Why the kanji are so hard to read

[Upsidedown Fuji]

Yeah, I've been studying Japanese for just over 6 years 4 of it in university as my major. By no way does that make me a pro, nor do I even admit I'm anywhere close to being a pro, but it does help me empathise and understand how you feel.

Kanji is just something you just gotta memorize. A lot of things don't follow a pattern and also can easily frusterate anyone who is trying to memorize by trying to find a pattern or simplify it in a way that it sticks better. I still have trouble memorizing for memorization's sake. I find reading, (not manga, although it is fun to read), to be a good way to put my kanji learning to good use.

The more you read and use kanji, the more you understand why it may not be as logically laid out as you may have first wanted it. Kanji is a neccessary evil and without it reading Japanese would be friggin hard Kind of like a long block of English text without punctuation, spaces, capitals, and line breaks. Kanji helps reading flow better by shorthanding the katakana in a way, and to a certain extent katakana does the same for non-Japanese based words. Thank God they adopted it from the Chinese.

Good luck with your studies. I commend you for being a homeschooler learning on Japanese on your own. I don't think I could have ever done it that way. At least from the begining.

[Breetai]

Chinese is the hardest language, ever.

Why do you say that? The grammar didn't seem too bad to me. Easier than Greek was.

[wakeup]

It's funny. I think I speak Mandarin, Cantonese, English and French all with a "lazy tongue" in that there are words which I cannot pronounce properly (eg. bleach and bitch). I mean for that example my pronunciation leans towards what I intend to say but without the sentence supporting the meaning of the word, people do get confused. Same with Chinese, I cannot pronounce the number 7 properly. And Mandarin relies so much on the tongue that many words sound the same to me anyways and I just say them in the same way.

It's really difficult to correct it now that I've been saying that way for years. Really noticeable when I'm singing though...

[nightwalker]

My wife and I are trying (trying ) to learn Japanese but we are both native spanish speaker. Dont get me wrong we both speak english fluently don't have the common trouble of pronunciation. Shes a flight attendant and I work with the federal goverment so yeah sometimes we forget spanish. But for us is kinda hard because we have to translate from japanese to english to spanish its becoming kinda hard to assimilate like we do with english. One curious thing that you mention. Can you explain me why when I go to the class they have katakana, kanji and something else that I don't remember the name? You mention something about the katakana. Is that some kind of another handwriting we have to learn???

[gtmtnbiker]

The hard part is the pronounciation, most languages have one sound for each letter, where as english can change the sound of a letter without warning. For example our vowels have so many different sounds, c can be soft or hard, letters can change sound depending what theyre adjacent to (th, ch, sh, etc).

As a native speaker with very good reading/spelling ability, I still make pronunciation mistakes at this age (42) so I definitely agree with you here.

Some of the words that I remember mispronouncing at one time:

doubt (pronounced the b)
chevrolet (did ch instead of sh)
nazi (did nazz-ee)

[Niode]

My wife and I are trying (trying ) to learn Japanese but we are both native spanish speaker. Dont get me wrong we both speak english fluently don't have the common trouble of pronunciation. Shes a flight attendant and I work with the federal goverment so yeah sometimes we forget spanish. But for us is kinda hard because we have to translate from japanese to english to spanish its becoming kinda hard to assimilate like we do with english. One curious thing that you mention. Can you explain me why when I go to the class they have katakana, kanji and something else that I don't remember the name? You mention something about the katakana. Is that some kind of another handwriting we have to learn???

That would be Hiragana? I believe it's used for words that have no Katakana or Kanji equivalent. It's based on vowels and consenant vowels I think... It's been a while since I tried my hand at butchering the Japanese language though, so I apologise.

[Upsidedown Fuji]

Japanese writing is comprised of 3 equally used forms: Kanji, Hiragana (native Japanese), and Katakana (all foreign/words that require more emphasis or abbreviation.)

Katakana and Hiragana are the long hand non-kanji forms of Japanese. Katakana would be the form you would write your name in if it was for instance, "Bob", "Smith", or even "Hussein" for that matter. Hiragana is more for "spelling out" kanji, and use with articles, particles, nouns, and verbs. Kanji is the fun Chinese character based one that most every learner struggles with at some point in their studies.

Usually when you formally start learning Japanese, you start with both hiragana/katakana. To not know one or the other would be fundamentally crippling to any serious study of the language.

[molotovwars]

My wife and I are trying (trying ) to learn Japanese but we are both native spanish speaker. Dont get me wrong we both speak english fluently don't have the common trouble of pronunciation. Shes a flight attendant and I work with the federal goverment so yeah sometimes we forget spanish. But for us is kinda hard because we have to translate from japanese to english to spanish its becoming kinda hard to assimilate like we do with english. One curious thing that you mention. Can you explain me why when I go to the class they have katakana, kanji and something else that I don't remember the name? You mention something about the katakana. Is that some kind of another handwriting we have to learn???

That would be Hiragana? I believe it's used for words that have no Katakana or Kanji equivalent. It's based on vowels and consenant vowels I think... It's been a while since I tried my hand at butchering the Japanese language though, so I apologise.

Katakana is used for foreign words, many of which came from English, though some like arubaito came from German. Hiragana can be used for all words of Japanese origin. For example if you had the verb tabemasu (to eat) you could just write the whole thing in hiragana, or if you wanted to do it with Kanji the root of the verb (tabe) would be written as a character, followed by -masu written in hiragana to signify what tense the verb is in. Though the base, which would be in Kanji would not change. Children will learn the two alphabets first (hiragana and katakana) and then replace their writing with kanji as they learn it. Sorry my computer isn't set up to type in Japanese, so I couldn't display my example better.

I studied Japanese in college (5 semesters), but I was very poor at reading. I never put the time into it and as a result I had to make the decision to discontinue my study (at least in University classes). At I continued to move up levels I kept having to split my time the new material and the old kanji I was expected to know and as a result I couldn't keep up anymore.

I am having a much easier time with Korean, especially since I am living in Korea now. Having native speakers is of course a huge plus, but the alphabet is great. All the "symbols" you see are comprised of characters from an alphabet, so I am able to easily get reading practice even if I don't know the meaning. In Japanese it was so hard to find reading material because if I didn't know the kanji then I could barely practice with it. In Korea, I can just pick up any newspaper and give it a shot. Korean is also good for pronunciation once you learn it. Unlike English, every word in Korean has one pronunciation based on how it is written (there are small rules/exceptions, but you learn them and overall it is very consistent). Japanese pronunciation is actually much easier, but again, if you don't know the kanji, its not very helpful.

[EDIT]: Ah, looks like Upsidedown Fuji posted an explanation as well. His may be easier to understand, but yeah all three writing systems are equally used (as he said).

[crux]

I can't wait for a universal language that everyone speaks. It would make travel so much easier.

This idea has been brought up on the forums before, but this is a bad idea. Language is deeply routed in the way we think, and to adopt one common World Language would be a step towards homogenizing all cultures.

As for English pronunciation, I think the easiest way for a native English speaker to understand the difficulties of our language is to learn the French language. English was heavily derived from Anglo-Norman and in turn Anglo-French, so the two languages have a number of similarities despite their differences on the surface. French is full of disappearing sounds, letters that often change pronunciation, combining words, etc. Much like English. Compared to, say, Spanish, they're both arbitrarily complicated. The real difference between French and English, in my mind, is that the French language flows beautifully while the English language... doesn't. We can thank the Dutch for that.

[nightwalker]

Thank you guys for your explanation! I haven't been able to go the classes but I still practice with Rosetta stone. The program is kinda helpful but after Ive read about it now and in Wikipedia maybe i need to set a set of priorities and organize my life a bit better as I see its going to take a loooooooottttttttttttt of practice and patience.