Everything you need to know about KANJI || Onyomi, Kuyomi || Radicals (JAPANESE LESSON #2)

what is up YouTube this is Kent a sensei and today we're going to be talking about kanji pronunciations and kanji radicals so my last lesson I taught you about differences between Shinagawa katakana and kanji but today we're going to go more in depth about kanji more specifically on the origins of kanji the different country pronunciations and kanji radicals which are parts that make up a kanji so going right in I'm going to first talk about the origins of kanji how kanji came to Japan so in the first century kanji came from China the Chinese language they came alongside Buddhism and Confucianism and during this time in Japan there is no such written syllabary but there was a spoken language so the main challenge was how are we going to use kanji in order to write in Japanese because kanji already had its own meaning and also a Chinese pronunciation associated with it what the Japanese did was they basically renamed the kanji using the Japanese term that corresponds to that country's meaning so for example this country right here means water and water in Japanese is music but during this time this kanji would be read differently or be read in Chinese but what they did was that they renamed this kanji as music or the Japanese Way of saying water but they also adopted the original Chinese pronunciation to its syllabary meaning this kanji can also be read as si so this kanji has two pronunciations see and music now don't get confused because not every country has two pronunciations some may have one and some may have more than two so to recap there are two main pronunciations that you need to know one was the pronunciations that originated from Chinese and to the pronunciations that originated from Japanese now this is very important to know because this directly correlates to yummy and creamy pronunciations all yummy pronunciations are the pronunciations that originated from Chinese whereas cleome are the pronunciations that originated from the Japanese language now one thing you need to know about all your meat pronunciations is that if you read a kanji by itself with its own yummy pronunciation it will make no sense what I mean by this for example is if I want to ask for water you cannot address water using its own Leone pronunciation see you cannot say sooo equal kudasai it would make no sense you need to use the cleome pronunciation in order to make sense you have to ask what miscible could I say so one thing about on your pronunciations is that one cannot understand what you're talking about if you're using the only pronunciation by itself as for cleome if you address a kanji using its cleome pronunciation people would understand what you're talking about and that's because that pronunciation was originally from the Japanese language now one may ask why do we even use onyomi if you cannot read it without making any sense and that's because all Yomi pronunciations are usually used when we are reading compound kanji compound kanji are basically kanji characters that are attached together in order to make one term for example Shinkansen which means bullet train or got coal which means school and as you can see multiple country can be grouped together in order to make one term and usually these kanji read in its own Yomi pronunciation there are exceptions to this and I'll get to it now as for cleome like I said before people will understand what you're really talking about if you read a kanji using its cleome pronunciation however you need to also note that there is something called Okuda Ghana Accra Ghana is basically hiragana characters that followed a kanji character now when you're studying kanji you might notice that a pronunciation is written in hiragana and there are a number of key dynamic characters that are written in brackets these hiragana characters are called lacunae ghana accra ghana is basically characters that follow a kanji and is used for conjugations conjugation is basically a step process that you take in order to alter terms meaning so for example in English if I were to change a go to going which is the present participle you're doing conjugation same with in Japanese when we conjugate in Japanese we are altering the operating honor so to give you guys an example the word Tabata has bitter as Oakley gonna that follows the country top so saying that by itself makes no sense but with the Oconee Ghana Tabata then you're saying to eat or I eat and notice if I change this term Tabata to Tabata it becomes past tense I ate or for example if I change this to tablet type that means I want to eat so as you can see by altering the Oconee Ghana we can alter the meaning of the whole term we'll get to conjugations in later lessons now going back to only pronunciations and about compound kanji like I said earlier usually we would read kanji and it's only my pronunciation if it is part of a compound kanji but there are exceptions to this for example in some terms you would read the first country in its own ium in pronunciation and its second country as its cleome pronunciations or the other way around we can read the first one including me and then and then ii kanji in ano me now these exceptions are called Chewbacca Yami and you told me you don't need to know these terms but it is important to note that not every compound kanji are read in onyomi pronunciations some have a mixture of them now that you know what onyomi and cleome are let's move on into kanji radicals kanji radicals are basically parts that make up a single Kanji character now you may have known now you may have known now what you need to understand is that kanji characters are not written randomly they were not made or randomly kanji characters consist of smaller parts which all have a specific meaning for example if I give you this kanji here this means to rest and on the left side we have one part and the right side we have another part the left side is something we called a neem bin this is a kanji radical and this country radical represents humans or humanity whereas the right side is a radical that represents treats now you can visualize a person resting under a tree so as you can see sometimes radicals may illustrate a general meaning which corresponds to the kanji that it constructs now why is it important to know what kanji radicals are it's because kanji radicals have its own meaning and they usually relate to the kanji that it constructs so when you're memorizing kanji it is very beneficial if you remember what these kanji radicals represent so if you know what a new man is if you know if that represents humans and it comes up to a new country that you've never seen before at least you know that it has something to do with humans or the person or the body perhaps and as you learn more and more kanji you're going to encounter complicated kanji characters but the thing is these complicated kanji characters can be breaking down into country radicals that you've already seen before so it makes it much easier to memorize if you know your country radicals so that's it for today's lesson so if you have any questions make sure to leave a comment down below and I'll get to you as soon as possible and also make sure to like this video and subscribe so that we can get as many Japanese learners to watch this video also if you want to participate in my lessons make sure to download amino and axis Japanese school amino that's where I teach weekly Japanese lessons for free also if you just want to hang out with other Japanese learners or Japanese natives make sure to join our discord server all the links are down below but until then Metheny [Music]

Channel: Kensei Sensei

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Keywords: Japanese, Japan, Language, learninglanguage, languagelearning, asianlanguage, anime, sensei, teacher, manga, kawaii, jpop, vocaloid, otaku, weeaboo, memes, 日本, 日本語, 英語, 英会話, japon, 일본, Japón, Japonya, Nhật Bản, japaneseculture, japanesefood

Id: TIxOGi26P0I

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020