Japanese Students/Fluents, Give me Your Advice!

Originally Posted by Minion

I never learned much Japanese, but I've always had a knack for languages and I can't really figure out what everyone's hang up is about kanji. I mean, sure it's a picture when you're used to letters, but when you think about it, you don't read letters, you read words. And how are words any less complicated than kanji? Just think of kanji as words that are smushed together into one character.

Yea, and see, there are THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of kanji. Or pictures. Whereas all words are made up of the same symbols.

Even katakana and hiragana are pretty comparable to our alphabet. Same symbols over and over, you know? Pieced together to form a word.

But ONE WORD is formed by ONE PICTURE. And there are THOUSANDS of them. With nothing to really aide in deciphering what it means, unlike in most other languages.

Kanji is a bitch. ;_;

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Originally Posted by Minion

But you don't read the symbols, you read the entire word at once as if it were one long streched out character. That's why you can rearrange the letters of words and still read them.

But theres a LOT MORE TO REMEMBER, dude.

Like, when you read any sentence, there are repeat characters which you quickly identify and piece together mentally. 26 letters in English which are all rearranged to form different meanings.

Imagine if every word in the English language no longer used the same repeat set of characters, but instead, used ONE PICTURE.

That would not be easy for most people to fathom, let alone learn.

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Originally Posted by Minion

I don't think you guys are getting what I'm saying.

Look, if any retarded Japanese boy can learn kanji, so can you. It's just a question of getting over that mental block of dealing with a languge that is completely unlike the one you're used to. I took to it pretty quickly, even though I didn't learn many. Probably because I didn't convince myself that it was hard.

Look, man. Some of us - including yourself - are pretty avid language learners.

If you're not a kid, and you're not learning the language to survive, its NOT THAT EASY.

How about you go learn all of the kanji, come back, speak fluent Japanese and then tell us how easy and simple it was, yea? <3

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Originally Posted by Minion

I wish I had, honestly. My college totally screwed me by not offering any language courses at all. Ever.

FUCK college, dude. If its so easy, learn it on your own!

Quote:

But did you read what I said about radicals? Kanji are made up of a smaller number of characters (sort of) that are repeated. So what's the difference?

Quote:

The Japanese writing system depends heavily on Kanji, although the total number of Kanji is controversial. Dai-kanwa-jiten (the great Kanji-Japanese dictionary), which is considered to be the biggest Kanji-Japanese dictionary, contains approximately 50,300 Kanji (1). According to research (2), the ratio of Kanji content to the whole script in one text varies from about 20% to 30%, depending on the type of the text. Although the Kanji content tends to be reduced these days (3), Kanji is still an essential part of the language which learners should face.

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