The Japanese Writing System in a Nutshell

[not an education video, just for fun]

video by me

[godslonelyman]

Japanese writing is just like Hebrew but with more scribbles

[is-sleeping]

japanese is easy
like
how are you? =genki? (元気？)
i'm fine =genki
and you=genki?
me too, i'm good =genki

[utosof]

As a Japanese I admit learning kanji is hard for non-Japanese speakers. Even native Japanese speakers do not know all usage of each kanji. In Japan you can see question about kanji on school exams( from elementary school to university entrance). Ordinary Japanese people just know basic usage of hundreds of basic kanji. They needn't write them perfectly but they just know "usage" and "sound."
If you learn kanji, I recommed starting from reading practice of kanji.

And then, removing kanji from the Japanese writing system is not a good idea. We have many many homonyms and distinguish them by using different kanji for each words.

[TotalRejection]

The more complex sentences become, the more you will appreciate kanji, because they give structure to the sentence and provide visual anchor points.

[azarishiba]

This was pretty funny XD XD

However, I don't agree with eliminating all kanji. Even with spaces between words (once Japanese people agree if a particle is part or not of a word, and if some conjugations like なければなりません can be separated or not), there is still the problem with homophones given the rather simple phonetic system Japanese has. But then, there is until now much documentation and literature (and manga and videogames) with kanji that either wouldn't be legible anymore without them, or it would be a painful job to change all the kanji without furigana into hiragana and katakana. Or at least, put furigana on them.

What I would agree is with reducing the number of official kanji to less than 1000 (500 would be the minimum) or making easier kanji readings, which is what actually make Japanese writing system so complex.

Buuuut, this is only my opinion. Again, this video was so fun! XD XD

[geoffk]

Hiragana with spaces is used now in children's books. But for adult readers, it's still much easier to read 東京 (Tokyo) than とうきょう. And there are many homophones (many more than English) which are only distingushed by kanji like 直す (fix) and 治す (cure) both read as "naosu". But it is a challange to learn, especially for kanji like 生 which have a lot of differnt readings or words with unusual kanji readings like 春日 (which can be read sensibly as "harubi", meaning "spring day", but is also read "kasuga" as a place name).

[SupremeLeaderKimJong-un]

The Japanese writing system is like if Mandarin and English took tons of drugs and decided to have a baby, like the English part is just so painful

[MhxAir]

Japanese is the most amusing language I'll ever learn. Children learn over 1000 Kanji by 6th grade. Ideally, you'd want to learn more than 200 Kanji a year as an adult, but there are over 3000 Kanji you probably should eventually learn, so pace what you can I guess. Don't expect to learn Japanese as fast as a Latin language or something. 10 Kanji a week should be good enough if you're not in a rush. School used to make us learn 20 vocabulary words a week, with a test on Monday to make sure we remembered them all, so you could probably apply that same method to 20 Kanji a week if you really wanted to.

[AverytheCubanAmerican]

Well, at least it's not Mandarin, where the same pronunciation can have VERY different meanings, or you end up saying the wrong thing than you intended because you pronounced the word you wanted to say SLIGHTLY different...
是 (Shì) = Yes
世 (Shì) = Lifetime
事 (Shì) = Matter
市 (Shì) = City
士 (Shì) = Warrior
室 (Shì) = Room

Mandarin was offered at my middle school and I decided to take it for a quarter in the seventh grade since I've been fascinated with Chinese culture, history, and calligraphy since the 2008 Summer Olympics and thought "Why not?"...famous last words

[numburger]

Aside from the "kanji sucks" joke, (it's not that it's a bad joke, I just see it *so* often) it's a really good video!
I like how you were able to make it funny for people who aren't and are learning Japanese while still being accurate lol

[moRooOdAYoo]

0:58 クロゼット✕ クローゼット〇
　　キモイな人✕ キモイ人〇
　　俺に見ているぞ✕ 俺を見ているぞ〇

[connorwright]

If this video makes Japanese writing seem like a ridiculously overcomplicated system, that's because it is.

To make it worse pretty much every kanji character can be pronounced at least two different ways and the written form gives you exactly zero hints as to which one you're supposed to use.

[strawberrymilksamurai]

1:00 "if everything was in kana, your eyes would die"

*has traumatic flashbacks to my second year of learning Japanese when I was good enough to read kanji but everything in our textbook was in kana*

[emilyparks]

Would like to add that Katakana and Hiragana *are* based on kanji. While they are read phonetically, they actually take their appearance from aspects of kanji.

Katakana is a simplified, angular adaptation of some kanji.

Hiragana is the evolution of classical cursive kanji.

[_YanoSkylar]

pls i'm literally japanese why is this so relatable- japanese is like, the easiest language with the most fucked up writing system istg... but i don't say that kanji is bad they add a lot to our culture but they could just simplify it (i'm character amnesic bruh)

[KeyboardMoment]

Finally, 21st century humor and bill wurtz combined
the most epic combination

[cmyk]

“Adding spaces to pure kana” is basically what Korean does, actually.
Korean used to be written totally in Chinese characters (called hanja in Korean, which is a cognate of kanji in Japanese and hanzi in Chinese), and then Sejong the Great invented hangul, which is like kana but it’s more like a phonology-obsessed conlanger made it up (which is pretty much how it actually happened). Then people mixed hanja and hangul for a while, but then they said “screw it” and wrote everything in hangul with spaces. And it stuck to this day. Nowadays, the only place you’ll see hanja is in news headlines as 1-letter abbreviations of country names. (e.g. 한일 관계 “SK-Japan relations” can be written 韓日관계 to clarify meaning and provide context)

[nikolaswap]

you missed the worst part about invention of kanji:
step one: steal from china
step two: steal from china again but don’t update the writing system and simply add all of the new characters and meanings on top of the old ones so that it is completely nonsensical to chinese readers unless they know the current and outdated languages
step three: repeat step two every time china updates their written script

[physical_insanity]

As someone who's pretty familiar with the Japanese language, I can confirm that the language is a beauty when spoken, but absolute hell when you have to read or write it.

[mud]

As a person learning japanese, my main complain with kanji is the fact that there are so many.

Some are indistinguishable from each other, or a very minor stroke makes it mean a very different thing. There's also the fact that some old kanjis, that barely anyone uses, will appear and i won't know what it means. Or there are other obscure kanjis that are synonyms to something and some crazy, "I wanna feel special" person, will use it and i won't know what it means.