A dilemma I have, copy and pasted from a comment;
“The problem I have with learning the word is that some kanji will appear in other words but because I don’t know the individual meaning, I don’t recognise it. I have to see the kanji in the word I know it as.
So to counter this, I want to learn the individual meaning, so do I learn them as their meaning in Japanese but as a word? But then the kanji is actually different. Like gakusei for example (student). 学means study but 勉強 is common word for study.
What do I dooooo
Only saving grace here is to learn the adjective for it but do you get what I mean? Really want to get back into study but kanji is literally the only thing holding me back. There has to be an effective way to learn it”
There you have it. Would appreciate some thoughts
8 comments
Assigning a “meaning” to Chinese characters is fairly artificial and won’t help one much in learning Japanese. They have canonically assigned “meanings” based on the words they are featured in but this list is incomplete due to semantic shifts, and crude at best.
Consider the “com” in English “complex”, it also occurs in “compound”, “concentrate”, “construct”, “connect”, sometimes changing form. If English were written with Chinese characters, this part would all be written with the same character, let’s say “節” for sake of argument and it would be assigned the “meaning”, “together”.
Obviously no one thinks of “together” when seeing the word “complex” and it won’t help one understand the meaning of the word. But that’s the abstract nature of the “meaning” of individual characters. They are tools used to write words, and words have a meaning, but assigning a meaning to individual characters is very abstract and not very helpful to learn Japanese.
> So to counter this, I want to learn the individual meaning, so do I learn them as their meaning in Japanese but as a word? But then the kanji is actually different. Like gakusei for example (student). 学means study but 勉強 is common word for study.
Yes, there you go. The “meaning“ of “学” is “education” and “生” is either “life” or “raw”. I have no idea why the word for “student” is composed of that, it simply is. “勉強” is a case of a semantic shift. The characters mean “effort” and “strength”. In Mandarin, this still means “reluctance” or “being forced”, but in Japanese the meaning has changed to “study” but the characters were never changed.
This highlights how unhelpful focusing on the meaning of characters is. They have no meaning in Japanese; they’re tools to write down words that have meaning and in some cases the characters to write down the words make sense, and in some cases due to historical shifts in semantics there’s no rhyme to it.
How do you keep the meaning of ‘study’ and ‘learn’ apart in English?
If you have trouble learning vocabulary because of kanji, just use one of the tried and proven kanji learning methods from the [resource list](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/wiki/index/resources/#wiki_kanji) and be done with it. Kanji aren’t new and you don’t have to come up with the best way of doing this yourself.
well, 学ぶ also means ‘to study’
there isn’t, i really wish people searched the reddit ever, this is asked a dozen times a day
[https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/search/?q=kanji%20meaning&restrict_sr=1&sr_nsfw=&sort=new](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/search/?q=kanji%20meaning&restrict_sr=1&sr_nsfw=&sort=new)
(it doesn’t show up a dozen times because they often get removed because they should have been in the daily questions thread)
you don’t read kanji. ever. only words. learn vocabulary. kanji aren’t words. you can only pronounce a word if you’ve memorized it. don’t mean to be terse but it’s not magic – learn words and kanji will come.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/10r5s4e/do_i_need_to_know_how_to_read_the_kanji_or_is/j6tzd0l/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/10r5s4e/do_i_need_to_know_how_to_read_the_kanji_or_is/j6tzd0l/?context=3)
This is why I’m loving the “Learn Japanese- Kanji” app. It introduces you to the individual characters and their meanings, then introduces you to vocabulary using the characters that you’ve become familiar with. Additionally there is a kana “spelling” and an audio clip with each kanji and vocabulary word so that you actually learn how to say it / read it correctly. I’m surprised more people on this thread haven’t mentioned this app. It’s fantastic.
If you can afford a paid method, WaniKani teaches you everything together (meanings/readings of individual Kanji and how they work in vocab that use them). I personally can’t imagine learning it all separately. But I also really appreciate having everything planned out for me so I just have to put in the practice time. Some people much prefer to build their own lessons.
Personally I just think it works better when learned together. Makes it easier to remember too.
*Caveat that I’m a learner of Korean. I know a bit about Japanese but I don’t speak it, so if I inadvertently misrepresent something about Japanese I welcome your kind and constructive feedback.*
I’m not sure how you would necessarily put this to use for learning Japanese, but you might be interested in the way Koreans treat the “meanings” of individual Chinese characters. Long story short, 漢字 aren’t words on their own (they are building blocks for words) but they do have defined meanings. They are also super easy to identify by “name” in Korean and describe their meaning, because each character is assigned an [音訓](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/음훈), which is a couplet consisting of the character’s 訓讀 (讀 is 読, Korean uses traditional characters) or semantic reading (which is usually a native Korean word) and 音讀 or Sino-Korean pronunciation. For example 名 is “*ireum myeong”* or “name *myeong”,* while 明 is “*balgeul myeong”* or “bright *myeong”.* These couplets serve as a unique name for each character (clearly distinguishing between characters which happen to be pronounced identically in Korean) and a mnemonic intended to help remember the character, meaning, and sound all together. They were invented during 朝鮮時代 to help students (who of course knew spoken Korean already) learn to read, write, and pronounce 漢文 (literary Chinese language), but they still appear in dictionaries and children’s textbooks today and if you ask a Korean “What character is 明?” she’ll probably still answer “It’s *balgeul myeong*!”
To dig a little bit deeper, Korean has the same distinction between native vocabulary (固有語 in Korean, 和語 in Japanese) and Sino-xenic vocabulary (漢字語 in Korean, 漢語 in Japanese). They fill the same roles, with native vocabulary proving most of the function words, grammatical endings, and intimate, everyday vocabulary, while Sino words are the bulk of the content words, especially the fancy ones. But an important difference is that, in Modern Korean, 漢字 cannot be used to write native Korean words. That is, you can write Korean in mixed script (“安寧하새요! 제 姓名은 새로운使用者입니다”) but only the Sino words can be put into Chinese characters.
As a result, Koreans don’t really think about 訓讀 and 音讀 *readings* the way learners of Japanese think about kunyomi and onyomi, but about 固有語 and 漢字語 *words*, and they think of 漢字 only as being a Chinese morpheme (or unit of discrete meaning that can be combined with others to form Sino words) with one or more specific Chinese-Korean pronunciations that is represented by a specific Chinese character. And they don’t really think of 訓讀 as “readings” for the character, but as plain-language descriptions of what the morpheme and character mean. Sometimes words they are assembled into are kind of opaque (why should “learn *hak,* emerge *saeng*” [學生] mean “a person who goes to school? Why should “fight *jeon*, dispute *jaeng*” [戰爭] mean “war” and not just “a fistfight”?) but you can still say that they are spelled from those particular pieces with those approximate meanings.
As I said, I don’t really know how you might want to put this to work for Japanese. I guess you could study individual characters together with their principal kunyomi word and onyomi readings, exactly as Japanese-learners generally suggest not doing. Or you could make English 音訓 with Heisig keywords and onyomi. Or you could just shrug, say “that’s kinda interesting” and move on. I just thought it was worth taking the time to share.