Apologies for the long wait, life has been hectic. Anyways, next video will not take as long, haha. support on ko-fi: ko-fi.com/lazyfluency checkout our eng/jpn podcast: www.youtube.com/@lazyfluencypodcast

@UndercoverDontSubscribe

Ай бұрын

it already did

I will never call French horribly inefficient again

@danielantony1882

4 ай бұрын

@@aliceberethartFuck, I autocorrected that, and didn't realize your wordplay.

@llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogeryc...

4 ай бұрын

为什么学习日语，中文比日语好 😁😅

@Deibi078

4 ай бұрын

I learn Japanese and French at the same time

@hinkyto2550

4 ай бұрын

@@Deibi078 Maybe you should do Japanese sessions and French sessions instead of both at once? Unless Frapanese is your goal, that is.

@cesruhf2605

4 ай бұрын

@@llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogeryc... 因为中国没有文化所以没有意思

If you know this language and it's not your native language. You deserve a golden statue of yourself.

@ClickDecision

4 ай бұрын

This guy is giving everyone the impression that it's this super hard thing. It's not. You learn vocab and then everything else that he's talking about is something you just casually observe.

@ClickDecision

4 ай бұрын

But ill take the statue sure haha

@cc_ppur1334

4 ай бұрын

The point isn't about Native it is about Reading

@ThatTrueCJ201

4 ай бұрын

Insert Obama awarding Obama meme here

@S3verance

4 ай бұрын

I don't know why I'm doing this to myself

“The Kanji on the left means day, the Kanji on the right means book. This means the day of the book.”

@atomic_wait

3 ай бұрын

The word in English is 'dook', as in "I sat down for a long dook".

Kanji activates my fight or flight response.

@RadenYohanesGunawan

3 ай бұрын

Nah only math does it to me.

I thought he was gonna start talking about how hiragana are also originally kanji when he mentioned removing kanji at the end. Definitely the “Luke, I am your father” moment of Japanese learning. Overall pretty good and comprehensive video imo

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

I tried to limit my mention of Hiragana and Katakana so that presumably someone who doesn't know Japanese can still follow the video. Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji all introduce unique solutions/issues 😂 My first video on this channel goes into the problems of Katakana specifically!

Stop sign in Taiwan:Pause School zone sign in Taiwan:Literature😂😂😂

I studied Japanese as a kid (14-16) to watch anime and play the Pokémon games a year early, I probably learned 1000-2000 words (many that only appeared in games like "jumped out" as in "A wild Farfetchd Jumped Out") and probably about 500 Kanji. I left it alone but could still understand anime pretty well without looking at the subtitles. About 6 years later I got back into languages when I went to Europe and it turned out my French was actually trash. I got obsessive and got my French good again but just believed my Japanese was good enough. About 4 more years later I got really into Chinese, and a lot of Japanese characters ended up helping, but Simplified Chinese makes most characters different so really maybe only 50 or so Kanji were truly helpful. I still thought my Japanese was pretty good, but I got so good at Chinese that it somehow overtook my Japanese, and one day I met a japanese person and when I tried to speak Japanese, only Chinese could come out. I really wonder why that is, I think because I think in Kanji and kana, Chinese and Japanese were stored in the same theoretical "box" in my brain and Chinese ended up overtaking it. Now I pretty much just remember the writing of Kanji but not most readings, and the kana, and the grammar principles but I have to think very hard to remember words. Moral of the story, consistency matters most and if you don't use it you WILL lose it.

@naoko707

4 ай бұрын

omggg same, i studied Japanese as a kid, now im really passionate about chinese and im leaving behind japanese... I should get back to it before i start forgetting stuff, but i undarstand the feeling of struggling with japanese because of chinese... Are you going to study Japanese again?

@MediumDSpeaks

4 ай бұрын

@naoko707 yeah I started using this card game called Japanese the game and it's helped me remember so much. Just gotta practice speaking more

@whannabi

4 ай бұрын

It's true for everything even maths. You can't remember everything especially if you're 50 and the last time you did maths was in highschool

@Broockle

4 ай бұрын

Understanding spoken Japanese is my weakest skill of em all. But aside from speaking to Japanese people there's really no way to practice it. Learning thru anime is very slow and inefficient.

I have learned some Chinese before. After stepping into Japanese kanji, I noticed a lot of the "multiple readings for the same character" happens because: instead of using different character for different word (like Chinese), in Japanese multiple words can be written with the same character, usually followed by hiragana so you can guess the pronounciation. So Japanese uses less characters, while Chinese uses more characters

@badrequest5596

4 ай бұрын

i just love the "guess the pronunciation part". feels like a system made by bad teachers so they can say whatever they teach is never wrong

@wesleychan7575

4 ай бұрын

This is so true. If you find kanji hard, it means you haven't learned enough.😂

@whannabi

4 ай бұрын

By "less characters" you mean less kanji because otherwise hiragana takes a lot of space compared to a kanji which is more "compact".

we call the 四字熟語　“成语” in china. it is sooo hard, we had to learn so many of them and understand their background when we were young.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Oh, interesting! I don't know enough about Chinese to understand how compound words work given that I thought word order determined grammar, but if its anything like 四字熟語 then I feel your pain, haha.

@wanderer8038

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency yeah, it is quite similar to 四字熟語. I think some of them lost in translation throughout the years. such as 一石二鸟 is more commonly replaced as 一举两得 or 一箭双雕 in chinese. A lot of pain to learn them, but these things make you sound smart haha

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Now I'm starting to wonder if there are any Japanese original 四字熟語. Like it is one thing to have to learn esoteric culture from hundreds of years ago, but it is another thing to learn about cultural references from an entire other country with a separate language and culture, lol. I am also terrible with geography which doesn't help, haha

@ramennnoodle

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency There are a lot of Japanese original ones, like 花鳥風月 and 風林火山 and etc; Korean and Vietnamese also happen to have a bunch of their own. China basically came up with the most troll language trend that the Sinosphere all adopted

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

ahhhh.... I see... Thanks China😂

"There is a correct way to write Kanji" -> There is stroke order, and then there is 必...

@badrequest5596

4 ай бұрын

me: yes, but also i'm going to ignore that

@andyyang5234

4 ай бұрын

@@badrequest5596 The Japanese order is different from the Chinese order, and the Chinese order is different from the Taiwanese order. And then from historical manuscripts that preserved the flow of writing, we know that there are another 2 or 3 ways of writing it that's different from _either_ Japanese, Chinese or Taiwanese. At this point, you could probably write it any way you like and still claim it's valid.

@chicha400

4 ай бұрын

@@andyyang5234nice, ima start writing it right to left, bottom to top- thanks for your blessing😮

This video randomly popped up in my feed and I'm very impressed. I've been learning Japanese for 3-4 years now and this video actually had a surprising amount of useful information I'd never noticed or been told (such as the meaning tending to be on the left hand and reading on the right) I feel I learned a fair bit. Big kudos.

Kanji, all the pain and stress of learning Chinese with none of the benefits of learning chinese

@DianaWanMa

3 ай бұрын

Bye bye no conjugations and consistent reading 😭

I'm half japanese and watching this video made me realise all of the fustrating things that we just see as normal. good luck japanese learners xd

This is one of the most well crafted videos i have ever seen and it deserves a reward. i am honestly blown away.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Thanks so much!

I can go you one deeper on the iceberg: 百舌鳥 (mozu/もず) is TWO syllables/mora but THREE characters. Not even a silent one like 五右衛門 (goemon/ごえもん), which has 4 characters and 4 syllables/kana but actually MORE characters than syllables/kana. A mozu is a bull-headed shrike, a kind of bird.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Damn, that's a nice find😂 There is actually another bird with similar naming shenanigans. I can't remember what it is though🥲

@MrKata55

4 ай бұрын

well at least the last one is "tori" and that's enough for most I guess

@Asakoto1849

3 ай бұрын

Also 赤車使者, but reading as MIZU

youtube algorithm has blessed me once again, subbed!

I'm just glad the verbs you've taught me doesn't have any complex irregularities. "We all Suck at Kanji"

Fantastic video, fascinating information clearly explained by someone who knows what he’s talking about. And the graphics and sound are a lot of fun as well. I have two kanji questions from my own time in Japan I’d like to learn more about: - given there are so many kanji, what sort of limitations are there in terms of what kanji you can write on the computer? How did this work in the early days of computers of Japan? - what’s the deal with those tiny “idiot hiragana” you sometimes see over kanji in books? I know this is mostly done in writing for kids, but I feel I sometimes saw it in other places too. I definitely remember seeing them over the names of politicians on election posters, which I guess makes sense now having learned about the crazy world of kanji names.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Wow! Just a bit ago I was reading your community post about iceberg videos! Huge fan, thank you so much! Answering the first question is a whole deep dive and video in itself, but I will say that one benefit Japanese had over Chinese at the time was that Japanese already had two phonetic scripts. This made the transition to typing a lot less painful. In fact, the first novel ever written (and by a woman at that), The Tale of Genji was written entirely in the phonetic script hiragana. Which is to say that technically speaking, Japanese does not need kanji to function. Although kanji can be absurdly difficult, there are many benefits that kanji has in Japanese once you get used to it. As for the second question, the "idiot hiragana" (lol) tell you how to read kanji. Whether or not the reading for any given kanji is provided is based on the target audience of the work, and the kanji's frequency/difficulty. The larger the audience, the more likely you will see readings provided. Which is why election posters (thankfully) tend to provide name readings. As I said though, most of the time, name readings are not provided. This is especially so for family names. As to why, I think this has to do with the fact that many family names are common place, so even if the readings are weird, if you are born and raised in Japan, the assumption is that you should know how to read them. With that said, even for native speakers, reading people names is like rolling a dice and assuming your dice roll is correct, haha. Which is probably why the government recently enacted naming legislation.

@socoollafunnyvideo

4 ай бұрын

Hi JJ, I am a huge fan and love your videos about Canada. Since I started watching your content, I became fascinated about Canada and politics, and I want to pursue politics when I'm older. I'm not a Japanese speaker or a professional, I'll be happy to provide you with my 2 cents for question no.1 . Initially, it was difficult to write Kanji on the computer because of limited memory. When JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) was developed where it covered a small amount of Kanji (6,355). Afterwards, Unicode was developed. It was a way to represent text and to way to promote compatibility across different systems and languages. The expanded memory and processing capacity of computers enables them to handle larger character sets, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters in CJK Unicode. CJK became a common framework used in East Asian writing systems. This unification helps in standardizing the representation of common characters across these languages and each character is assigned a code. It also provided a standardized input system such as hiragana and romaji (latin alphabet) in Japanese and Pinyin for Chinese. However, there are still many limitations of CJK unicode. For example, the Chinese Character Biang seen in 0:04 still can't be written due to the complexity, as the rendering engine or application does not handle complex characters well. Additionally, regional languages such as my native tongue of Cantonese has Characters that still aren't able to be processed on the computer. There is so much more to explain but it would require take much longer to cover everything. Thanks for making videos and inspiring me and I hope this explanation is useful.

@JJMcCullough

4 ай бұрын

@@socoollafunnyvideo It is! Thanks!

@doesthisusername

4 ай бұрын

In the early days of personal computers, you couldn't write kanji, only katakana. The keyboards would have a 'kana mode' key, which would flip between typing with the Latin alphabet and katakana, sort of like how caps lock works with upper and lowercase letters. The displays at the time did not have the resolution to display kanji well enough to be readable without making them comically big (I think most fonts were 8x8 pixels at the time), nor did they have the memory/storage to have a usable set of kanji, as far as I know. Writing kanji on the first computers with kanji support involved writing a hexadecimal code for the character in question that you'd look up in a manual, sort of like alt-codes on Windows (are those still a thing?). However, people quickly began writing programs to make the conversion from kana to kanji (IME) easier, and for a time a lot of programs did it in their own way - so a word processor and a spreadsheet program might have different systems for doing the conversion. This ended up coalescing into generally having just one IME. Generally, you can write any kanji you might need, although IMEs don't have literally every kanji, so sometimes you might have to copy-paste it. I think you can also manually add characters to the conversion dictionary, but I haven't found the need to do that personally. Sometimes it doesn't give the right kanji, but I've found that often, if you write a different reading (especially the onyomi), it'll be in the conversion list somewhere. For example, writing 'so' in order to get 塑 'deku' (I think deku isn't used much, so writing 'deku' doesn't work). The small kana are called furigana, and are used to indicate how to read something, as you know. They're used when you don't expect at least some of the audience to know how to read what you wrote, when you want to differentiate between ambiguous readings (like the 身体 example he gave), or when you want to imply something or give the reader extra information maybe not present in dialogue, for example if someone says 'That bastard...', you can write the kanji for the name of the person, then put 'bastard' as furigana, if that makes sense. Sometimes authors will also make up words or terms, and so furigana can be used to introduce how to read them. I hope that makes sense.

@JJMcCullough

4 ай бұрын

@@doesthisusername fascinating! The role of computers in Japan for writing would make a good video

The words in jujutsu kaisen aren't really "heiroglyphic-inspired" but rather an old typography of Chinese called "seal script" which does look cool hence why it is used often enough

@mckendrick7672

4 ай бұрын

It's sorta half seal-script, but also not entirely - probably for general legibility reasons.

The shown calligraphy is very simple as long as you remember how to write "clouds" and "dragon" and mash them up together

I didn't know about your channel, but I'm glad this popped up in my feed. Great job, I really enjoy your video format, how well put together it is, and I appreciate the rant. I know this pain :')

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Thanks so much!

This video was not only extremely funny but also really informative, I'm surprised to see your channel does not have a lot more subscribers than it has so far! Definitely looking forward to more content, keep up the good work ❤

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Appreciate the kind words! Currently working on the next video! Looks like it will be awhile though as its a little ambitious😂

People often says "AIYO why uses Kanji when can just use Hiragana and Katakana", while not knowing that actually Hiragana and Katakana are also originated from Manyougana (万葉仮名) which are Kanji being adopted phonetically.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

The use of hiragana phonetically is fundamentally different from kanji which is why I many people feel this way. Darth Vader might be Luke's father but that doesn't mean that Luke is Darth Vader😂

@ThePallidor

4 ай бұрын

Been in Japan over 20 years and read Japanese at native level, and I can tell you one of the most annoying things is when something is written all in hiragana when it's usually written in kanji. It takes way longer to read, because Japanese has so many homophones. You can't get rid of kanji without completely changing the spoken language, too.

@TheAwesomeAccount

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency I don't understand the Starwars reference but I think he's trying to say that you have to respect the origin because there is a crossover. It's actually the cursive script that helped create the look of standard hiragana, and kanji readings gave the sound. I know you say it's frustrating but think of Kanji as a tool to explain things with more depth. Even in English we have millions of words with complex origin but you only use the uncommon words when appropriate. There are basic ways to write, then there's more meaningful ways to write. Kanji give you the choice. Let's not act like English words can't be confusing too

@Komatik_

4 ай бұрын

@@ThePallidor Homophones are not the reason for that. Kanji feel easier for natives and proficient foreigners because the way human brains process language is that we see a set of squiggles on the page/screen and our brains connect that shape with a word of the language. You process eg. English words just the same as you do kanji. This has a flipside: Since fluent reading happens via mass exposure to the written form of a word, if a word is almost always written with kanji, your brain connects the kanji squiggles to the word and not the hiragana ones. If we write 大丈夫 most of the time, not だいじょうぶ、 'lo and behold, the first set of squiggles feels sensible, the second you have to expend effort to figure out what they're trying to say. Why? Because your brain hasn't drawn the connection between this set of squiggles だいじょうぶ and its meaning. But it has drawn those connections between all the Latin letters in this post and the English words I intend to make you think about so you have no trouble reading my writing. Similarily, Korean people who are exposed to a completely alphabetic written version of their own language have no issue seeing 괜찮아 and connecting it with their equivalent of 大丈夫。 Basically: Fluency in reading is just about exposure, it doesn't actually matter whether Japanese is written with mixed script or only kana, people would come to read either style fluently through the mass exposure of lived life. Korean went through the exact same transition from a mixed script to completely phonetic script, and it worked out fine. Koreans read their language the same as I read Finnish or English. If kanji were necessary for a readable language, Korean wouldn't be readable (they have all the same problems as Japanese due to a similar language with a similar history) and it would be impossible to talk about things clearly in Japanese. Yet Korean is functions fine with a phonetic script and you clearly can speak about complex topics in Japanese (and thus record them understandably with a phonetic script). People would just need to get used to it, and they would get used to it over time. It would be slow and feel uncomfortable for a while at first, though.

@Komatik_

4 ай бұрын

@@TheAwesomeAccount Kanji are perfectly fine in explanations, but in that aspect belong in etymological dictionaries, not everyday writing.

great video, informative and presented in an entertaining way. keep it up!

This is gooodd. I really love the fact that you added frequency and frustation bars 😂

best editing and most effort i have seen in a video in a long time. subscribed just for effort if anything

You are really funny. I love this. Informative and funny, and so much effort in one video. Even the info box quote - amazing. Respect, my guy!

The amount of quality in your videos is unmatched. Your graphics are high quality and incredibly helpful! I'm baffled as to how you have under 10k subscribers

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Appreciate the kind words!

Your video was super informative and relatable 😂 I understand the pent up rage. Thanks for making this video!

Amazing video! I'm genuinely surprised you have so low subscribers. I really love to dig deeper into the history and culture of languages so I was sure I would not come across anything here I didn't already know about, but there were quite a few things I heard for the first time! And the way you interject the jokes and animation with the explanations make learning about them so much more fun and interesting. I'm sure you will blow up soon with this quality of videos.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Appreciate the kind words!

Thank you for the effort

Awesome vid, as always! I'm in full support for transfering the section you had in the podcast where you rant about Japanese into videos for the main channel. I think i speak on behalf of everyone when i say we all enjoy a Joey rant. Someone already commented, but i will add my own frustration with the 大 situation. I never get it right and i always feel like a complete idiot because it's so basic. Also, a week or so ago, i decided to pickup some netsuke and Japanese prints we have at the office and try my luck at reading. I had promised myself i wouldn't do that before i close my kanji gap, which i did, so i felt confident. I knew i wouldn't be able to read the name, but i was hoping to recognize kanji. And then i encountered the cursive kanji problem, haha. That was a very sad moment. To top it all, everyone at the office knows i'm learning Japanese and they ask me to read stuff when we have Japanese things, and i never can and they're all "Pfft...you don't know anything...what have you been learning all this time..", hah.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

I have always seen learning Japanese to be similiar to attending a liberal arts school (which I attended, haha). You put in a shit ton of work, and at the end of the day any time you respond to a question about where you went to school, people just assume you spent your time frolicking in the park. For Japanese I think this is because most people (atleast in America) have some experience learning Spanish, which is one of the easiest languages to learn for native English speakers. So people relate their experience to being able to read a book after 2-3 classes and then wonder how someone can study for 4+ years and still struggle reading manga. Now I'm not looking for validation from other people when it comes to language learning, but I will say that even now as I feel comfortable with pretty much any text/audio that comes my way, most people just take it for granted that I can perform X task, and assume that all people that have ever studied Japanese can also do so, haha.

There exists a 533-stroke character that one can get when you combine the more-conventional (literally the 3 cloud and 3 dragon characters in their square forms stacked. Normally to fill a square character cell they are vertically-squished, but...) Taito Kanji as the entire left side of the character (so you don't squish the combination of 3 clouds and 3 dragons in their square forms) and then for the right half of the character, you take the artistic 108-stroke Bonnō Kanji which represents the Klesas/108 worldly desires, and then below it you put the frivolous and unfortunate Dhó character that has 341 strokes. The character is read as Bonnōtodhó, which is a portmanteau of Otodo (dark in Japanese, also one of the readings of the Taito kanji), preceded by Bonnō (the 108 worldy desires Kanji whose meaning translates to trouble, but that can also be interpreted as suffering due to the way in which those 108 worldly desires are said to cause it). So Bonnōtodhó means "dark suffering" (Dhó is purely phonetic, and in Japanese phonology canonically is represented as ddō via a sokuon). The Dhó character was intended to be specifically a Chinese character by its creators, as ridiculous (and not in a good way) as they are. However, you need to use Hangul and the Middle Korean/Jeju Dialect tone marks (but luckily not obsolete non-Unicode Middle Korean Hangul) to represent "Bonnōtodhó" perfectly without substitutions like you need in Japanese (Bonnōtoddō). Yes, the character was made thanks to a Westerner. Great effort was made to follow the rules and to even do stuff like create an Ideographic Description Sequence for the character. Also, if the 720x720px version is too big, there's also a canonical 16x16 version that just manages to work. Also the character was created in good faith and was done just because it was possible. Publishing the actual character is something that I don't know how it would go, but it was made 6 years ago. It's something that was done out of boredom.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

There is also a 736 stroke character called shinzo which was made in 2022 or 2023 I believe. Thankfully these aren't actually used in writing. I can't imagine the amount of cramps I would get😂

@stgigamovement

4 ай бұрын

@lazyfluency Apparently Shinzo lacks a meaning and its reading was actually the name of one of the creator's friends. Bonnōtodhó has a meaning and reading derived from the input characters. Also if you drew the 16x16px version you could technically use it in running text. It may not necessarily be the biggest constructed Kanji, but it was engineered to check all the boxes of a more-typical Kanji in a non-contrived way. Also, it's structured in a way where it would make a good component Kanji if you're trying to further push the record. Quite a few superlarge Kanji have stuff like the walk component which can make combinations look wonky. Shinzo also has this issue. Also, if you squeezed Taito into the top left quadrant of the character, you could fit one more character underneath. However I'm already at a 4-syllable 2-word character, and it's getting tight. Also, Huang and Shinzo both use a too-thin Serif font to go well with the image, and cause clunkiness when trying to portmanteau Bonnōtodhó with it. Also for it to make sense, the extra character needs to be a Kanji with a meaning that fits with the other two. Nothing however stops you from using this as a component character to use in a new composite character. That said, squishing it probably wouldn't exactly work well. Oh and I should mention that printing it out on Letter-size paper is just barely possible. An attempt at a 623-stroke character ended up filling an entire large rectangular drawing pad when someone hand-wrote it. This character's print-out leaves room, AND it can fit in 16x16. The Shinzo and 623-line characters can't. Basically, Bonnōtodhó is the largest "practical" character. Also its proportions are not hyper-stretched like Huang and Shinzo are.

Really neat video condensing a lot of information in a short timespan!

you have incredible editing! subbed!

i really enjoyed this video, thank you for sharing. subbed

Holy, how much work must have went into this video... Great job!

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

Great video! Learned a lot!

This is a great video with great editing. There was a lot of kanji trivia that I didn't know before, and it's nice to know I'm not alone in my love/hate relationship with kanji. Misery loves company!

Kanji are one of the things that drew me into Japanese. They're beautifully complex and more convenient than any other writing system imo.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

More power to you!

@yoshikagekira1863

4 ай бұрын

Yeah I’m learning them and I think they’re fun to learn and read

@trawrtster6097

4 ай бұрын

I do like the high information density per space taken up

@macurvello

4 ай бұрын

Dude... Beautiful? Complex? Sure. Convenient? Sorry, I don't think you can say that with a straight face haha. Kanji are also one of the things that drew me into Japanese and I love them for the same reasons as you. Yes it can be convenient to see a new word you don't know that is composed of kanji you do know and you can deduce the meaning of it (that's one of the most satisfying things to have happen to you while learning Japanese btw). Yes they can be convenient to save space sometimes or even convey a complex meaning with few strokes. But the INconveniences way waaaaaaaay outweigh the actual conveniences overall. This video does a pretty good job of showing that I think.

@adam-k

4 ай бұрын

The Japanese writing system is the most inconvenient, inefficient, contrived piece of junk ever conceived by human beings. It is worse than cuneiform or hieroglyphs. And those went out of fashion over 2000 years ago. It simply has no redeeming qualities. If you tell anybody on this planet to come up with a writing system that is easy to learn, easy to read and write nobody would say "hey why don't we base it on Japanese?" Even the most hardcore Japanese scholar wouldn't do that. There is absolutely no reason why a culture that has no writing system should pick the Japanese. There is absolutely no reason why Japan should pick the Japanese writing system. When you go to a country and ask a professor of the language "Can you read everything that is written in your language" and the answer is "No" than it is a really really bad writing system.

Honestly subscribed after 20 seconds and seeing the channel name. Thank u 🎉❤😂😅😊 ready to enjoy the rest of the video

Great video man

In a way, this was very reassuring 😂 totally stellar video!

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

reassuring in an if everyone fails the test then no one fails the test kinda way😂

Thank god I was not the only one scratching my head over 山手 line😅. Thanks for the video!

Based on the title, I expected this video to be all about odd/rare kanji phenomena like "ghost kanji" and stuff, but it ended up being super interesting and informative anyway! Great video with lots of valuable perspective on the struggles of learning kanji I also loved seeing Monster and 20th CB on your shelf in the back :D

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

haha, you might enjoy the Book Off video on this channel😂

Great video! I went to Japan last summer and didn’t know as much kanji as I do now. These topics are good to understand.

ive been waiting for this type of vid to come out subscribed!!

Subscribed! Dude I loved this video. Entertaining, funny and informative... It also shows how much you have dedicated yourself to studying this language, props to you! And although it may seem weird, it strangely shows how much you LOVE kanji. I'm not saying this sarcastically at all, you wouldn't know so much about the topic only from "mandatory schooling" or such, it definitely required self study driven by your own interests. Yes, we can love something and be equally frustrated by it, in fact I'd say you can't be frustrated by something you don't at least care about.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Correct, haha! It is for sure a love hate relationship!

this is why studying kanji in isolation is a waste of time (unless you want to learn to write by hand, good luck with that btw) and i just study kanji by learning vocabulary directly.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

100 percent agree! I didn't discuss learning strategies in this video as I saw this as more of a fun way to do a deep dive into kanji as opposed to a how to learn Japanese video.

@Matias-zh3dp

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency I know, i just thought that it was related to the topic. Good video btw!

@ThePallidor

4 ай бұрын

Kanji is just vocab. The Kanji Kentei is a good test with great training materials that teach you kanji as vocab, though also teach you about all other aspects of kanji. If you get to 2nd kyuu, you have native level understanding of kanji in every aspect, except names. For names you just have to read and quiz yourself on a ton of names.

@Matias-zh3dp

4 ай бұрын

@@ThePallidor I have no interest in taking the Kanji Kentei nor learning to write japanese by hand. This is why i dont waste my time (subjective) learning kanji individually and all their readings. People who have interest in it are free to do so.

Love the video.

As a 中国人, I’m always tempted to read kanji the Chinese way instead of the Japanese way (even in a Japanese context…) 日本が好き becomes “Ri ben ga hao ki” instead of “Ni hon ga su ki”

@user-mi9uv5pp5b

Ай бұрын

I am the opposite case. I tend to read Chinese in Japanese pronunciation immediately after I take Japanese lessons, haha

Incredible video! You know, there’s actually a lot of similarities between my struggle learning literary Tibetan and learning kanji. For one thing, you have the ancient vs. modern vocabulary problem, then you have cursive. I’m sure it’s similar with Chinese too

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Not sure if this is making want to learn Tibetan because I like Japanese or if this is making me not want to learn Tibetan as Japanese is a pain in the ass😂

Great video!

Great video thank you!!!!

17:52 腺 and 搾 exist in Chinese with similar meanings to what is showed here. 18:05 Idioms. If you speak Chinese, this is easily learned.

half am hour and only 2 comments and 11 views? wtf? this video was awesome btw, i guess i don't have to feel bad for not knowing how to read kanji, at least until I have to read one lol

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

One does not simply read kanji. One can only simply try to and inevitably fail, haha. Appreciate the comment!

What a great video, the animations and your enthusiasm had me watching til the end! I’ve lived in Japan for almost 15 years. I’m doing pretty well and can read a lot and regularly type and communicate in Japanese, but I swear I have some sort of disability/dyslexia because I can’t for the life of me write even the simplest kanji like 赤 and my 2nd grade daughter thinks that’s hilarious. I just can’t visualize the kanji in my head at all. Ps I feel so validated that someone else had pointed out 井上 - where is the の！？ Also I cannot for the life of me type out “atmosphere” in Japanese. 風に気　封印機　ふういニキ　雰囲気 oh yay I finally got it!

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Although kanji visualization might be how some people write kanji my feeling is that it is mostly muscle memory. Unlike your daughter, you probably don't have any reason to write Japanese on a day to day basis!

A magical video that bucks to want for learning japanese. Perfect. I hope you do this type of videos more,❤🎉

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

What a nice comment!

As a calligrapher I just wanna say that jujutsu kaisen is not written in bone oracle script (亀甲獣骨文字 or what you called hieroglyphics) but is instead written in a faux version of the seal script (篆書) Oh and so people don't doubt my credibility The cursive text you showed was 吾輩は猫である in 草書 (well not an accurate representation of it but it's still legible)

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Ahh, I appreciate the correction! I looked into caligraphy and noticed a bunch of the writing styles, but decided it was probably too much of a deep dive as my main point is that you see Japanese written in a bunch of different styles, and for many learners it just makes Kanji even harder to recognize.

@liuzh1han

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency hahaha, it's fine man, I just thought calling seal script as hieroglyphics is slightly misleading as seal script doesn't function the same way as oracle bone script And even then oracle bone script aren't hieroglyphics by definition which is why I just wanted to provide more accurate information for other viewers Great video btw! Super informative!

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

@@liuzh1han When I was editing I actually was unsure about what style the Jujutsu Kaisen script was written in, so at that point I should have made sure I was referencing the correct style as I have seen actual hieroglyphic Japanese text on store signs before in Japan. The more you know ✨️

@liuzh1han

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency oh and again just a slight correction They're not hieroglyphics they're logograms Sorry for being so pedantic but this is a topic that I'm genuinely passionate about

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

When I say hieroglyphics I am referring to 象形文字. The English translation of this phrase is hieroglyph. Are we referring to the same thing? Also no worries at all. One of the difficulties I had with the script is that all my experience and research was in Japanese, so when I translated back to English I was not entirely sure what terminology was technically correct😂

remarkable job

Bro, the names thing is actually so true. I would be walking through the neighborhood with my mom and brother and look at the name placards and I could never guess the reading correctly.

well that was entertaining, glad I decided to focus on kanji study this year, so rewarding 😂

This was a great video with easy to understand topics :D I'm gonna hide in a corner now then pick up learning after I'm done sulking 😭

I normally see the patterns for dakuten and handakuten. Took me 1 exact year to learn all 常用漢字

Any thoughts on kanji with a completely different stroke order than what you would expect? Take 必 for instance, which seems so simple to write as it's literally a 心 with a line down the middle, yet the stroke order dictates otherwise. Great video btw 👍

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

In once sense, pattern breaking is super annoying with stroke order as stroke order is determined in a top down governmnent sense (for the most part, ie it seems like complete standardization is possible). On the other hand, as a laymen learning kanji as opposed to a caligrapher, it ultimately doesn't matter if you follow proper stroke order or not😂

Hey man great video, insightful and you clearly put a lot of effort into making it. I randomly stumbled upon this video and subscribed! I study Chinese myself by the way, not Japanese

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Appreciate the kind words!

This explains a lot of my confusion as a half arsed nihongo learner, like calligraphy being so hard to read. Though in my few semesters we didn't learn beikoku. Just used katakanized versions of country names.

What a mood. I loved the video and your edu-rant. Kanji are always a love-hate relationship, and I still have such a long way to go... As for the left/right sound vs meaning radicals, i hadn't realised that it tended to follow that pattern when having two side-halves! To add my two cents about the components: I use the outlier dictionary (focused on etymology) while studying so at this point I have resigned myself to the fact that you shouldn't trust too much that any stroke in there is there to help you with either meaning or sound. For the meaning part, it is an extremely flexible suggestion sometimes: 日 as a meaning component might be related to time, or to brightness. Sometimes a component is there to indicate opposite meaning, like in 暗い which is dark. And then meaning components usually refer to the Original one, which may or may not be easily connected with the commonly used today. In 倍 the person there is the meaning component, because originally it meant "to turn someone's back to", and later took the meaning "twice, double". Then sound components (also subjected to variable change), can include those that are technically sound related, but that are not obvious in Japanese nowadays- so why even bother to point this out in the dictionary, I wonder. You also have form - like meaning but picture-like. The lie they sell you with the first 40 kanji where they teach you 山 or 川 and they ask you to stretch your imagination like one does for constellations in astronomy. However 求める, to request, started as a centipede drawing so. Take that as you like. (弱い is supposedly two men pissing, do you like that info?) Then finally there are empty components, where due to degradation of the drawing over time, or due to phonetic-meaning shifts, where a kanji is used for a meaning because it was a homophone (this is what happened precisely with 求). To give another example, the mysterious sheep on top of big for beautiful was originally a drawing of a headpiece, then deformed over time. Sometimes all of it bears no resemblance to how it started and you got to take it as it is. Also some components came from different origins, hence why 左右 seem to share that cross but they're written in the opposite order. Or why 月 appears so much with body organs, since it shares with 肉 a convergent graphic evolution. Sometimes etymology helps. But more often than not kanji by themselves are as absurd as kanji combinations + readings. The more of them I study the cleared that is. 🙅 Trust nothing and no one with these little fuckers.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

haha, I think of patterns as giving you a good enough guess to continue reading and to refrain the urge of pulling up a dictionary. Kanji definitely border on the "is it even worth learning any patterns" territory sometimes. Generally speaking I think they are helpful to not disregard entirely, haha. It's kinda like polling the audience in a game of wheel of fortune😂

i love the paper mario sound effects! great video lol

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

A precelebration for the upcoming remake!

@macurvello

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency there's gonna be a remake? of the original? opening google right now...

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

@@macurvello Paper Mario Thousand Year Door HD remake for the switch coming out this year!

calligraphy is actually a breath of fresh air from blocky fonts if you have learned the stroke order and recognize kanji as combination of strokes not as a picture

Kaname Naito says don't try to learn kanji because you can't. He says "learn vocabulary"

Thanks brother. I want to read old martial art books so everything you said is applicable and reading the kanji is easy well modern kanji. I haven’t done old school or caliphrapgy

There are also ghost kanji (yure kanji which appeared out of nowhere, an interesting story on its own), simplified kanji where hard to write parts of a kanji are replaced with katakana or latin alphabet letters and many more curiosities.

I thought I was just bad, but now I know there will be no end to this journey.

I love that the part about names the example newspaper article he gave was a person I recognized and knew their name ...Hamada-san.... from Downtown!!

Im in japanese major and this is such a good video lmao this frustration never leavesssss

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Fellow Japanese major here😂

I began my Kanji journey in 1975, at Sophia University's summer intensive language program, and one of the first jukugo we learned was 結構--and I can't even begin to count the number of times I've relearned it--still can't write it two days later. Trying to explain why I still suck at Kanji 50 years later is not easy, but I now have a video I can refer them to.

tfw your mother tongue is chinese and during that one trip to japan you could sort of deduce what the signs were trying to say

I picked up my Genki textbooks again a week or so ago. Was going to refresh, but I don’t have any place to really use it. I just want to not lose it all.

3:23 actually, it's yaMA. By the way, fantastically edited video. It was on point.

How am I only now just realising that there is kanji with more than one commonly used stroke order…I’ve sometimes done a couple of strokes in the opposite order while still producing the same result and wondered if my teacher would be able to tell I did it the wrong way lmao. This is a huge relief for me.

@lazyfluency

3 ай бұрын

haha, If you do caligraphy stroke order is very important as it affects how the character looks but with pencil it is much harder to tell.

I don't even bother with the reading I just learn words and eventually you will know enough to enjoy the content and communicate. As far アホ goes I remember crows saying that in ナルト and looked up as the 関西弁 word for バカ so at least makes partial sense about the meaning for albatross. To be honest I think its kind of good that Japanese still stumps AI many times so I think that a bonus.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

"How can AI know what I mean, when I don't even know what I mean?"- Japanese Language

Thank you for the amazing video! As a Japanese learner myself, do you have any insight into another aspect of kanji I don't really understand? I can only think of these examples right now but I know I've encountered more and this is my problem: 後悔 = regret ... 悔 itself also means regret 身体 = body ... 体 itself also means body 交通 = traffic ... 通 itself also means traffic 信 = trust/faith ... 信用 also means trust I take it there are nuances to the compound kanji words but it's hard to even begin thinking about when to use each in a sentence when dictionaries simply list them with almost the same exact meanings. And on top of that, learning vocabulary/compound kanji words is nice when you can look at the meanings of each kanji in it's construction like 小説 or 毎日, but then it's like "oh obviously the word for regret is constructed out of the kanji for regret that already exists with apparently the same meaning" lol. Does this have a name or you see where I'm coming from? Also if you could justify the differences for any of those examples that would be great haha. I hope you know of some easier way to determine/distinguish these things! Also just a personal gripe... 後悔 makes me upset because it adds 後 which to my knowledge from other words it's in must add some time related nuance to 悔 but you can't even have the concept of regret without there already being time involved so I just don't get it man 😭 Anyways keep up the great videos!　一所懸命！

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Most of the nuances with the examples you chose simply depend on what word you want to use. 悔しい for example is frustration where 後悔 is regret which makes sense if you think of this as afterwards frustration. 体 is strictly more literal than 身体 as mentioned in the vid. Appreciate the kind words!

Do you have a bot going through and liking every comment or do you do it yourself? Either way it’s a really nice touch and it’s cool to see! Awesome video btw! I’ve just started learning Japanese because my girlfriend is Japanese (and I lived there as a child) and damn, it’s extremely difficult even when I’m only learning hiragana. I know English, French and Spanish but this is a whole other beast.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

No bot here! Just a guy who is happy that a video he's worked on for the past 4 months is being recommended😂

@Qysto

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency ahh how cool, and you should be happy!! I’d do the same thing if I were you lol, it’s always great when something that you’ve worked hard on gets the recognition that it deserves. You’ve probably had a lot of new subs and likes from this and I really hope it continues! You earned a sub and a like from me at the very least. I hope to see you in my recommended again soon!

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Appreciate the kind words!

Loved this video! If I may just please request for graphics not to be removed so quickly? Like sometimes I wanted to pause and see what was presented but you take it away so fast I can't catch it and have to go back many times.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

My intention is to give enough time to pause, but sometimes my desire to keep the pacing of the video going might have messed that up a bit😂

I was feeling like a badass for learning basic grammer, vocabulary, ,speech and passing level 10 on wanikani. I can just barely watch anime with japanese subtitles alone. Thanks for curve stomping my ego. Very excited to spend the rest of my life learning japanese.❤😢💀

Great video! Just wanted to let you know you misspelled "origin"

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

Well shoot. That makes two typos I've noticed. Its almost impossible not to make a mistake or two with all the graphics😂

my favorite 四字熟語 is "承認欲求", hope someone recognized it

Bottom iceberg : every copy of kanji is personalized

I felt true despair when the writing for "myutsuu" popped up

how the fuck do you only have 3k subs. this is gold

The "that's a good question" (3:02) hit.

@I-call-it-the-poop-loop

3 ай бұрын

I was going to practice writing today, but on second thought 💀.

suddenly my goals have become more realistic

0:54 I am already looking forward to hearing all the rage.

here before the algorithm makes the video take off 🚀

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

haha, I would sure love that

For those interested, the phenomenon of phonetic shift mentioned at 10:19 is called rendaku (where a consonant of the second morpheme of a compound word becomes voiced if it is unvoiced). Some phoneticists believe that rendaku is limited by Lyman's law, which states that if there's already a voiced consonant in a morpheme, rendaku will not occur (e.g. harukaze has the voiced consonant Z, so K does not turn into G). Another "rule" for rendaku is that it usually occurs in Japanese compound words and not Chinese, but there are exceptions to this one so I tend to ignore it. Also I could really relate to the name problem mentioned at 14:15. All my life in America, no one pronounced my name correctly, and I thought this would change when I went to Japan. Unfortunately my name is very uncommon and I was a fool.

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

haha, I assume in Japan your name mispronunciation was because of the kanji in your name?

@ryuuseirune

4 ай бұрын

@@lazyfluency yep, kanji causes all the problems... Apparently the 2nd character in my surname has a lot of different pronunciations (at least 10) and no one knows which one they're actually supposed to use... so they just guess lol

The fit is super fancy, nice

@lazyfluency

4 ай бұрын

I like to dress up😂

This was strangely encouraging

This video perfectly encapsulates the qualms I have with Kanji as a writing system in a comedic and compact manner. You sir, have just earned a like(only reserved for videos that have earned a spot in my heart) Good job.

@KYSheng

3 ай бұрын

But as bad as it is systematically, the whole guessing game of Kanji can fill me a temporary sense of fulfillment(albeit a quite shallow one) and if I guess incorrectly, I can just shrug it off as being unlucky. Videos critiquing Japanese writing system will never get old when executed correctly, another video of similar motif that I enjoy is Katakana 2 by ヘルスカ.

@lazyfluency

3 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!