Hello my friends,
I recently mastered the kana. Bow its time for Kanji. But the problem is, the guides how to learn it properly are very confusing. I thought at first Kanji are the japanese words, but its not like that. Then what is a japanese word? Since Kanji is just a symbol for meanings, i dont know how to learn it properly. And do i have to learn the chinese and japanese pronounciation? Many people say no, but how am i supposed to talk about a word if i dont know the pronounciation?
Pls help me.
4 comments
If you only learned the Kana, you should now start learning basic grammar and vocabulary. You don’t need to start kanjis just yet (soon, but not yet).
At first, courses will only use kana. Then, some words we be replaced by kanjis. わたし will become 私. きょう will become 今日.
That’s when you’ll start worrying about kanji.
Kanji are not words. Kanji are used to write words. Some words are often composed entirely of Kanji, some entirely of kana, and many a mix of both.
You learn pronunciations of individual words. From there, you can extract the readings of individual kanji. Brute forcing Kanji readings out of context as a beginner is a mistake since you do not yet have the experience to determine which reading is used when.
kanji aren’t words, they’re just letters. learn words, and as you learn them, learn how they’re spelled. individual kanji “meanings” are not relevant to reading at all. you don’t memorize pronunciation of kanji, you memorize pronunciation of words. just like english. there are patterns, and sometimes that can help remember spellings or pronunciations (also like english) but knowing patterns isn’t sufficient to read (like english).
Words are just sounds, kanji were assigned to words and gained readings from that – since there’s often some consistency between similar meaning words and the sounds, they are often read the same (as in most kanji have one Japanese reading and one Chinese reading, depending on where the word originated) but some have quite a few. Examples,
きゅうきゅうしゃ = 救急車, the meaning each kanji points to are rescue, urgent, and car respectively. Ambulance. While 急 (きゅう) and 車(くるま) are also words in their own right, 救 is not.
A word can be part kana or not have a kanji at all, like すくう = 救う (to rescue, the kanji above) or せがむ.
Words written in katakana are usually foreign loan words like パン, or katakana is used in replace of rarer kanji (like fish names such as 魴鮄=ホウボウ).
Some words with kanji are usually written in kana, like せっかく=折角
You’ll notice that multiple kanji words with no hiragana usually have the Chinese reading, and the Japanese reading otherwise. With exceptions..