence to indicate how to parse it in Japanese. So, one'd end up jumping around the sentence 6 or 7 times just to read it. It was a BITCH.

>>8357157
Korean were able to do it because they have normal tonal system. Tones in Japanese are so laughable, that textbooks don't even bother to mention them.

>>8357182

But you are aware that hiragana are based on kanji, right? And that Japan hadn't a writing system before they imported kanji, right?

>>8357127
Be patient. It's a long haul, you'll need it. Most of his "blabbering" helps to keep you going. It's important to change how you look at learning the language. It'll take a few months to understand much of anything, a few years to understand everything. But if you look at it right, every day can feel like a leap forward.

I have used, with satisfaction:

Anki
Remembering the Kanji (anki deck + pdf found online)
TaeKim's
Jisho.org
your favorite mango/animu/hon/dorama/eiga

Basically, kanji>kana>sentences/phrases(grammar by examples)

Try his faq. Don't look for handholding. Try things to see if they work for you. There is no right way. Classes generally suck.

>>8357184

Japanese doesn't actually have tones, which is where all the multiple Kanji meanings come from. They were approximating the different tones in Chinese with the kana sounds of their language. Vaguely similar to how things of foreign nature are written in katakana, but not really.

>>8357182
You shouldn't base your history knowledge on anime, anon, I thought we went over this already.

>>8357190

They had a spoken system, which they mashed together with the written kanji. From that came the kana, which reflected the SPOKEN Japanese.

The sounds were still the same, they were given a written form as the kana. It's not like Japan was filled with monkey who couldn't even talk before they met China.

>>8357198
If you are reading 橋,箸,端 the same way, you're doing it wrong.

>>8357200

You actually know what you're talking about anon. I thought we went over this already.

>>8357195
Thanks, i've always had a problem with being impatient and getting easily frustrated so everytime i've half-assedly tried to learn japanese has always ended in disaster

>>8357213

Indeed, because they aren't read as stand-alone things, they're combined with a sentence that denotes how to read them.

The 'tones' of Japanese are like the iambic pentameter in English. It's there and is vaguely 'tonal', but isn't in the same way as Chinese.

>>8357208

Topic is the written language and you made it sound like the wrote in kana before they adopted moonrunes.

>>8356164
>every normal adult should be able to read at least around 5000
No:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei

>Level 2 is the maximum point where many Japanese even with higher education bother to take. Therefore having level 2 is a plus and an advantage in such as hiring, pre-1 and 1 are something special.
>Level 2 requires the ability to read and write all of the 1945 daily use kanji (jōyō kanji), and knowledge of the 284 kanji used in names (jinmeiyō kanji, 人名用漢字)

>>8357200

Actually, most of this is coming from wiki, which I trust over the rantings of /jp/. Samurai Shamploo was the first series that came to mind when I was typing.

>>8357249
That's nice and all, but you'll be laughed at if you even stumble over kanji used in light novels for kids just because they aren't jouyou, not to mention reading actual books.

>>8357221
I had that problem aswell i found making my environment more japanese if you will helped me more than anything. Listening to japanese music, podcats, tv shows, anime without subs, VNs when you get a bit better, playing games in japanese. He goes over a lot of this in the blog aswell.

>>8357253
Then maybe you should reread the article, or better yet, link to it next time instead of retelling it faulty.

>>8357240

I suppose it does sound like that. For the women, it certainly was true; they weren't allowed to use Kanji nor katakana for quite a while, so they only learned spoken Japanese and written Hiragana.

The order is spoken Japanese -> Straight Chinese earmarked for spoken Japanese -> Katakana shorthand -> Hiragana in there somewhere -> mashing them together.

>>8357266

I didn't relay it incorrectly. And, if you really can't type 'Kanji' into wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

>>8357259
Who said you couldn't use a dictionary?

It's a process.

>>8356062
Because lolhomophones, and authors wouldn't be able to do that funny thing where they use a kanji with an outlandish pronunciation in ruby text.

>>8357293
>checks link
>The Japanese language itself had no written form at the time kanji was introduced

I used to think the same thing about kanji, that it made Japanese needlessly complicated. But really, once you can read (and not even necessarily write) kanji, it helps you grasp the meaning of words and sentences a lot quicker than trying to muddle through it with hiragana/katakana.

>>8357177
Here's a sentence that illustrates that quite well:
神の髪は紙
For me, that's easier than trying to work through:
かみのかみはかみ

It breaks up sentences better than spaces, it's compact, and if you know the kanji, it's basically like looking at a picture. Imagine replacing all the nouns in an English sentence with a photo? You'd understand it at a glance.

Only posting here because of Rei.

>>8357419
I hate one word comments but, this. Besides, I'm already glad enough we got Hiragana. At least women did something useful.

Question to Japanese speakers: you say you can derive the meaning from certain kanji by "looking" at them rather than reading, so do you read the word in English or Japanese in your head?

I understand using Kanji, but I don't see why they can't use spaces.

Because Japanese is shit, basically ~50 sounds.

>>8356062
Spaces between words are vanity anyway.

The thing here is that Japanese writing system is ancient. It is simplified version of Chinese writing system. Much older than roman writing system. Younger than hieroglhyps.

Even still today this writing system is almost equal to roman writing system. Even though it must be hundreds years older than it.

There might be some advantages over roman writing system in it. Then again roman writing system is much more simplier to learn.

>>8358322
I attach an English word to the kanji, just to get it into my head. As I read, If I know the Japanese word, I'll say that in my head; if not, and there's pronunciation written, I'll say that in my head; if not, and pronunciation is not written, I'll just say the English word in my head. Though often I'll just skim over the text and get the meaning without thinking too much about it.