About the MochiMochi App - Download link for iOS, Android, or website version: kanji.mochidemy.com/ - Join MochiMochi facebook group: facebook.com/groups/27477... 1:13 Names and Kanji 2:27 Three Writing Systems (Scripts) in Japanese 2:35 When to use Hiragana 3:42 Okurigana 4:57 What is Kanji? When to use Kanji 5:25 On-yomi & Kun-yomi 6:35 When to use Katakana 7:23 Moon + Ocean = Jellyfish? 9:27 Jukujikun 14:25 Visual learner vs Auditory learner 14:55 Spaced Repetition & Mochi Mochi App 17:22 Color Coding Technique 17:32 What is "radical"? (bushu) 21:33 Circle a part 24:05 Should you learn stroke orders? 26:51 For Auditory Learners 29:00 Contextual learning 30:43 Motivation
Misa Ive been a fan of yours for a long time and my name is Christian Moore. But ive always wanted to be able to write it in kanji but didnt know the right characters to use and I didnt know how so I was wondering if you could help me. Know what that name would be in Kanji I would really appreciate it.
Good advice. As someone who has studied kanji for years and is still learning I especially agree with the advice to learn them as words and not individually. Trying to individually learn kanji meanings and readings is a quick way to insanity or stroke! Another good video Misa-san.
I learned them individually with the meaning and one reading. Introducing them and then reviewing the flash cards around 150 at a time you can do 10 reviews or as many as you like the meaning sticks with a extremely small amount of effort you just are able to recall the meaning like magic after some time making it a lot easier to attempt to read new words and understanding them before even learning them making watching RU-vid a lot more enjoyable because even if you don’t understand the sentence you can still pick out some meaning and it’s more engaging and memorable to study.
"Trying to individually learn kanji meanings and readings is a quick way to insanity or stroke!" so true man i was overwhelmed one time i was trying to learn kanji meanings but this helped me so yeah thx Misa-san
I've been watching your videos for over 4 years now. My Japanese still sucks but the amount of things you've taught me through all these years have been priceless. I quit many times, I lost motivation and even felt like giving up, but I never forgot the basics I learned with you, and that's what has always made me return to learn a little more. I just hope you know you're really appreciated by us, your audience. Your hard work and selfless teachings had made a change for many of us, and I admire you for that. みさ先生、教えてくれてありがとうございます
Well said! Keep at it. I've been learning for 3 years now with a wonderful iTalki 先生。And Misa has always been my number 1 most inspirational and professional online RU-vid 先生。I'm sure my interest in 日本語 would have waned and stopped long ago had it not been for her wonderful videos. So, many thanks Misa! I will stick with my adventures in Japanese, despite the fact I'm inevitably about to flump my JLPT N4 exam for the second time this Sunday! 😅🤣 *** Note to self : watch even MORE JapaneseAmmo videos! ***
This is exactly what I needed right now! I’m taking my Kanji studies much more serious and the difference when to use 音読みと訓読み helped me so much! ありがとうございます
I wouldn't say stroke order is fun, but I think that for beginners, it does teach how a kanji is structured (especially complex kanji) as usually the stroke order makes you write a kanji component by component. Also, by handwriting a kanji, we pay more attention to the components it is made of. I found it also usually leads to better memorization and regognition when reading. Athough at first stroke order is not intuitive, with some practice, we kind of guess the correct stroke order of most kanjis (we can be wrong sometimes though). 😉😅
I think stroke orders are pointless. We live in a digital society and most of us type on a phone or computer day to day. As long as you know what a kanji means and looks like when you type in the word you’re fine. And if you do wanna learn to write kanji, then just write it. My kanji look exactly how they should and I don’t pay attention to everyone try stroke order. As long as the end result is the same, it doesn’t matter. Most people aren’t gonna get into Japanese calligraphy
@@FransceneJK98 You're right, not everyone will get into Japanese calligraphy, and I'm personally not interested in it. Actually, stroke order wasn't devised solely for calligraphy. In Japan, teachers and calligraphy masters had arguments while trying to establish a correct stroke order, as their perspectives differed. Additionally, the guidance that settled the stroke order and now serves de facto as a norm is relatively new (it was published in 1957). It was intended to provide a step-by-step method for writing kanji and to ensure consistent visual results regardless of who is writing. Does that mean nobody would be able to read what you wrote if you haven't followed the correct stroke order? Of course not! I'm sure you learned at school a way to write every letter of the alphabet that you don't follow anymore (when you have the opportunity to write by hand, that is).Paying attention to the structure of a kanji (following the correct stroke order will generally allow you to do that) while handwriting it both enhances your level of engagement and trains your procedural memory. Also, when I refer to writing by hand, I don't mean writing pages and pages of the same isolated kanji with or without all its various readings. I did this when I started to learn Japanese, and it didn't work for me. What I mean is writing complete words encountered while reading Japanese content, along with their contextual reading and meaning, 2 or 3 times. This way, you will train your brain to recognize and understand these specific words more quickly, enhancing the fluency of your reading. That being said, if you already know all the jōyō kanji and the vocabulary based on these kanji, handwriting for reasons other than enjoyment probably won't improve things significantly.
I believe that another very useful way to learn kanji is to read simple texts with furigana, and memorize not single kanjis, but _words._ In the end, we learn kanji to be able to read Japanese. :)
I was just done with the Kanji series, then saw the notification from this video. All your videos are really amazing and have helped many people. Thanks for always keeping me motivated and for being amazing! ありがとうございます!
My favorite part of learning kanji is some of the "Wow!" moments when I realize how a word originating in Japanese that I've already known all my life, is built from kanji that I am learning without realizing the connection right away. Words like "Typhoon", "Emoji", "Kabuki", "Tsunami" etc.
Japanese has so much more word play due to the complexity of kanji and their radicals, but one of my favorites in English is the word "bed" looking like an actual bed (The b and d look like headboards of a bed)
I'm relieved to hear you say that stroke order really doesn't matter depending on goals, like just reading Japanese. I always feared that by writing a Kanji in the wrong way, I was disappointing the spirit of some Japanese ghost-man, but writing a kanji helps me remember the shape itself. Only thing that still gets me is seeing a kanji in the wild and not recognizing it because of the font it is in.
I think that actually knowing the proper stroke order helps with recognizing kanji in different fonts... well, if they're weighted. If it's some weird geometric ones, then that doesn't help lol (I played a game and all the characters were, like, square-y??? big ew!). But for weighted fonts, you can see how the strokes went and if you know the stroke order, you can "translate" it to a normal font, if that makes sense.
ありがとうございます! すごい！Most Japanese language learners struggle with Kanji because of the main point to this video, kanji are better for reading commonly used words like proper nouns but are complicated when used for everyday conversation words.
Understanding the basics of kanji is like unlocking a secret code! Radicals and composition play a key role, and this video explains it all with a sprinkle of awesomeness! 🕵♂🔍🎩
Mochi Mochi is a good and cute app 🤗 . It took me only two weeks to memorize all N5 minna no nihongo vocabulary in the app that I didn't believe I couldn't do before. I knew the app from my classmate and now from you. Thank you for explaining the app, now I truly understand how it works. 👍👍
Thank you, Misa, another excellent video. For many westerners, learning Kanjis can be a big challenge. My study of Japanese has definitely been slowed by the difficulty of learning to read kanji symbols, but videos like yours are a big help.
@@Isobel079 nah I have a Chinese friend, I'd show him Japanese words and he'd recognize some kanji and would discover other kanji that he's never seen in Chinese but are often used in Japanese. Learning Chinese can definitely help you learn kanji in Japanese but it doesn't make it less of a job either
This is such a good timing for a video like this! I was only studying verb conjugation/grammar at first before I wanted to start learning kanji. I started learning kanji 2 days ago after feeling comfortable with my grammar so this came out on the perfect time 😊
Thank Misa for your experience and positive reviews about the app. We hope your RU-vid channel would achieve more success with the educational values that you have been bringing to the Japanese learning community 😊
Hi Misa. All these years that I have been living in Japan I have seen many youtubers instructing people on kanjis what they are how they work etc etc, but you are absolutely the only one that says things as they are. All you say make absolute sense and I cannot fault you in any way. In fact it is more about how sensible you thinking is than anything else. Too many people talking nonsense out there so much so that I am in shock that I agree with everything you say. This actually never happens... 😂 you made my day (in fact not even a good one, thanks for that BTW...)
I tried memorizing N5 kanjis for several months and maybe memorized 15 or 20 (and then forgot). Then I understood that I'm not a very visual guy. Memorizing squiggles is not my strength. Writing them down 10 times in a row - I will probably hurt someone near me. I tried Heisig Remembering the Kanji book, where the author groups the kanjis by radicals and other pieces. He also suggests using mnemonics and mini-stories for the pieces of kanjis which is amazing for auditory learners. With this approach I learned the meanings and writings (NOT readings!!) of 1000 kanjis in 4 months, because each subsequent kanji reinforced the kanjis I learned before. I know that a lot of people finish Heisig's book (2300 kanjis) in 3 months, which is completely insane. Instead of memorizing squiggles, i memorize stories, and it seems to work really well for me (about 93% recall). Occasionally I stop adding kanjis in Heisig order and add some N5, N4, N3 kanjis, so that it's easier to follow subtitles in TV shows. Then I return to Heisig's order because this way the remembering process is so much faster. The readings? I don't care about the readings, they come from words. The readings of the kanjis is such a big mess that it's pointless to try to memorize them in isolation. Try Heisig's book if you feel that repetitively writing kanjis down does not work for you. If your imagination works well, you will learn kanji in 3 months.
@@matzekatze7500 it may be relatively bad if you have good visual memory and can learn faster without mnemonics. That's certainly not my case. Without Heisig, I would still be stressed out about the N5 kanjis and mix up "tree", "person" and "big" :D
@@ganqqwerty I personally just don't like the concept of learnign mnemocis that oftentimes have nothing to do with the actual meaning of the Kanji. I rather just learn words.
@@matzekatze7500 well, you're saying that because you're capable of doing that in a reasonable time without getting pissed off. If I see a word that consists of two or more kanji I don't know, there is no way I learn it without some mnemonic tricks... well maybe I will learn it, but it will take too much time and I will end up hating everybody.
I am so happy today, I've been learning Japanese for 6 years now I can confidently say I know as much as a first grader. Just kidding I now know as much as a 2 year old.
On-yomi is copied from old Chinese which is probably why it sounds a bit different to today's Chinese since at the time, Mandarin was not the main dialect spoken throughout China as well
ミサ先生、教えてくれてありがとうございました！！ It's the first time I write a comment on this channel but I should have done this sooner because god knows how it helped me to get through this difficult journey that is learning japanese. I must admit that I was bit reluctant at first to watch your videos. I found that many teachers out there rely on their image to attract viewers while the content is really not that great. But boy I was dead wrong. Once I watched one of your videos, I couldn't take my eyes off of it. Not only are you gorgeous but you are also amazing at teaching and I've watched all your beginner videos. And I cannot stress this enough but you played a big part in the reason that I still learn Japanese nowadays. I joined a Japanese class last year and the first thing the students told me is that they love your videos. This video is amazing, as well. I believe there might have been a mix up in the kanji 誰 marked as "difficult" but I may be wrong. In any case, I hope life gives you as much as you give to your students. Your faithful viewer,
The Mochi Mochi App is like a friendly kanji mentor, guiding us through the learning process with its awesome features! Can't wait to give it a try! 🌟📚📱
I've been doing kanji spaced repetition for 400+ days now and never fully realized some of the exceptional readings are simply because it's a pre-existing word assigned kanji purely by their reading😅
The way that I learned black 黒 kuro is 里 looks like a window and windowsill and the four lines beneath is the same radical as fire 火 so think of a fire burning beneath a window and burning the windowsill BLACK with soot and ash.
About the stroke order: I'm a visual learner but I also like the muscle memory approach. Studies have shown that you internalize things better when you write them out so for me it's absolutely essential to "draw" the kanji. That way I can also get better by doing mistakes, which encourages and motivates me to improve my skills and learn more. This is a great explanation, I learned a lot because you explained the diffrent approaches very simple and understandable, thanks so much!
Hello Misa 先生! Nice seeing you again. You answered important questions I had. No need to mention that your video was crucial. Listening to you helps me gain insight into the Japanese language. Even the most excruciating part of this language seems affordable with you. Thank you for everything!
i'm using mochimochi while listening to you 😍it's a good app and i really loved this vedio especially the sea moon and big person and ground dragon and the other ones it made so much sense to me and is so fun to discover those ....i actually went and looked up the kanji radicals and there are 214 i just wrote down the important most frequent once and they are just 52 not that much it's just so funny that when you find a kanji and are familiar with the radical you say oh i know this one it give you a satisfaying kind of feeling ❤❤❤❤❤ anyway a golden vedio as always and i don't know but i guess you became thinier please take care of yourself misa san we love you ❣❣❣❣
I am struggling with my kanji. I can read n write in hiragana n katakana(not very good though). I think practice writing is good n also learn through singing karaoke. But i can 't write but can recognize the word. But i never give up learning because Japanese is a beautiful language. I love everything Japan - from its culture, beautiful country, its people very polite, its music etc.., thank you for recommending the app, I'll try it and let you know if it works
I've always struggled with Kanji. When I lived in Japan for about a year I learned somewhat well how to make myself understood while speaking. Generally I'd just go out to a bar or a Izakaya, get hammered and talk to the owner. That part was easy. But having to sit down and memorize thousands of Kanji is just something that my ADHD riddled brain is always going to struggle with. Hopefully once I get my ADHD medicine it will get easier, but you never know.
You know, you are literally the first person I have ever heard actually express just how absurd, confusing, and convoluted the Japanese language is! It's almost as if they were just winging it as they went along and were too stubborn to admit they had messed up lol. "Borrowing" from the Chinese but then altering the words to confused the Chinese was really not the brightest idea. Unfortunately, many attempts to make the Japanese language more concise have failed in the past due to politics. No language should need to mix 4-6 different writing systems just to create one sentence. It's insanity. And if you ask how or why certain scripts are used, you can never get a straight answer because no one knows. A language based on "Feeling" or "Context" is not ideal. Realistically all we need is some revamped Hiragana (to include words normally written in katakana), some English punctuation and the biggest of all - - SPACES!! With that being said, whilst other countries (Korea) have altered their language over the centuries to evolve with the world, it seems as though Japanese is focused on doubling down in order to stay in the 8th century. I still say Japanese is difficult by design. It wasn't meant to be understood by anyone but the Japanese. The irony of that however, is there are so many Native speakers who struggle with their own language. That's not a good thing lol
I learn patterns not individual kanji.. if i try to learn "today" word, I am looking the kanji form not individual. I can memorize it but the problem is I don't have document includes the words.
If learning and remembering a single character were easy and fun, and the only problem was their sheer number, that would be one thing. But it's neither of those things. Because the characters are pretty much arbitrary, not only are they hard to remember, there's nothing intellectually satisfying about them. There is never that "Eureka!" moment like when you discover a beautiful mathematical proof. It's just like "this character, whose components mean 'stone', 'water' and 'bird', means 'cattle'", and you just have to accept it.
Japanese seriously need to do what Korea did and modernize their alphabet, unfortunately, they are too prideful and passive to do anything about it. It's so convoluted for no reason, if your own people who are born and immersed there can struggle with your language, it's time to rethink if said language is truly optimal.
@@Juriismywife Well the main reason they still use Kanji is due to the high number of homophones. Unlike Chinese, Japanese doesn't have tones to distinguish them. The problem with the system is more that it's out-of-date rather than there being anything inherently wrong with it. Remember, in the past most people were simply illiterate, and those who could read and write didn't really do much else. It actually made sense for them to make it hard to learn as it was like a private code.
Just been to Japan for a month, your complete beginner's video helped me a great deal. Thanks and looking forward to more great contents. (obviously I need to catch up with your lessons over the past few years first)
I've just been ignoring the meanings and onyomi and kunyomi and just learning which combinations of symbols(kanji or kanji and hiragana) mean which words without learning the meanings or pronunciations of individual kanji. Is that a good method?
Wait wait wait wait ... I paused the video at some point just to read all the kana and I had a minor revelation. So .... 今（kon) + 日（nichi) + は (ｗa) ＝ 今日は ？ Could you write こんいちは like that?
Can you provide? In Japan Country and Locations. Education us on 3 Languages. Jp Japan Japanese Language . Japanese Sign Language JSL. Language of Japanese Braille JB. New Classes and Program. Learning free or pay small amount. Adventures Learning. Visual. Auditory. Kinesthetic. Others. Reading. Writing. Speaking. Listening. Improve Vocabulary comprehension. Your Accessible needs and accommodations. Deaf Community. Blind Community.
wait...wait...wait: Is mogura related to Moguera(1)/M.O.G.U.E.R.A.(2), the Godzilla-verse mecha with drills for snouts? 60 years and I finally get the joke 🤔 (1) 1957 The Mysterians (2) 1994 Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla
I wish the audio wasn't cracking that much it really hurt my ears and was distracting misa. We know way better from you. But the video was still great and informative
In my opinion learning kanji independently is useless. I just make vocabulary flashcards with kanji on the front and kana on the back. Rarely can you ever guess the reading of a kanji so it's better to not even try and just learn words that use it so you can get an intuitive sense of what the kanji stands for. I find myself being able to understand new words based on their kanji that I've never independently learned the meanings to often.
Misa : "its a mess...." Me: ok i can handle this... English is pretty messed up too... Misa: "mole = earth dragon" Me 😳😳😳😳😳 😍😍😍😍😍 wow i love japanese!!! 💜🎉
YAY!! Welcome back (five months ago 🙃 - I blame my tardiness on the YT algorithm). Anyway. looking forward to your pithy, witty, and highly useful videos! 😀
"Jukujikun" is a word not usually found on the tip on one's tongue, but it is a subset of the ateji readings. (Most learners will be more familiar with that term).
This use you mention, of KATAKANA for naming animals.... is this not already a sign that people are day-by-day LESS proficient with Kanji? Specially when you mention that "more common ones like CAT or DOG are stil used in Kanji"... ? Could it sound as an alert like "National language is degrading!..."? :( It seems very sad.
Yesterday I was thinking about watch any of your videos just to take my grammar's studies back! And such in good timing you released a new video! You ain't got no idea how much your channel helped me through the pandemic
As a native English speaker, this video has made Kanji more accessible. I wonder, though, as a native Japanese speaker, do you ever see Kanji and know the meaning but not the pronunciation?
Kinesthetic learners: Guess I'll die. In reality, though when learning kanji I like to walk while listening to them, then write them down. That helps the memorization a LOT.
I know very little about Kanji but when you showed 苺, I expected you to follow up. I was wondering what a strawberry has to do with my mother and I never found out.
that was always kinda confusing to me in animes (for example in death note) when people tell each other with which symbols their names are written. Cause latin letters basically have absolutely no meaning xD since today I know why. :D
I wish there were more Japanese RU-vidrs. It would be helpful to be entertained while learning Japanese, but there are only a handful of channels that, unfortunately, I don't find too interesting.
Do you think using Furigana reading material to learn and recognise common Kanji would be a valid learning aid? After learning Hiragana and acquiring a moderate vocabulary, that is.
