How To Learn Kanji? 6 Steps To Get You Started Whenever you take a look at a kanji, see if you can spot a radical and think about whether it can give you a clue on the kanji’s meaning. If you just learn a few common ones, like the water, earth, and person radicals above, you’ve already got a big head start. Sure, it can be frustrating to think, “Wow, I just learned some kanji, and now I have to learn them again in order to be able to tell what they are when they’re radicals!”īut the good news is, there’s not really that many radicals. If we use 人 as a radical, suddenly “woah!”, we get 侠 (“tomboy”)! It hardly looks the same. It also happens with 人, which means “person.” The earth symbol looks almost the same appears on the left side of this kanji.īut when it is used as a radical in this way, we can see its bottom line start to slant upward.Ĭan you see clearly how the line at the bottom of 土 slants up when it become part of 塚? You might see this in, say, “earth” ( 土) vs. There are 214 radicals in Japanese and these are the base characters from which all other more advanced characters are built.
This piece of kanji that gets tacked on to a bigger kanji is called a radical, and radicals change shape when you put them onto another kanji. Why do these two look different when they mean the same thing? We already know from our previous example that 水 means water, so what’s going on? If you had known that 氵means water, you might have been able to guess what this word meant if you saw it in a sentence. On the left side that leaves u with 氵, which means “water”.Ĭould it be that the kanji 海 which is made up of these two more basic parts has something to do with water? On the right side we can abstract 毎, a regular old kanji that we might find anywhere. Try breaking it into a left side and a right side. If we take it apart, we can get a hint on what it means. Think of kanji like a little puzzle they’re made out of pieces, and each piece has a specific place where it fits in.Īs an example, let’s take a look at the kanji 海, or うみ (umi). However, in order to do that, you have to know how kanji are set up, which is what we’ll look at next… How Are Kanji Set Up? However, using kanji saves a lot of space, and if you learn to understand how kanji are made, you may even be able to guess what some characters mean or how to say them, even if you’ve never seen them before! Hiragana is a convenient way to “spell out” a word if you don’t know how to write its kanji but you do know how to say it. Remember, Japanese borrowed kanji from the Chinese, so of course it makes sense to call them “Chinese characters.” That’s right, it’s kanji (かんじ), which literally means “Chinese character”! What happens when you put them together? 漢字! Sometimes, if you put two kanji together, they can make a new word based on their two individual parts.ĭid you know that 漢 ( kan, or かん) means “Chinese”?Īnd the character ji (字, or じ) means, well, “character.” It’s still pronounced mizu, but now we can represent that entire idea in one single character instead of “spelling it out” in hiragana with two separate characters. However, we can also write the same word in kanji as 水. This is actually phonetic, as hiragana sounds out the word: Kanji are borrowed from Chinese and they’re more complex than hiragana or katakana.įor example, you might know that the Japanese word for “water” is mizu.
Which is like 1500 years at least! The Benefits Of Kanji Vs. Those are kanji, and they’ve been intimidating new learners of Japanese for, well, basically as long as they’ve existed. Those are katakana, an alphabet Japanese people use to write down words that aren’t originally Japanese.īut maybe, mixed in with those characters, you spot a big, intimidating blob, like this: 漢字を読めますか You might also see other, similar characters that look a bit chunkier: Those are hiragana, one of the ways that Japanese people write down the sounds of their language. Whenever you look at a Japanese sentence, you probably see a bunch of small, relatively simple characters, like this: Let’s take a closer looker at the three elements of written Japanese and the role of kanji among them. So if you want to read or write in Japanese, you’ll need to learn them! They are a set of written characters that have been adopted from the Chinese writing system and are used together with the native Japanese hiragana and katakana characters to write Japanese. Kanji are one of three elements used in the Japanese writing system.
#Nexuiz kanji free#
If you’re ready to get started, click here for a 7-day FREE trial. With Japanese Uncovered you’ll use my unique StoryLearning® method to learn Japanese naturally through story… not rules. If you prefer a comprehensive course that will teach you all aspects of Japanese in detail, my top recommendation is Japanese Uncovered which teaches you through StoryLearning®.
0 kommentar(er)
