Napple tales:arisa in daydream
- Thread starter Hiro4321
- Start date
Kanji is the name of the japanese ideographic alphabet, consisting of about 10,000 (is this correct?) ideograms borrowed from the chinese alphabet.
Unlike hiragana and katakana, the two phonetic alphabets in the japanese language, kanjis do not usually have a unique pronunciation (on indeed a transliteration to a string of hiragana). It is very common for a kanji to have 3 or 4 different readings, making for an alphabet you cannot learn overnight (unless you have one of those VR teaching machines in SF movies where you learn an encyclopaedia by heart in a matter of minutes).
Identifying and remembering kanjis is in fact the biggest obstacle for a western native speaker when learning japanese.
Hope this gives an idea. ???
Unlike hiragana and katakana, the two phonetic alphabets in the japanese language, kanjis do not usually have a unique pronunciation (on indeed a transliteration to a string of hiragana). It is very common for a kanji to have 3 or 4 different readings, making for an alphabet you cannot learn overnight (unless you have one of those VR teaching machines in SF movies where you learn an encyclopaedia by heart in a matter of minutes).
Identifying and remembering kanjis is in fact the biggest obstacle for a western native speaker when learning japanese.
Hope this gives an idea. ???
MasterAkumaMatata
Established Member
Funny, I had thought they were stolen (i.e., pirated) from the Chinese written language
AFAIK, the literal meaning for kanji ("hanzi" in Chinese), as shown from the kanjis below, is Chinese character. The first character "han" (traditional form BTW) is used to mean Chinese as the majority of Chinese people are of Han origin and speak the Han language know as "hanyu" (i.e., Mandarin, national spoken language, the common speech).
That's right. Learning kanji is pure memorization. This reminds me of the very last episode of Star Trek Voyager where Captain Janeway of the future has a tiny chip implanted somewhere in her brain which enables her to know how to perform many different skills (such as piloting a ship) and also expands her memory capacity(?).
