Current Events > does anyone here speak japanese

(+) Yeah! (+)

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FF_Redux posted...

what

Ore wa ochinchin ga daisuki nandayo
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"Does anyone here speak japanese"

*posts requires you to read it*
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I did Hiragana flash cards for like two months and never got good at it.

So like, I recognize a few of those symbols but even of the ones I recognize I'm not sure about some of the sounds.
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Megaman50100 posted...

"Does anyone here speak japanese"

*posts requires you to read it*

Exactly

As someone who doesn't know a shred of Japanese, that looks like 'been in college for two years', 'now', 'bad(at something)', something about 'think' or 'thought', and 'something of Japan being the lowest or worst'.

Am I right?

EDIT: Never mind, just saw leverage's translation now lol
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Distant_Rainbow posted...

As someone who doesn't know a shred of Japanese, that looks like 'been in college for two years', 'now', 'bad(at something)', something about 'think' or 'thought', and 'something of Japan being the lowest or worst'.

Am I right?

EDIT: Never mind, just saw leverage's translation now lol

You know Chinese?

leverageblargh posted...

I studied at the university for two years but I think that I am getting bad at the moment. But I'm not a weeb, Japanese anime is the lowest

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EverHeardOfIt posted...

Distant_Rainbow posted...

As someone who doesn't know a shred of Japanese, that looks like 'been in college for two years', 'now', 'bad(at something)', something about 'think' or 'thought', and 'something of Japan being the lowest or worst'.

Am I right?

EDIT: Never mind, just saw leverage's translation now lol

You know Chinese?

I'm Korean. I learned Chinese letters until I graduated high school.

Granted, we learn the orthodox, traditional Chinese letters instead of the simplified stuff China and Japan use, but it still is a massive help in reading and understanding stuff.
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Distant_Rainbow posted...

EverHeardOfIt posted...

Distant_Rainbow posted...

As someone who doesn't know a shred of Japanese, that looks like 'been in college for two years', 'now', 'bad(at something)', something about 'think' or 'thought', and 'something of Japan being the lowest or worst'.

Am I right?

EDIT: Never mind, just saw leverage's translation now lol

You know Chinese?

I'm Korean. I learned Chinese letters until I graduated high school.

Granted, we learn the orthodox, traditional Chinese letters instead of the simplified stuff China and Japan use, but it still is a massive help in reading and understanding stuff.

Japan also uses the traditional Chinese characters. Not simplified.
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Dragonblade01 posted...

Distant_Rainbow posted...

EverHeardOfIt posted...

Distant_Rainbow posted...

As someone who doesn't know a shred of Japanese, that looks like 'been in college for two years', 'now', 'bad(at something)', something about 'think' or 'thought', and 'something of Japan being the lowest or worst'.

Am I right?

EDIT: Never mind, just saw leverage's translation now lol

You know Chinese?

I'm Korean. I learned Chinese letters until I graduated high school.

Granted, we learn the orthodox, traditional Chinese letters instead of the simplified stuff China and Japan use, but it still is a massive help in reading and understanding stuff.

Japan also uses the traditional Chinese characters. Not simplified.

It's a mix to be honest. Japanese uses both traditional and simplified characters, along with their own home-made kanji.

Even when they use simplified characters, sometimes it'a different simplification than mainland China uses.

Traditional:
Simplified (Japanese):
Simplified (mainland China):

There's also the case of Japanese using the same simplified characters than mainland China.

Traditional:
Simplified (Japanese):
Simplified (mainland China):
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teo torriate
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Megaman50100 posted...

"Does anyone here speak japanese"

*posts requires you to read it*

This.

Reading is different from speaking.
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Kisai posted...

Megaman50100 posted...

"Does anyone here speak japanese"

*posts requires you to read it*

This.

Reading is different from speaking.

tru

they correlate tho

Yomi posted...

It's a mix to be honest. Japanese uses both traditional and simplified characters, along with their own home-made kanji.

Even when they use simplified characters, sometimes it'a different simplification than mainland China uses.

Traditional:
Simplified (Japanese):
Simplified (mainland China):

There's also the case of Japanese using the same simplified characters than mainland China.

Traditional:
Simplified (Japanese):
Simplified (mainland China):

Interesting, in college I'd learned that Japan mostly used traditional kanji. Apparently not.
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Dragonblade01 posted...

Yomi posted...

It's a mix to be honest. Japanese uses both traditional and simplified characters, along with their own home-made kanji.

Even when they use simplified characters, sometimes it'a different simplification than mainland China uses.

Traditional:
Simplified (Japanese):
Simplified (mainland China):

There's also the case of Japanese using the same simplified characters than mainland China.

Traditional:
Simplified (Japanese):
Simplified (mainland China):

Interesting, in college I'd learned that Japan mostly used traditional kanji. Apparently not.

I see, you may want to read about and then. Before World War II Japan used only traditional characters just like China, but they went through some reforms after that. Still, there are a bunch of kanji that remained untouched. Such as:

Traditional:
Japanese:
Simplified (mainland China):

This image goes through the differences in simplification of both Chinese and Japanese.


There's also the case of both the simplified form and traditional form being used in Modern Japanese. For example, in words I see used for swamp or marsh, but in names you can see both that simplified kanji, and the traditional version . In my opinon it's just a mess, a beautiful, beautiful mess.
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Omae wa mou shindeiru
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I know hiragana and katakana and have the vocabulary of a 3 year old. My kanji knowledge is about... 20 kanji. Gotta keep working at it.
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Yaridovich posted...

I know hiragana and katakana and have the vocabulary of a 3 year old. My kanji knowledge is about... 20 kanji. Gotta keep working at it.

Kanji is the thing you will spend your life on. I've been learning as a hobby (about 5-10 hours a week) for around 2 years now and I only know about 400-500 kanji's implied meanings. That doesn't include the 2+ readings of them at all. You need to know over 2,000 to have a newspaper reading level.

I highly recommend the book Remembering the Kanji if you are serious about continuing. I find the study very interesting despite how slow progress is.
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GiftedACIII posted...

(unsure if i use no or wo here? fuck im bad)
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WaniKani got me through the kanji, not sure if I would have been able to do it without it. It was time consuming but kanji seems like the easiest part of the language. Waaaaaay waaaay harder is all the vocab (I recognize 1700 kanji and have been studying for 3 years but in video games, anime and manga I am still running to a dictionary sometimes multiple times per sentence, but on average probably once every 2.5 sentences). And grammar, when a lot of different grammar points are used in one sentence, sometimes a sentence just doesn't mean anything to me even when I know all the words.

All in all, it's a great hobby.
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Nightmare_Luna posted...

GiftedACIII posted...

(unsure if i use no or wo here? fuck im bad)

You would use to identify the thing you don't understand.
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Megaman50100 posted...

Yaridovich posted...

I know hiragana and katakana and have the vocabulary of a 3 year old. My kanji knowledge is about... 20 kanji. Gotta keep working at it.

Kanji is the thing you will spend your life on. I've been learning as a hobby (about 5-10 hours a week) for around 2 years now and I only know about 400-500 kanji's implied meanings. That doesn't include the 2+ readings of them at all. You need to know over 2,000 to have a newspaper reading level.

I highly recommend the book Remembering the Kanji if you are serious about continuing. I find the study very interesting despite how slow progress is.

In my experience Remembering the Kanji (RTK) just helps you get familiarized with them instead of learning them. I'd recommend just getting Anki and downloading a core vocabulary deck. I find that learning kanji on their own is just time consuming and not that effective when you're a beginner, it's better to learn them with words so you learn both vocabulary and the kanji used in said words.

Of course, you can dedicate time for the kanji themselves later on if you want, but I think that if you learn different words where is used then you'll know the different pronunciations along with the different meanings of each words that correlate with the meanings of the kanji itself. You'll end up learning and then you can infer that can mean "big / superior / great" by how it's used in these words.

That way you'll know that:
is a noun that means "university" or "college"
is an adjective that means "big"
is an adjective that means "important"

And when talking about the kanji itself you'll know that:
is a kanji that can be read or

This in turns makes it easier when you learn words that have kanji that you already encountered in other words, like and because you'll already be familiarized with those.

Or it just might be that RTK didn't click with me lol, either way, it's nice to try different resources at first :)
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Yomi posted...

I use RTK with the companion mobile app, which has words and readings on the flash cards. You are correct about the book alone only teaching familiarity with meaning.
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One thing I don't like about RTK is that it has all those tips for remembering what the characters look like, but they don't actually correlate to the radicals that are shared across all kanji. Honestly, I think it would be better to understand how all the parts of kanji fit together, and use that to bolster your ability to memorize characters.

Using RTK's method, you need to remember each one individually. Learning the radicals, you can come to understand what each part does, enabling you to grasp bits and pieces of characters you haven't even seen before (such as what general category their meaning fits under and even how to pronounce them), and better enable you to look them up in a dictionary.

Kanji is like a spider web. By slowly familiarizing yourself with their multiple facets, you can retain much more than by brute forcing a lot of different characters at once.
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Dragonblade01 posted...

RTK does teach radicals. It builds it mnemonics entirely off them.
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It may use them as a basis, and even reference them directly at times, but it also incorporates its own particular logic on top of them which I worry clouds a comprehensive understanding of how they work together. But even more importantly than that, you almost never learn how the radicals are actually incorporated into the character or how to utilize them to pull information about the character's meaning and pronunciation.
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Do you have an example? I don't understand the difference of what you are meaning and how RTK teaches them.
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I also took it for two years in college and am getting rusty. At my peak I was able to understand a decent amount of the story to a Japanese copy of Pokemon pretty well.
Since college though Ive forgotten a lot of the kanji and vocabulary. Mostly just use it to decipher captions in anime porn now lol.

Could anyone recommend a service or game or app or whatever that would help me get back on track? (Preferably a free one)
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Well, for example, take the characters and , which (as I'm sure you know) mean "moon" and "meat" respectively. Both however take on the appearance of when used as radicals. I can tell by the placement of the radical which one it's most likely to be. Though exceptions exist, that radical most often means "meat" when used on the left side of a character (often referencing flesh and the body). Meanwhile, when used on the right side, it most often refers to "moon."

With regard to pronunciation, take the character . I know that when this character is used as a radical (especially on the right side of the kanji), it most likely has the reading . This makes it much easier for me to look up an unfamiliar character which possesses that radical.

Obviously, there are plenty of exceptions; but as a whole, learning how all of these things intersects will greatly increase your understanding of the characters and strengthen your ability to deal with unfamiliar ones.
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Yo you guys need to make sure not to get too hung up on just kanji and remember to learn the language. if you're actually serious get the book Genki and start working through it.

Sausage muten Roshi sama!!!
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Dragonblade01 posted...

Thanks for expanding on it. I understand what you mean now, RTK just doesn't go in depth about placement changing the meaning of the radical, rather than just that it has multiple implications 'Moon' and 'Flesh, Part of the body' which it does say.
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EverHeardOfIt posted...

Yo you guys need to make sure not to get too hung up on just kanji and remember to learn the language. if you're actually serious get the book Genki and start working through it.

Oh for sure. I just like talking about the writing system the most because it is the most interesting part about it to me.
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EverHeardOfIt posted...

Yo you guys need to make sure not to get too hung up on just kanji and remember to learn the language. if you're actually serious get the book Genki and start working through it.

Nobody's saying to ignore the rest of the language. It's simply the case that kanji can be a very challenging part of learning it that requires a lot of time and dedication to understand well.
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I need to touch up a bit. I studied for a year in college and haven't really touched it since the end of spring. I try and read Japanese blog and twitter posts so I don't forget but there's still so much I don't know, especially with kanji and vocab.
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I did RTK when I first started and I learned the 2200 kanji in the book in about 2 and a half months. It greatly helps and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Japanese.
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