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: 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.

Kanji activates my fight or flight response.

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

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 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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.