I’m trying to learn kanji and then after learning the kanji the same word comes up with vocabulary but in a different hirgana. What does vocabulary actually do vs just kanji?
Vocabulary is… words. The thing languages are made of.
I’m not too sure what you’re asking here but on the off-chance that English isn’t your first language, vocabulary means the words that make up a language. So you can have English vocabulary and Japanese vocabulary etc.
Kanji is a Japanese writing system.
Vocabulary means word
I think they’re referring to the on and kun versions – possibly in wanikani as it shows “kanji” and “vocab”
As I don’t really know what you’re asking I’ll answer two questions.
Vocabulary has to do with the words and other kinds of ”signs” (vocabulary items) you know within a language and what you know about them such as ”cow”(content word), ”plant”(content word), landscape (compound word), ”Over”(function word), ”And”(function word), ”To mess up”(multiword expression), ”To TAKE a bath”(collocation) ”It’s raining cats and dogs (idiom)”, ”How are you?” (cliche), etc. This is in contrast to the ”grammar” which is about structural and functional patterns within the language such as word order, how to use functional vocabulary, or how functional versions of smaller parts of words called affixes are used to create new words (function words) like in ”Unlikable” having the affixes ”un”’ and ”ble”. Basically grammar tells you the restrictions in how you can organize those vocabulary items into sentences and new words and gives structure to the language so that you can’t just put words together at random.
Kanji on their own are not vocabulary, they represent concepts 魚(was once an icon of a fish and means that), which are then used to represent words like さかな/sakana (fish in Japanese), or 魚雷: ぎょらい/gyorai (torpedo). but in Chinese it may represent different words entirely however the characters themselves do still share their meaning of fish. Often 1 kanji represents 1 part of a word called a morpheme. So a ”compound word” with two parts like ”Trash Can” would have 1 kanji for trash and 1 kanji for can, though this is not always the case.
Most words are represented by two kanji, but it can be any number, including 1. Some words are also written with the same kanji (homographs), so that might explain why you get different hiragana. 一日 could be the word ついたち/tsuitachi or いちにち/ichinichi. Meanwhile if you look at only kana, some words are different and have different kanji but are written with the same kana or have the same sound (homophones). ashi/あし could be 足(leg) or 葦(a reed plant, though the pitch accent is different, the kana is the same) which are different words but sound the same. However sometimes different kanji are used to represent the same word/vocabulary item, for example 脚 is also used to represent the word for foot.
I’m no expert, but my understanding is that kanji are the building blocks of vocabulary.. in WaniKani the pink ‘kanji’ items give the meaning of the kanji and a common pronunciation (often on-yomi, but sometimes kun-yomi, confusingly.)
The purple ‘vocabulary’ items are meant to help you learn which words that kanji is often used in.
Imagine you were to learn both English and the latin alphabet at the same time. Then you’d both learn the letter “a” and the word “a” (the indefinite article in “I ate a banana”). The pronunciation of “a” in “ate” and “banana” are also different, so you can’t say that letter “a” has one single pronunciation.
vocab is a word
let’s do “water”
water in Japanese is みず
as you can see it’s made of hiragana
but it has a shorter kanji representation
水
note that that kanji in this case is also pronounced “みず”
sometimes it’s pronounced differently, but that would be in different words. Such as 水防. This word is すいぼう and it means “flood prevention”. Notice that there is no みず sound in it at all, but it still uses the same kanji. That’s because it’s a different reading. But that’s ok, because you can learn the word すいぼう means flood prevention. And if you see 水防 you say すいぼう and you are good.
now go and learn about 25,000 vocab words besides みず and すいぼう, and you’re good to go on vocab
It means the same thing as what vocabulary is in English. Just words.
“penultimate” <- this is an example of a vocabulary item. It’s just a word.
Even these sentences are composed of vocabulary.
In Japanese, words can be spelled with kanji or kana, or sometimes the Roman alphabet, etc.
The only thing foreign to English speakers here is the fact that Japanese words are often spelled with kanji. It’s difficult to learn because kanji are mainly used as a meaning-based spelling system rather than a sound-based spelling system in Japanese.
This is why you have to learn how words are read in Japanese. When things are spelled by meaning rather than sound, and when words have standard spellings, that’s a lot of standard spellings you have to memorize. And most of those spellings could not be guessed from the sound of the word.
Words sometimes use kanji for their sound values too, such as the word 風呂(furo), “bath”.
Think of kanji like emojis “I like 🌻” you know 🌻 is flower so it’s just the shorter version of flower but let’s say if you see this🌹, then you could say it could mean a beautiful flower. They both mean flower but this 🌹 just mean beautiful flower . If that makes sense
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Vocabulary is… words. The thing languages are made of.
I’m not too sure what you’re asking here but on the off-chance that English isn’t your first language, vocabulary means the words that make up a language. So you can have English vocabulary and Japanese vocabulary etc.
Kanji is a Japanese writing system.
Vocabulary means word
I think they’re referring to the on and kun versions – possibly in wanikani as it shows “kanji” and “vocab”
As I don’t really know what you’re asking I’ll answer two questions.
Vocabulary has to do with the words and other kinds of ”signs” (vocabulary items) you know within a language and what you know about them such as ”cow”(content word), ”plant”(content word), landscape (compound word), ”Over”(function word), ”And”(function word), ”To mess up”(multiword expression), ”To TAKE a bath”(collocation) ”It’s raining cats and dogs (idiom)”, ”How are you?” (cliche), etc. This is in contrast to the ”grammar” which is about structural and functional patterns within the language such as word order, how to use functional vocabulary, or how functional versions of smaller parts of words called affixes are used to create new words (function words) like in ”Unlikable” having the affixes ”un”’ and ”ble”. Basically grammar tells you the restrictions in how you can organize those vocabulary items into sentences and new words and gives structure to the language so that you can’t just put words together at random.
Kanji on their own are not vocabulary, they represent concepts 魚(was once an icon of a fish and means that), which are then used to represent words like さかな/sakana (fish in Japanese), or 魚雷: ぎょらい/gyorai (torpedo). but in Chinese it may represent different words entirely however the characters themselves do still share their meaning of fish. Often 1 kanji represents 1 part of a word called a morpheme. So a ”compound word” with two parts like ”Trash Can” would have 1 kanji for trash and 1 kanji for can, though this is not always the case.
Most words are represented by two kanji, but it can be any number, including 1. Some words are also written with the same kanji (homographs), so that might explain why you get different hiragana. 一日 could be the word ついたち/tsuitachi or いちにち/ichinichi. Meanwhile if you look at only kana, some words are different and have different kanji but are written with the same kana or have the same sound (homophones). ashi/あし could be 足(leg) or 葦(a reed plant, though the pitch accent is different, the kana is the same) which are different words but sound the same. However sometimes different kanji are used to represent the same word/vocabulary item, for example 脚 is also used to represent the word for foot.
I’m no expert, but my understanding is that kanji are the building blocks of vocabulary.. in WaniKani the pink ‘kanji’ items give the meaning of the kanji and a common pronunciation (often on-yomi, but sometimes kun-yomi, confusingly.)
The purple ‘vocabulary’ items are meant to help you learn which words that kanji is often used in.
Imagine you were to learn both English and the latin alphabet at the same time. Then you’d both learn the letter “a” and the word “a” (the indefinite article in “I ate a banana”). The pronunciation of “a” in “ate” and “banana” are also different, so you can’t say that letter “a” has one single pronunciation.
vocab is a word
let’s do “water”
water in Japanese is みず
as you can see it’s made of hiragana
but it has a shorter kanji representation
水
note that that kanji in this case is also pronounced “みず”
sometimes it’s pronounced differently, but that would be in different words. Such as 水防. This word is すいぼう and it means “flood prevention”. Notice that there is no みず sound in it at all, but it still uses the same kanji. That’s because it’s a different reading. But that’s ok, because you can learn the word すいぼう means flood prevention. And if you see 水防 you say すいぼう and you are good.
now go and learn about 25,000 vocab words besides みず and すいぼう, and you’re good to go on vocab
It means the same thing as what vocabulary is in English. Just words.
“penultimate” <- this is an example of a vocabulary item. It’s just a word.
Even these sentences are composed of vocabulary.
In Japanese, words can be spelled with kanji or kana, or sometimes the Roman alphabet, etc.
The only thing foreign to English speakers here is the fact that Japanese words are often spelled with kanji. It’s difficult to learn because kanji are mainly used as a meaning-based spelling system rather than a sound-based spelling system in Japanese.
This is why you have to learn how words are read in Japanese. When things are spelled by meaning rather than sound, and when words have standard spellings, that’s a lot of standard spellings you have to memorize. And most of those spellings could not be guessed from the sound of the word.
Words sometimes use kanji for their sound values too, such as the word 風呂(furo), “bath”.
Think of kanji like emojis “I like 🌻” you know 🌻 is flower so it’s just the shorter version of flower but let’s say if you see this🌹, then you could say it could mean a beautiful flower. They both mean flower but this 🌹 just mean beautiful flower . If that makes sense