Did you know that japanese has the biggest vocabulary list in the world?

[Anonymous No.]

And most words are also really short but very specific thanks to kanji. Add 2 kanji together and boom, a new word. Look at this:

寄港 - kikou, stopping at a port. 攻城 - koujou, raiding a castle. 防災 - bousai, prevention of natural disasters. 殺虫 - sacchuu, killing insects. 玉音 - gyokuon, voice of an emperor. 胃癌 - igan, stomach cancer. 試射 - shisha, test firing a gun. 濃霧 - noumu, thick fog. 空軍 - kuugun, military air forces. 軍医 - gun-i, military medic. 対潜 - taisen, anti-submarine. 官邸 - kantei, residence of a government official. 義肢 - ghishi, artificial limb. 名峰 - meihou, famous mountain. 和議 - wagi, peace negotiations. 老樹 - rouju, old tree. 多頭 - tatou, (creature) with a lot of heads. 凍死 - toushi, dying of cold. 戦果 - senka, war achievements. 静音 - seion, low sound. 汚水 - osui, dirty water. 清酒 - seishu, refined sake. 聖槍 - seisou, holy spear. 機首 - kishu, nose of a plane. 誤爆 - gobaku, bombing the wrong target. 洗顔 - sengan, washing one's face. 邪眼 - jagan, menacing eyes. 岩塩 - gan-en, rock salt. 豪腕 - gouwan, strong arm. 鼻下 - bika, part below the nose. 噴煙 - fun-en, smoke from a volcano erruption. 鮮魚 - sengyo, fresh fish. 降嫁 - kouka, a princess marrying someone of lower status. 愛馬 - aiba, one's beloved horse. 樹齢 - jurei, age of a tree. 遠泳 - en-ei, long distance swimming. 渡欧 - toou, going to Europe. 遷都 - sento, moving the capital to another city. 怪光 - kaikou, ominous light. 円陣 - enjin, troops positioned in a circular battle formation. 蝗害 - kougai, damage to crops produced by grasshoppers (actually pretty common in news during summer kek). There's also some funny cases like 雪 (yuki, snow) where there's so many variants used in news or official situations in winter like 新雪(shinsetsu), 降雪(kousetsu), 積雪(sekisetsu), 除雪(josetsu) (fresh snow, snow falling, removing snow, snow piling up etc.)

[Anonymous No.]

And I know what you're thinking, "all of these words are probably memes and obscure or something" but that's not the case, I'm fluent and been studying for 12 years and I can guarantee all of these words are fairly common and every native knows all of this and more. Japanese is beautiful bros, start learning it.

[Anonymous No.]

How is this not something like this?:
*combines any kanji at all*
"Behold, a new entry to the vocabulary."

[Anonymous No.]

huh, frog

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105922
that's exactly what it is
but it doesn't stop them from being words
nowadays every English word is a potential Japanese word too leading to what Miller calls "total availability" both for Sino-Japanese words and English loanwords

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105946
So I suppose one of the conclusions to make here is that it's most sensible to learn primarily kanji rather than focusing on the vocab which rarely deviates from what you'd guess intuitively from the kanji meaning.

[Anonymous No.]

I will never learn Japanese...

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105994
do both, beside you will learn basic kanji by learning basic vocab, so it doesnt really matter.

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
>Add 2 kanji together and boom, a new word.
Sure, mechanically, but does the government/academia need to sign off on the new word being included officially? At least I recall articles like "the japanese government signed off on X new words today."
Related, are new kanji still being introduced? I also recall articles of the effect of "kids are being dumbed down by keyboards, so we're stopping the introduction of new kanji to the curriculum."

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
Why isn't Chinese's vocab list bigger? They use only kanji.

[Anonymous No.]

big whoop, the same as german and like 10 other european languages
btw kys frogposter

[Anonymous No.]

>>46106214
How can they all have the biggest? Literally impossible unless it happens to be the exact same number.

[Anonymous No.]

go back

[Anonymous No.]

stay

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
Yeah but it's actually pretty intuitive and simple
The words tend to sound very similarly to the combination of the kanji you used

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
kys frogposter
>>46105887
Agree
They're very common in written language,
but also a bit more uncommon (but not rare) in speech.
Written japanese is way different than spoken one

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
Personally, I really like that Japs have a dedicated kanji that means "hot sake", 燗

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
cool thread, bro. this is neat

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
Next time you make the thread, keep certain kanji pairings together, something like
XY = thing,
XW = different thing,
XZ = YET A THIRD THING HOLY SHIT,
That way we see they have a common pairing of the X in front.
As an EOP that looks like the JP equivalent of "bros check out how these words are related: (two random words that share neither the same suffix nor prefix, while one is latin based and one is greek based). SO BEAUTIFUL."

I see now you kind of did that at the end but the post is fairly messy still.

[Anonymous No.]

>>46109103
isn't that basically two kanji squished together?

[Anonymous No.]

>>46115210
That's most of the kanji, the ones that aren't made-up from non-kanji radicals

[Anonymous No.]

>>46109048
Yeah but I was surprised when I reached the level where I'm now understanding audiobooks that use such words. Even though written Japanese contains words people don't normally speak, you can still understand them by hearing them recited instead of reading them, provided you've read a decent amount beforehand. The brain really works magic with context of what's going on to nail all the homophone 熟語 like it's nothing when you have enough hours of listening and reading.

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
>retard posts newfag frog

[Anonymous No.]

I will never learn Japanese...

[Anonymous No.]

>>46125889
Anecdotally I learned enough from the DJT to not be bothered with either RAWs or the few times I've been on the 本州. My listening and speaking skills are basically immediately-ask-them-to-repeat-more-slowly-in-a-canned-phrase tier, but considering I learned from nothing but anime/manga, VN, and 2010s Niconico in my free time I think the bang-for-buck is great.

[Anonymous No.]

>>46105884
This is cool, but how is this different from forming new composite words?

[Anonymous No.]

>>46132757
They tend to last longer and be more systematic than Western composite words, and delay the process from which a a new composite noun of common use gradual involves into a conceptional, single word (like telephone -> phone).
You even see this in hiragana/katakana where shortenings/abbreviations are more varied and less consistent.