DJT is a Japanese language learning thread for advanced むっつりスケベ共 that are interested in the language, anime, manga, visual novels, light novels and Japanese video games. Japanese speakers learning English are welcome, too.
So I'm at the very beginning of learning Japanese and I need to wrap my head around kanji. Right now I'm wondering if the kanji by itself has a meaning, or if the kanji is assigned a Japanese word (string of syllables) and gets its meaning from that. It's just kind of confusing.
As far as I understand a kanji has different pronunciations (one or more on'yomi & kun'yomi) and the pronunciations themselves can be used to create words by adding more kanji or hiragana to them, but at this point the resulting meaning comes from the string of syllables from the pronunciation and not the individual meaning of the kanji itself, correct?
i feel like you are overthinking this way too much. i can't even tell whether i understand your problem or not
Parker Lewis
>名を、聞かせてくれるかい。新たなる同胞よ "let me hear your name, my new comrade/associate"?
Christopher Sullivan
Just learn vocabulary. It's written using Kanji and Hiragana mostly. Memorize how you pronounce the word that is represented by the Kanji / Kana combination and its translation. Do that for years.
Thanks And just a grammar question, with 新たなる同胞よ does the naru imply "the person who has just become my comrade" (with なる normally meaning become) or am I overthinking this?
Jacob Hall
なる is the old adjective marker like な and い 新たな=新たなる
Kanji is a cluster fuck bud, especially with kunyomi wago words. Obviously not a 1:1 correspondence from kanji to word. >Multiple wago words placed under the same kanji (生) >A single wago word is broken into several kanji (登る, 上る, 昇る) >A wago word is assigned kanji based upon pronunciation, with no respect for meaning, this is called ateji 当て字 (寿司 is the archetypal example here) >A wago word is assigned kanji for the meaning, with no respect for pronunciation (大人, 大和, basically every animal species in existence)
Christian Hill
Don't forget using wrong readings for artistic purposes (宇宙ーそら、小惑星ーアストロイド)
Easton Miller
My sore throat coworker took day off again, and I'm feeling sore in my throat. >It's ドキドキ
>the other day >"kacho? I think I'm feeling weak this morning and as you know the gov is saying we shouldn't really go the workplace in a case like this.." >Kacho"(クソデカため息) just do as you want" Funny thing is that these days it's always those managers in their 50s working like 15 hours a day, sometimes even when he's coughing. It's Boomers who know how to be disobedient to authorities desu.
I think you're correct. For example both 人 and 口 can have several different pronunciations depending on how they're used, but 人口 is always じんこう, and it means specifically "population," regardless of what the individual kanji mean by themselves. The meaning can be sometimes obvious and other times it's not. 州知事 is pronounced しゅうちじ and means governor. It's made up on the kanji "state", "know," and "thing." I've found that knowing the individual Kanji can only go so far in helping you guess what a word is. It is better just to memorize that 州知事 means governor and how it's pronounced.
Oh, no, that wasn't me. Why would anyone ban pictures of Tapris? Not yet, but I went to the hospital because I broke my toe and then I had to go through and wait in the corona section so I might have caught it there...
I want to start reading yotsuba or something similar as soon as possible. Right now reading yotsuba is borderline impossible. So how much anki grind do i need in order to be able to read yotsuba smoothly assuming i know my grammar and such.
Kayden Brooks
>体調はいかがですか I'm still in my quarantine at home and perfectly healthy. Last night I made カレー
>So how much anki grind do i need in order to be able to read yotsuba smoothly assuming i know my grammar and such. You won't be able to read it smoothly from Anki grinding. The best you can hope for is that it's a bit less painful before you start. I did 4 months of Anki before I really started reading btw, but I was also generally busy.
Brandon Cox
i did reading and anki simultaneously. in the beginning, it was a pain and i had to look up basically everything, but it still helped to get a general feeling for how it works. especially very casual speech was very hard (and still is for me desu).
now after 2.5 months, i can read new yotsubato chapters somewhat comfortably, obviously depending on how much new vocab there is. when I re-read older chapters, they are very easy to read because i usually know all the vocab already.
>I asked one of my coworkers from abroad what Japanese book he read lately and that was this series all he had read as Japanese books. Have you posters ever tried one? He(N3 maybe) said it's really recommendable.
>なら最近は何を読まれましたか I'm actually mostly reading Corona news now (not in Japanese), but I'm still playing プリコネR and reading story mode. >カレーは飽きが来なくていいですね。ここ数年、日本ではカレーに花椒と言うスパイスを入れるのが流行っています。 Pic is the one I always use here.
>Not yet, but I went to the hospital because I broke my toe and then I had to go through and wait in the corona section so I might have caught it there... Should've worn your gas mask
for weebs who don't actively study the language 万歳 is just a cool word with no meaning like すごい i think i saw a meal called "kamikaze" at some japanese restaurant here kek
In my opinion the best way is to think of on-yomi and kun-yomi as two different kinds of words.
On-yomi are Chinese words. A character like 生 by itself is a Chinese word, and the Japanese copied the pronunciation of that word as せい or しょう (originally しやう) a long time ago, when Chinese sounded a lot different than it does today.
That Chinese word せい or しょう can be used as a word by itself, or it can be combined with other Chinese words to make compound words in the same way that we use Latin or Greek root words to make words in English. So in a way, you can think of the on-yomi of 生 as like the Greek "bio" in words like biology, biomass, biome, or the Latin "vita" or "viva" in words like vitality, vitamin, vivid.
And in Chinese, a single word like 生 isn't necessarily limited to one meaning or even one part of speech. It can be a noun meaning "life" or "living thing" or "the act of living," an adjective meaning "fresh" or "raw," or a verb meaning "to live," which can also be used with a causative meaning "to cause to live, to cause to exist, to create" or a passive meaning "to be born, to be brought into the world, to be created."
The Chinese readings せい or しょう can encompass all of these meanings at once just like the original Chinese word, but in order to be able to explain the individual meanings in Japanese you have to individually translate them into Japanese words. That's where the kun-yomi come in. 1/2
Aiden Jones
Kun-yomi are native Japanese words that exist independently of the kanji but are associated with them through their meaning.
In order to express the verbal meaning "to live" of 生, you use the verb いきる, which therefore comes to be written 生きる with the kanji standing in for the indivisible root part of the verb. The causative meaning "to cause to live" can be expressed with いかす or いける, which are related to いきる, but the sense of "give birth to" is うむ (生む) and the passive meaning "to be born" is also expressed through うむ with the passive version うまれる (生まれる). And there are still other similar words like はえる "to grow (in reference to plants or hair)" which are written with 生 as well.
The adjectival meaning is translated into Japanese as the word なま in the same manner. And the noun meaning is often just left in the Chinese form せい by itself, but you can also force the reading いのち (命) if you want to use a Japanese noun.
But in all of these cases the kun-yomi words are stand-alone words originally unrelated to the character 生 that you could technically write in just hiragana if you wanted without being wrong.
I am sorry for the text wall please don't hurt me
Elijah Morris
How are you learning Japanese?
Nathaniel Moore
uh i don't
Jacob Roberts
>ほうほう……そういう服になってたのか…… Is this like "how do clothes become that"?
Nathan Murphy
I watch anime
Parker Peterson
>thinking people can learn Japanese
Landon Moore
it's hard for me to tell without any context but it sounds more like "so that's the kind of clothes it had become" like he wasn't sure before but now he is seeing it and is like "oh so that's how it works"
