In my last rant about all the ridiculousness
it takes just to write a simple sentence in Japanese, the list of complications kept growing
and growing and growing, until we threw that kanji bomb into the mix like a writing systems
ninja. But I didn’t get into the stuff that really takes Japanese kanji over the top,
making them seriously awkward. Don’t forget, don’t you dare forget, that
Japan borrowed its characters from China. That’s important, because it explains what
happens next. When a Kanji came on the boat across the sea, it brought its Chinese pronunciation
along with it. But Chinese and Japanese are two very different languages with two very
different pronunciation systems. So each character didn't get pronounced the way somebody from
China would say it but the way somebody from Japan would hear it. Here's how I imagine
that history. "Well, hello! Who might you be?" "Han." "Ok, Kan.” “No, HAN!" “Yes,
Kan. Nice to meet you, Kan." And that is just the tip of the Sapporo ice sculpture. What makes this confusing cultural mismatch
even better is that the acoustic exchange happened a long time ago, so it’s the way
characters from old China sounded to people in old Japan. And since, like I explained last time, most
characters are a bad game of charades with one part of the character telling you what
the word "sounds like", the confusion coming out of this phonological telephone game makes
that vague "sounds like" hint even more vague in Japanese. The fancy term for this cultural mishmash
of kanji pronunciation is the Sino-Japanese reading. In Japanese, they call it the On'yomi!
Literally "sound reading”, since you’re reading the kanji with its Chinese sound.
And, of course, there’s more than one way to skin an on'yomi. There's go-on. That’s
the classical Wu pronunciation of the characters from the 5th century. Then came the kan'on,
which are T’ang dynasty pronunciations starting in the 7th century. Tou-on pronunciations
made their way to Japan from later dynasties. The final on'yomi is kan’you-on, outlier
pronunciations and even mistakes that became conventional and stuck around over the centuries.
So, yeah, don’t be surprised when the on'yomi for a kanji you’re learning is actually
a bunch of different Sino-Japanese pronunciations. This has amusing consequences. If you go to
Zen ceremonies, they recite this passage in Classical Chinese that's called the Heart
Sutra. But this is Japan, and these are all kanji. So how do you think the sutra gets
pronounced? In Classical Chinese? No. In Standard Chinese? No. In Japanese? No! It’s just
chanted as a long string of on'yomi, basically resulting in gibberish in both languages. Kanji don’t just have on'yomi though. They
also have Kun'yomi! Like I said before, Japanese and Chinese are two very different languages,
which means that all these on'yomi getting borrowed century after century are basically
foreign vocabulary words. But do you think the native Japanese words just stepped aside
and made room for all the shiny new Chinese terms? No. The incoming kanji had to fit Japanese,
too. So Japanese words got matched to Chinese characters that seemed like a good fit at
the time. Here's the character for cart or vehicle.
It has a few Sino-Japanese on'yomi, but the basic one is "sha". But the Japanese already
had a word for this: kuruma. So this character can represent any of these pronunciations. It wasn’t an exact science though. Just
like you can have multiple Chinese pronunciations for each kanji, why not have multiple Japanese
meaning readings, too? There’s even one more bunch of readings
to add to this list. Nanori! It’s for proper names and is usually yet another native Japanese
pronunciation for the character. And the excitement doesn’t stop here, tomodachi! Because it’s time to forget the reading
fun and think about all the writing fun you can have with these. That is where you really
get to play with this systems within systems madness... I mean, uh, amazingness!... that
is the kanji. If you want to play fast and loose with the
history and meaning of the characters, you can switch in some Ateji! Those are kanji
characters used just for the way they sound. When you see "sushi" written this way, that’s
some improv ateji stuff going on. Neither of those characters has anything to do with
the meaning of that word. Sometimes Japan just builds its own characters
following the logic of Chinese character composition. Just makes characters up. Because you can
be productive with this charades game. These are called Kokuji! Country characters. Sometimes there are newer ways and older ways
of writing the exact same character. Shinjitai! Kyuujitai! Sometimes a character gets way too complicated
or you’re just feeling creative and you need to abbreviate it in one way or another.
And by abbreviate, I mean turn it into a completely unrecognizable thing that I’ll sit there
trying to look up, like WHAT IS THAT? IT WASN’T ON MY OFFICIAL KANJI LIST! Ryakuji! And mastering one character is only a fraction
of the battle. Often characters don’t mean what you think they mean, or they really don’t
mean much on their own. Japanese loves to combine characters to make a word. You go,
Japan! Stack those characters! And then, once you’re comfortable with multi-kanji words,
level up again to tackle those terse little three-character or four-character proverbs
that pack some deep meaning in just a very few syllables. ("Yame!") This not even where things get out of hand.
I promise you. You see, it’s not the quirky syllables from last time. It’s not the quagmire
that you get into when you start memorizing all the kanji with their sound readings, their
meaning readings, their substitutions and abbreviations. It’s the untamed beast that
only rears its head when you first put ink to that fresh sheet of Japanese paper. Which
looks a lot like regular paper. Uh, stop and think about how super intricate the characters
get with all their little lines and strokes and da--... while I tell you in all seriousness
that there’s officially a right way and a wrong way to write each and every single
mark in these things. You made it this far, but I need you next
time to help me through this. Stick around and subscribe for language.
Interesting video but the video comes across as a lot of teeth-gnashing about stuff that doesn't really matter-- and it seems extremely discouraging to potential learners to throw all of this at them at once, saying "haha, see this mess? you'll never be able to figure this out" which is patently false.
You don't have to know every possible reading of a character to be able to speak Japanese-- and one commonly overlooked fact is that the more common a kanji is, the more readings it has. That's why 日, the most common kanji in newspapers, has like 5 different readings-- but if you look at something like, say, 液, it has exactly one reading (えき）and that reading is the same all the time. It's a ridiculous exaggeration to even insinuate that you're going to have to memorize like 5 different readings for each character, because outside of very common kanji, a lot of readings are just archaic and nobody uses them any more.
The video's also full of bad examples:
He brings up the kanji 行 as his example which is yet another EXTREMELY common kanji, thus it has a ton of usages. He also brings up 弓 and 9 out of 10 times that's going to be ゆみ/キュウ, you're never going to say たらし because people would assume you just time warped in from the 1600s. It's literally like referring to a bow as "boga."
His 車 example completely lost me. I have NEVER seen that represented by anything but くるま/シャ. If there is a COMMON word using 車 pronounced as コ or キョ I'd love to hear about it (excepting the fact that as a radical it becomes コ as in 車庫)
The one point I'll agree with him on is name kanji. Very often there is just no rhyme or rhythm to it-- thus why you'll see even Japanese people ask what characters a person's name is written with, etc.
There's a lot of scaremongering around kanji, but they really aren't so hard. They're all just collections of reusable parts, and learning the readings of kanji is pointless. Just learn the word and which kanji are used to represent it. Slowly you'll get used to various patterns that exist. Don't memorise kanji out of context with their readings, then try and build words based on the pronunciation; that would be nigh-on impossible!
I don't understand the trouble with stroke order. The system is logical, and as you write more kanji, it becomes second nature. The only real glitch with it is the handful of kanji that are similar to other kanji but have a different stroke order than them, like how the order of the top-left component in 右, 左, and 友 changes based on the component below it, or how the top stroke in 心 is written second to last, but the same stroke in 必 is written first. Sure, these things can get frustrating, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The only other problem might be what others mentioned with its differences with Chinese stroke order, but this is only a problem if you already learned that, in which case you probably don't find the concept of stroke order baffling even if you do find the Japanese version odd. In the end, stroke order just isn't that bad.
I got downvoted to oblivion (here!) by trying to use Chinese writing sequence for the character 右.
Imagine my confusion when I saw the Japanese teacher use a completely new method to write the character 必 that goes against Chinese logic and is actually the correct way to write it in Japanese. No wonder the handwritten character was unrecognisable to me at first.
Addedenum:
The writing sequence of kanji in the Chinese system attempts to build on existing characters while maintaining consistency between similar characters.
As a native chinese speaker, the more kanji in a sentence, the easier it is for me to have a guess on the meaning :s
Let's definitely discuss how annoying the Japanese writing system is. How about a tentative meeting on Thursday, right after all English speakers of the world get together to reform English spelling?
I saw this over at /r/japan via /u/saintdiam and thought you guys here would appreciate it too.
He should have mentioned at the end that there is a right and wrong stroke order, AND its not always the same as chinese!