Why the kanji are so hard to read

[wakeup]

I don't know much about Japanese, but isn't kanji almost all Chinese characters? If it is, I know how hard it is. My native language is Chinese and I remember rewriting those words for homework everyday when I was young to remember how to write them. It is one of the reasons Asian elementary schools are much, much more homework-based than North American schools. (I mean when I got to grade 8, the homework load was still less than my grade 1 workload in Hong Kong)

It is also difficult learning a language when you don't know anyone else who speaks it with you or is in an area where the language spoken is that language you're learning.

English was ok for me to learn because Hong Kong makes you learn English and Chinese (Cantonese). Now I believe they make you learn Mandarin too. And that's starting from preschool. Of course I wasn't fluent until maybe grade 5 or 6 when I still had grammar problems. But it's true, when you're young, it's easy to learn another language.

[Wurp]

As an American who uses the 23 Roman letters

You could work harder at that too. This isn't classic latin.

[fingersmaloy]

Yeah, way to speak English.

Also, the compound words aren't "arbitrary", though they are abstract, yes. The problem is that he's still trying to equate Japanese words to English ones, which is futile and only creates mental blocks for you.

For most kanji, it pretty much IS just memorizing a set of information. It's just that Japanese's dirty little secret is that it, like Korean, isn't all that suited to kanji. It was brought upon the land by circumstance. But consequently, you find that most kanji have two pronunciations, one based on the original Chinese, and one that is an original Japanese word to which a kanji has been applied because it shares the same meaning. Some have far more than two, and you just have to memorize them. But they're not arbitrary. Just memorize them.

Kei-kaku 計画 doesn't mean "measure-picture". At least, not one-for-one exactly. If you absolutely have to equate kanji with something else, I find it makes more sense to equate it with Latin and Greek word roots. I've never studied Latin or Greek, but you know how they pop up in English constantly in abstract ways? Like "tele-" or "pic" or "graph" or "phon"? It's more like that. I guess ga (画) is like "-graph". It can mean picture, or diagram, or drawing, or GRAPH. Is it that hard to imagine how a word meaning something like "measure" and a word meaning something like "-graph" can be put together to mean something like "plan"? When you plan something you measure variables and write up a diagram. Sure it's abstract and you're not likely to decipher the exact meaning just by looking at it, but it's certainly not arbitrary. It's not like they combined "diarrhea" and "horse" (痢馬) to mean "plan".

I think the trick is just keeping an open mind, avoiding the tendency to translate everything in your head, and of course, rote memorization. Ultimately kanji are actually one of the greatest tools to helping you learn Japanese. When somebody uses a word I don't know, I always ask them what the word's kanji are. Knowing that, on top of having a context, usually I can figure out what the word means. It's kind of an amazing thing.

[Anayo]

I would retract my claim that they're arbitrary. They're just abstract to the extent of bordering on arbitrary for someone who grew up with English. Keikaku was a bit of a bad example. A better one might be 家 when it's used as a suffix/title and not to mean "house", like 政治家 or 作曲家. When I see that I think "government house" or "make melody house", when it's really "politician" and "composer". Or 遠足 = far foot = picnic? Or 相当 = face to face + hit = equivalent?

I don't find distinguishing on yomi and kun yomi too hard when the kun yomi is used with a standalone kanji and on yomi is used with combinations. A good example would be 新, which is almost always "atarashii" by itself and "shin" when combined with something else. That one is very predictable and consistent. Where it gets hairy is kanji that randomly trade on yomi when combined, like 平, which reads "hei-wa" for 平和 and "byou-dou" for 平等.

Don't get me wrong, I think this stuff is fun as hell, it's just totally weird for my Western brain.

[corn619]

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

[Dylan]

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

Sign me up for it. Unless it's not English.

[AmishSamurai]

It's called Esperanto. At least that was what it was designed for.

and literal translations will kill you when learning any language. Spanish is annoying because I try to literally translate phrases and colloquialisms. My fault, not the language's.

And I can second the pronunciation thing with English. My stepmother still pronounces j's like h's all the time and doesn't pronounce h's at all. Spanish is her first language.

[aaron]

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).

which is extremely hahd to do if you're in boaston, or some such place.

[MrPopo]

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

Give the internet another couple of generations.

[Haoie]

Chinese is the hardest language, ever.