The Kanji Iceberg Explained 

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

I will never call French horribly inefficient again

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

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

Kanji activates my fight or flight response.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It's worth noting that 四字熟語 is a practice that extends far beyond Japanese - it's basically in large part Literary (Classical) Chinese. Japanese has its own idiomatic 4 character phrases, but fundamentally it comes from the same tradition, and a huge number of Japanese phrases were imported from Classical Chinese where these were common. It's so difficult because it's like learning a whole another language with the way ideas were constructed within the constraints of the Classical Chinese language. If there were an equivalent (which there isn't) it'd be kinda like learning idiomatic Latin and Greek philosophy but without learning Latin or Greek first and just using the readings we have borrowed from the languages into English.

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.

youtube algorithm has blessed me once again, subbed!

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.

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.

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 :')

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

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”

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 ❤

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.

After all I love Kanji and I'm glad they exist. Despite all the difficulties they perfectly fit to Japanese👍

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for the effort

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!

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.

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

"i suck at kanji. you suck at kanji. we all suck at kanji" man its kind of messed up that those words kind of made me feel better about my frustration with learning kanji LOL! great video!

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

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!

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

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

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.

you have incredible editing! subbed!

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!

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

I love the fact that 月 can be read as Runa/Luna (because it means moon in latin and spanish). Also in death note, Light is called 月 to the point that Misa, using Shinigami eyes read "Yagami Tsuki" instead of "Yagami light"

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

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

Great video! Learned a lot!

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

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.

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.

Great video man

I'm a speaker of Japanese and use it in my daily life and I can say to anyone learning; Kanji will end up being your limiting factor if your goal is to COMMUNICATE in Japanese. Lots of people obsess over Kanji because it's something finite, tangible and easy to memorise in a rote way, but those who actually use the language daily and focus on learning it to speak to others will almost always end up letting their Kanji lag, myself included. But that said; don't obsess over it, even if you live in Japan you'll need it far less than speaking ability. It's also easier to learn/memorise/recall Kanji if you understand the word's that it is used in. The first 100 or so N5 Kanji are the ones you should learn directly alongside the early Japanese you'll learn, after that I suggest focusing on learning how to speak with confidence and utilise context learning over rote learning for acquiring words and phrases and then on the side try to learn the Kanji for the vocabulary you already know; the other way around is far less effective. I meet a lot of people with "N1" or "N2" Japanese who do seem to know a lot of kanji and vocabulary but struggle to communicate in Japanese and spend most of their time speaking with other people trying to maximally utilise their vocabulary instead of having an interesting conversation (often overly punctuating with なんか。。。). I never make friends with such people as they see you as either a teacher or competition, both are not fun. Incidentally these people often have few to no actual friends who are native in Japanese. I won't speculate as to why. These experiences I've had are in both Japan, London and in online language communities.

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

No matter how many kanji I learn I will never not have a breakdown trying to read plant/animal names or place names. All japanese learners have this kind of shared trauma of having to deal with things like guessing character names in books. You'll think you finally know all kanji that are commonly used only to find some random jinmeiyou kanji in someones name that youve never seen before.

In the first part of the "Danganronpa" trilogy, there was a conversation about names which obviously makes no sense for users of European languages until you know even a little about Japanese: Naegi: what are you doing? Asahina: if you want to remember someone's name, you need to write it on your palm three times… Oh, wait, how do you write your name? It's not an exact quote from the game, but the sense is kept (PS sorry if I wrote something in a weird way, that's just me not being a native speaker of English).

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.❤😢💀

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

17:47 Writing 口口 as a horizontal 日 is very common in East Asia, not only in Japan. And it is the reason why simplified Chinese character 临 (originally 臨) has the radical.

Missed the oppurtunity to talk about Kanji with colorfully descriptive kunyomi. E.g.: 雷's kunyomi is kaminari, which is literally 神鳴り.

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.

Great video!

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.

Love the video.

The only way I ever managed to get as far as I did in learning Japanese was by completely ignoring kanji. Even now, there are tons of words I know how to read just by visually recognizing them (plus context) but I have no idea what the kanji in them are. Still, kanji is fun and interesting so I'd love to go back and learn more of them.

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

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

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.

I absolutely love yojijukugo. My favourite ones (probably because these are the only I remember) are 破邪顕正（はじゃけんしょう) (destroy evil, spread truth) and 悲憤慷慨（ひふんこうがい) (indignation, evil times)

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.

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

おそらく、漢字は自分の一番大好き日本語の一部。語彙は自分の最大の弱点。日本語をひらがなだけ。。。だめだめ。難しい。 日本語勉強以来2019年。 2009年に遡り、六十つ漢字学びです。漢字はおなじみ感じ。ひらがなやカタカナだけ。。。地獄よ。 この動画いいよね。。。よく研究されている。乙、レジフルエンシさん。見る楽しかった草ww。 いいねボタンを押しました。

This video made me realize that Japanese is actually much harder than Chinese despite Chinese having tonal pronunciation.

Great video thank you!!!!

By the way, the reason why japanese onyomi sounded different from chinese is because they adopted the character a long time ago Chinese never had a pronunciation systems or phonetics so a lot of readings have diverged from the time japan adopted them That's also partly why a lot of kanji readings also sounded similar to hokkien and cantonese instead of mandarin as mandarin is essentially manchu influenced beijing chinese for the last 300 years of China's imperial era

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

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

Haven’t finished the video yet, but as someone who has studied both Japanese and Chinese with English as my first language, Kanji is both my saving Grace and worst enemy becauee soemtimes it’s overly tedious and complicated, but reading straight hiragana feels like words soup and makes my eyes bleed.

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

i love the paper mario sound effects! great video lol

I've recently been reading 吾輩は猫である and recognized the cursive text (19:35), but it's hard to read even while knowing what it's about.

I suppose that if your goal is to learn all kanji, it's basically equivalent to someone learning the entire English dictionary. You just don't, and if you somehow still think you will, you'd better hope you're a native speaker of the language

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

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.

This video is a good showcase of why you should just learn kanji through vocabulary instead of learning the readings in isolation.

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 👍

remarkable job

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!!

As someone who has studied Japanese extensively and is studying to pass the JLPT 2 currently, this video reinforced my hatred of Kanji. You have earned my subscription sir. Great video!

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

20:56 "who is stealing the nos?" it's all of us who've been going "got your nose!!" to babies, duh

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 😭