I studied the N5 level kanji through the vocabulary words, but that was mostly a year ago and I’ve forgotten most of them, or so I thought. I came across an example that contained this phrase:
「写真を撮ることやピアノを弾くことが好きです。」
The only kanji I got right away was 好 and I mistook 弾 for 強. The others I thought I hadn’t studied at all. For some reason this confusion also had me not understanding what ピアノ meant even though I’m usually good with katakana and English loanwords. I resisted the urge to just throw the whole sentence into DeepL and just translated the first word 写真 and realized I had studied it in Anki. I started reading the sentence and my brain automatically just said 「とる」when I just kept reading, which kinda blew my mind a little. Now I’m understanding the structure of the sentence with や and I’m remembering that you 弾くa piano and the whole phrase is 易しいベイビ〜〜
I guess basically I’m saying if think you’ve forgotten things just take it slow and trust your subconscious.
4 comments
yup, it’s all about being patience and taking the sentence piece by piece. That’s how you know you’ll get far learning this language…because you didn’t just throw the sentence into a translator and actually tried to disect its components. good job 🙂
I’ve recently hit a point where I realized I have put so much emphasis on learning kanji that I’ve neglected any kana vocabulary, so while I can understand all those kanji and have a general idea of what the sentence is saying, I don’t know what ことや adds to the sentence, and this has been a very frustrating thing to finally realize.
Nice! This is why reading is so important. Even if it’s slow, your mind naturally makes those connections and you can gain rather impressive understanding with minimal context clues. It can allow you to enjoy things outside your punching range.
I thought I studied quite a bit, but I only knew 2 of the kanji in that sentence (写 and 好) 🙁
But judging from the fact that 写 is the first kanji is the two-kanji word for “photo” and there’s one very likely action that you do with photos, and one for piano, it’s likely that the sentence is “I like things like taking photos and playing the piano”.