VGPolyglot said:
DJjazzyGETH said:
Learning Kanji is the hardest part for sure, but it's easier in Japanese because they use a combination of Kanji and Kana, which is phoenetic. Japanese is often written up->down, right->left (the traditional method, used in books), but it can be used horizontally left to right too.
Basically you can read it by being constantly bombarded by it 24/7, and practically no other way. Japanese and Chinese students go through intensive learning in middle and high school to get a couple thousand memorized. There are advanatages to it, particularly if you're a visual person, in that words are often constucted using kanji that are representative of ideas. It's basically how root woods work in English (television = tele, distant; vision, to see), and can simplify reading if you've truly memorized it all and understand how the words are constructed. It sounds daunting from outside, but native speakers can't imagine not using them.
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Actually, I'd say that Chinese Hanzi is easier than Japanese Kanji, because almost every Kanji has a least two readings, many being multisyllabic, while most Hanzi has one pronunciation, and every single Hanzi is only one syllable long.
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That's certainly a complexity I didn't mention haha, but yeah, Kanji (along with most vocab) have Chinese and Japanese pronouciations, and it gets even more complicated trying to figure out which ones are appropriate for conversation. Man it's been a few years since I've thought much about Japanese, this thread is bringing back the nightmare a bit haha
