@@jameschoi9399 I live in Japan, married to a Japanese man, and i feel like it is torture being "immersive" while in a relationship. He speaks English so that's what we use, and when we use Japanese, I feel I can't express myself correctly. Any tips for immersion while in a relationship?
@@PlzCa1mDown ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1ZjQe5U25uo.html highly recommend this video a watch! He explains how he does immersion while living in a nonjapanese household with a wife and kids. Immersion can be as easy as listening to japanese while driving to work or watching anime while doing household chores.
@Dougann yeah! That's actually a good idea! I seriously appreciate your reply. Living in a mixed house is so stressful so sometimes we just "Say it in __language__!" Lol
I kept asking an Asian kid what these characters meant in a book he was reading, and he just kept saying "that's candy"... then I'd pick a different symbol and he'd say "that's candy" and I was so confuses because every word was candy I thought he was reading willi Wonka or something... now 2 decades later I realize he was saying kanji, not candy. But why was he just telling me everything is kanji? He's the weirdo. If someone was asking me what an English word was, i wouldn't say "that's a word" or "that's letters"
That's a funny story, lol. He probably wanted to just teach you his name for those funny runes that he's reading, but it never crossed his mind to actually say what they mean.
i think its safe to say you know this language inside and out, and even if that may somehow be an overstatement. you have an amazing wealth of knowledge. i think that is awesome of you, and am thankful for you giving us subscribers help on getting to where youve gotten!
After watching this video and then going over my Anki kanji reviews, I started noticing the keisei characters a lot. There were a lot of kanji that made a lot more sense after realizing that one part represented the sound and not part of the meaning.
2:37 For the record, this rule never was hard-fast, rather it was always a mnemonic device that may happen to be slightly off. For example, 軍 was 'kun' in Old Chinese, but 揮 was 'qʷʰər' or 'qʰul', so you can see they are quite different, despite sharing a phonetic component. The manifestation of this in modern Japanese is even clearer, namely ぐん vs き. Apparently totally unrelated. So these differences in the original pronunciations can add up!
But I believe 終 isn't a 形声文字 but a 会意文字, and also believe neither 糸 nor 冬 is pronounced "syu". It is obscure how 糸 + 冬 can mean 終 but my guess is, if you have enough 糸 (yams/fabric) you will survive until the end (終) of 冬 (winter).
@@kingo_friver By checking dictionary, I guess It's a mixture of 形声, 指事 and 会意 , in Chinese 終 reads zhong while 冬 reads dong, they have similiar parts. Also 冬 was originally a pictograph of a thread with both end knotted and through 指事 to mean the end, later it's used to mean winter(as the end of a year) while 終 is created to mean the end through 会意.
Oh my, that actually helped me. I read numerous times that kanji have sometimes characters that dictates the meaning and the pronounciation but i didn't take it seriously (maybe because I thought it was not that common and I cannot tell right and left apart instintively) but the visual proof made me see it was right before my eyes.
Holy god, this makes so much easier kanji. Im gonna try it eventhough i wasnt doing like that. I was learning summarising kanji like 1+1 with the most easy ones (and making histories or remembering of some kind of anime), but I didnt know there are radicals for the most complex kanjis. Thanks a lot dude, this get me out of just remember repetitive. Also before learning japanese, I was applying your method but indirectly (I didnt notice until you explain it in you channel). BIG LIKE to this video.
Me at the end of the video: "Oh too bad I'm not good at Kanji yet" Me when a tip is put at the bottom of the screen: "Oh. Too bad I'm still not good at Kanji yet"
I must say I am really impressed with the depth of your level of kanji knowledge. In Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan we learned the (nearly) the same kanji and we all learned 六書, but no one really remembers it after high school.
wow thanks for the video, it explains a lot, I always thought it was weird how many homophone sounds there were for kanji that look similar haha (I remember 儀 and 義 etc. coming up a lot), I thought that would have made it hard for someone who hadn't done rtk but turns out there's a reason
As a Chinese leaner for whom hanzi have become pretty second nature and are very well suited to the language I'm learning, I feel so sorry when I look over at Japanese learners who are expecting Kanji to make sense at face value - videos like yours are so important for helping people overcome that barrier, and I wish this concept was better taught in Japanese education circles. Also interestingly, I always assumed that the phonetic elements of characters were easier to identify in Chinese than Japanese, and of course given the prevalence of kunyomi readings in Japanese that is largely true, but although Japanese onyomi is phonetically limited, its in some situations much closer to middle Chinese than Mandarin chinese is, which has had some wild sound changes. The example of 講 and 構 that you mentioned happens to be a perfect example, because in Mandarin they are pronounced jiang3 and gou4 respectively, a far cry from the neat phonetic consistency that's preserved in Japanese!
Actually in this case the Mandarin pronunciation reflects Middle Chinese more closely, since Japanese borrowings simplified the -ng ending and 講 came to sound like 構 in Japanese. These two characters weren't even perfect homophones in Old Chinese, which shows that the system had it's flaws from the very start.
Dude I studied Chinese up to HSK 5 and looking at Japanese Kanji I can recognize most instantly but I don’t know how the fuck people memorize the readings… multiple pronunciations, multiple syllables for one character, no real pronunciation “hints” in the characters…. Literally it’s such a turn off, it almost makes me want to give up on Japanese lol
@cuddledog142 - the WaniKani learning method really helps. Focus on the most common onyomi and kunyomi reading first, then learn alternative readings with vocabulary else they never stick. The most useful/most common readings will repeat over and over and stick in your mind, the rest you learn through exceptions. It really helps.
Thank you! I’m studying Kanji about three different ways right now, and none of them have really gotten as far into how Kanji are put together as this video has.
0:50 This reminded me of something. The French youtube channel Le Rire Jaune mentioned how 1, 2, and 3 in Chinese is just one, two, and three lines, then jokingly said that 10,000 is written with 10,000 lines.
I'm starting to learn Japanese and chose to seek how kanji is and this made it more simple for me as a introduction. I am hoping I can become a translator later in life so I can translate many things in the future! Other words, MORE CONTENT!
@@arnelarboleda2870 Pandemic hit hard so ... not really. Good news, family is doing well now(mother gotten cancer and I had the rona a few times) so hopefully after the holidays I start over.
The pronunciation principles never made perfect sense in the sense that the pronunciation would be unambiguous. However, they did make more sense, because later on some of the sounds and (especially) sound combinations moved farther and farther apart from each other. For Example: 艮跟根, 懇, and 很狠恨痕 are all -en with slightly different velar consonants at the beginning (g/k/h), as well as four different tones. 銀 yín and 眼 yǎn* used to start with a velar consonant as well: the velar nasal ŋ (≈ng) - but that got dropped in Mandarin. Like 眼 yǎn, 限 xiàn and 艱 jiān also had a vowel that was somewhat different to the one in 艮. The two vowels moved apart, and when the vowel of 眼/限/艱 shifted, it triggered a sound shift in the preceding consonant, thus making the difference even more prominent. In Cantonese however, 艮, 銀, 限 etc. still sound quite similar to each other. *yan and -ian are pronounced roughly like how you would pronounce "Yen" in English
very informative, thanks for the video! could you please provide more info about koujien? is it a desktop program or a website (or maybe both) ? I couldn't find it on Google or maybe I just didn't pay enough attention to the results...
If you watch my video titled "AJATT Tips: How to Make Sentence Cards", I explain how to obtain a desktop version of koujien. There is no online version as far as I know of.
Hey Matt, I thought this was pretty interesting! I've finished the RRTK Deck not too long ago and am about halfway through the N5 Tango deck. But I'm finding myself struggling with remembering pronunciation. I'm sure you considered this when developing MIA, but would it not be more efficient to also add the part of the 形声 characters that indicate their pronunciation to the RRTK deck along with audio? The only reason I can see why this wouldn't work is perhaps because of the many potential different readings - and that it would get in the way of in-context acquisition. I'd really like to hear your thoughts!
Cure Dolly goes over the most common of these. learnjapaneseonline.info/2014/12/06/the-key-to-japanese-kanji-pronunciation-meet-the-sound-sisterhoods/ I think MIA should include something like this since it seems very helpful and doesn't take very long to do.. There's only 90 cards which you can bang out in a week doing 10-15 a day. Or just in 1-2 days since they arent that hard to remember.
I feel like the problem is that they aren't 100% reliable, so your best bet is just to learn readings in context, because trying to learn which ones have which reading has the same problem as trying to learn when to use which onyomi with which words.
I'd suggest making mnemonics for pronunciations. Try to think of something that kinda sounds like the word and that correlates to the meaning (or use it in a phrase that contains the meaning of it). Here's a great example of that: www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/fcfqak/heres_a_mnemonic_i_use_to_remember_the_word_for/ Sometimes I think of 2 words in which the first 2 letters of each make up the pronunciation of the word I'm learning, while the rest of the phrase tells the meaning. You can also use other Japanese words or even names. It can be hard sometimes and many of my mnemonics are stupid as hell, but I still find that it makes it much easier to remember.
@@teatime2688 Thank you for this! While I understand that it isn't 100% reliable (sort of in response to those who are against it for not being a consistent rule), this relationship between sounds and radicals makes a lot of sense! It seems very similar to the concept of mnemonics used in RTK too. Even If it isn't 100% consistent, that doesn't seem like a problem, as the things I learn from in-context immersion/study will eventually help build up this subconscious archive of intuition "rules" and how things interact with one another within the language. Like Matt had stated in the OG version of MIA (now Refold?), the point of this kind of kanji study/revision is to be quick and messy - what sticks will stick, and what doesn't will eventually be learned though immersion. I won't need to focus too heavily on learning grammar rules etc. as I'd gain the intuition from the immersion. I think my only possible concern for this would be potentially building bad habits that I'd need to fix. Perhaps that wouldn't be an issue depending on how I study it and how religiously I follow the rules. SO as a starting place to help speed up my ability to recognise the pronunciations of words even if it's only like 65%, it's still better than the 10% I'm understanding right now :') I'll definitely make use of this tool! Thanks and all the best!
This concept is covered in RTK2 (the one that everyone ignores) and Heisig gives a thorough treatment for learning the phonetic components of 形声-class characters. Also, if it's of any interest to you, the book Difficult Characters edited by Mary S. Erbaugh has an article written by Sachiko Matsunaga, "Are Chinese Characters Ideographs?" (Chapter 4), that discusses this topic. To quote some statistics from the article, the number of characters that work like this for Chinese is 90% and for Japanese is 66% (close to the number you mentioned). The difference can be explained by realizing that this trick for remembering character readings only works if we're talking about the on'yomi of the character. That is to say, the difference it proportional to the number of loan Chinese words vs. native Japanese words used in contemporary Japanese.
@@jonathancastro8487 It's okay, I didn't really do much :) you should go to Wiktionary, which is where they show those transcriptions (alongside the original characters of course). I think their coverage of Chinese is very interesting (you also get to see the transliterations of the other Chinese languages).
Can anyone tell where can we find these details of types of kanji, how different kanji are used for and how their pronounciation can be known for a English speaker.
hey dude personally what do you think is the best way to learn kanji? and about this immersion thing where you read 10,000 sentences everyday, do you have to know kanjis before you try it or you just have to suck it up and eventually you will get used to it?
Guess what, I actually have a video called "Why RTK is the best way to learn Kanji". Oh and also guess what, I have a video called "How to Learn Japanese | AJATT Overview/Timeline".
Matt, what's your opinion on Kenneth G. Henshall "The Complete Guide on Japanese Kanji"? It actually explains this topic as "Formational Principles of the Chinese Script". The reason I brought this because I'm using kanji etymology from this book as a "story" for remembering the kanji. I'm feeling that this way I can actually understand the origin and evolution of each kanji - sometimes in a non-verbal way like an idea or image. If we take 銅 as an example: "Has 金 "metal" and 同 "same" as phonetic with associated sense generally taken as "red" (Mizukami also notes alternative interpretations "flow through" and "cavity, cave"), to give "red metal" i.e. "copper". So it's not like they randomly take 同 and call it a day - they choose this homophone because of some phonetic association with "red". I can see why the usual "take a kanji and make up your own story" way worked in the past - when all you have is just a list of this "alien language" symbols and your goal is to load them in your head - you probably can't do anything else. But now, when we have access to etymology researches - why don't incorporate this stuff into your learning process from the day one? Do you know people who went similar way? Because I'm a beginner (5xx RTK at this moment) and maybe I just can't see some potential difficulties or pitfalls of this approach.
I also thought to take that approach, but ended up giving it up for the following reasons. In case you gave of 銅, what you are talking about works pretty nicely, but more often than not this is not the case. For example take "染". originally this character comes from "氿" and "木", but 氿 does not exist in modern Japanese. That means that learning the etymology of this character would mean memorizing a whole new character that is no longer even used. But that is still one of the more simple cases. Due to corruption over time, many current characters do not resemble their original etymology at all. Check out the etymology for 鬱: www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/77c0p6/what_they_never_told_you_abou_kanji_%E5%85%AD%E6%9B%B8/dolhc0z/ Not to mention that the etymology of many characters is either unknown or still debated among scholars. After looking into it, I came to the conclusion that trying to learn the modern day kanji based on their etymology would be MUCH more work than simply making arbitrary heisig-style stories. And the other half of the issue is that ultimately, unless you are an academic scholar of kanji, knowing the etymology of characters is completely useless. Japanese people themselves do not know them, and I can't think of a single situation in which knowing them would come in handy besides being able to showing off obscure knowledge. In the situation in which you have a "close to the original etymology but slightly difficult to remember" story, vs a "completely arbitrary etymology-wise but very easy to remember" story, if your goal is simply native like fluency in Japanese, it makes more sense to me to choose the second one.
I was so surprised to hear this! They didn't even tell us that when I studied in Japan! But one question, when you have a kanji that consists out of three parts, how do you figure out which one defines the pronounciation? For example if you have 怒?
This is tricky, you must first know most of the "meaning-defining radicals"（部首）。these MDRs usually dont define the pronunciation. After removing the MDR, the "remaining radical" (only regard it as a single radical at this point)（偏旁）defines the pronunciation. This "remaining radical" now can be classified into either会意or形声。if it's会意then it defines the pronunciation, if it's形声then you need to further divide it into 2 smaller radicals and decide which defines the pronunciation. Im writing this in a HKer's perspective, but六書in JP kanjis are more or less similar in principle, though they also invented some new kanjis which also fit into these 6 categories.
The kanji on the right 演means perform ~ and kou 講 has the meaning of speak because of the particle 言. It does this because it is 形声. So what does perform + speak get you? Lecture. Which is the meaning of 講演
@@ketchup901 Do you know a word that uses 蚊 with the ぶん reading? I'm fairly certain the origin really is the sound a mosquito makes, but it would make sense that if 蚊 needed to be given an on'yomi reading in a word ぶん would be picked. edit: Actually not that certain. A Japanese person explained it this way to me, but on further research I don't think it's an accurate origin story. Too bad :(
@@kokopelli121123 I didn't know any, but I looked it up just now and it seems that there are a few obscure ones. 蚊虻 (ぶんもう) , 蚊雷 (ぶんらい), 蚊母鳥 (ぶんぼちょう), 聚蚊 (しゅうぶん). But it doesn't really matter if there's an actual word using that onyomi because kanji weren't "given" onyomi, they were imported from China where they already had a reading. However, it could actually be that 文 was chosen as the phonetic component because of the sound mosquitoes make. This is what 漢字源 says. 《解字》会意兼形声。「虫＋音符文（こまかい模様）」。あるいは「もんもん」という羽音をまねた擬声語か。 So to answer your original question it would be a combination of 会意 and 形声, which is actually pretty common in general.
@@ketchup901 There actually are some characters that were given on'yomi, for example, 働. This kanji is native to Japan (rather than China), but was later given an onyomi reading. Most characters invented in Japan have no onyomi however like 込 and 峠. Anyway, I was way off about 蚊. I was given a verbal origin story for it and never looked it up.
tbh at this point it's commonplace in american english to pronounce it like that. maybe pronunciation should have two spellings: proNOUNciation (makes sense bc comes from pronounce) and proNUNciation. I similarly wouldn't mind if the same happened for similar words like announce/annunciation. This way, you can choose whichever feels easier/comes to mind/makes sense, and the word loses no root meaning.
@@DengueBurger I wouldn't say that pronounce comes from announce. pronounce comes from latin nuntiare, which does mean "announce", but the word "announce" comes from latin nuntius, meaning "messenger". As far as I'm aware, the words are not cognate, but I could be wrong. In any case, you have to go back all the way to latin to find any relation between the two. "pronounciation" is indeed not super rare, but I wouldn't say it's all that common, either. Most people know how to say it properly.
American Writer the fact that Matt pronounces it that way suggests that it’s not so uncommon or nonsensical. Languages are tools that can be adapted to better suit needs and be made easier to use/communicate.
