Biggest Realizations / Mind Blows You've Experienced Learning Japanese: Emoji means what?!?!

That would be why I saw it so much then

Not sure why Japanese borrowed it to mean “like”, I can’t think of any case where it had that meaning in Chinese.

So there’s the ones that lkyvic0075 mentioned, as in

  • 好天氣 good weather 好朋友 good friend etc.
  • 好高 very tall 好長 very long 好久 long time etc.
  • 好。 ok, got it.

but that’s not all!

  • 好棒 great!
  • 好像 seems like
  • 最好 better if
  • 好好 with care
  • 好了 done
  • 好吃 delicious 好看 pretty 好玩 fun etc.
  • 做得好 well done 跑的好 runs well etc.
  • 看好 look carefully 寫好 write well etc.
  • 看好 looked 寫好 wrote etc. (yes, this is ambiguous with the above)

Despite that, Most common Chinese characters - ordered by frequency says it’s only the 82nd most common Chinese character…

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It does also mean “good” in Japanese in some words. For instance, in 好調 or 良好.

But it’s not a huge jump from “good” to “fondness.”

Actually, I have to retract my earlier statement. CEDict does say 好 has an alternate pronunciation meaning “to be fond of”. I did not realize it was the same character due to the sound shift.

I tend to pause and rewatch… I do my best to pick up what I can at natural speed.

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i don’t know if it already was mentioned, but i’m so happy about 月 and 日 used as month and day. because the moon needs a month to wander around earth. and thanks to earth rotation sun needs a day to appear again. easy to understand. super logical. thank you japan!

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Anki

あん - memorization

What.

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You know that itty-bitty bouncing sprite wandering artist character from Okami, Issun? His name is literally 一寸. One inch. (or to be precise, 3.03 cm or 1.19 inches)

falls backwards

You mean I could have been using the old Japanese system to explain my measurements rather than giving up because I don’t know metric??? Why didn’t they tell us Japan had an imperial measurement equivalent before??? I could be introducing myself as 五尺一寸 tall? (5’2")

Ahem, why did it take so long to discover this native system existed???

Is that a serious question?

BTW, I think the real mindblow is that 一寸 is how you write ちょっと in kanji.

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Nope, not a serious question, but across four or five textbooks and a dozen books about Japan and its history in general and a couple Japanese seminars, including art history, wherein the teacher explained in detail how Japanese houses were built and measured, you’d think I would have discovered this far earlier. Instead I can tell you that it is information to be found on Wanikani level 45. It being that late in WK is not a surprise, because yeah it’s unnecessary and obscure and doesn’t deserve to be mentioned earlier, but in my general studies? What.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

If you’re starving for context like I am, read this wiki article.

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Don’t know how related it is to that character, but there is a very famous folktale character named Issunboushi, who is one inch tall and fights demons with a needle or something. People will probably think of that when they hear Issun :slight_smile:

http://life.ou.edu/stories/issunboushi.html

Same with me - that was the moment I realize many of the kanjis have very rational structures.

Calf? child and cow
Puppy? child and dog
Queen? Woman and king
so on…

My last mind blow experience was watching Midnight diner: Tokyo stories in Japanese and actually understanding some words without the need for English translation :stuck_out_tongue:

That is a mistake, I started attempting (and failing) to speak japanese just a few weeks into it.
Now I speak daily with my couple even if just a bit and if I make a mistake I get corrected. You cannot expect to only start speaking when you have a super advanced grasp on the language because the speaking aspect helps generate a feedback loop to help you study and the other way around.

I went to Japan three months into my studies and learnt more on a week over there speaking to people than sitting at home for the previous three months. Don’t dismiss the learning tool that is speaking in the real world, it’s the point of languages, and it’s how kids learn too. Classroom speaking is OK but it isn’t as good as a real on-the-spot conversation.

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It took me a while to figure out that the way to word a distinct between certain words was ‘transitive vs. intransitive’. Like I knew the patterns were there with things like 上げる and 上がる and I had like a…vague concept as to what it the difference was. But I could not for the life of me remember how to describe this concept in English until I sat there and was like OH IT’S THAT THING. WITH THE LINGUISTICS. WHICH IS MY THING I STUDY. RIGHT. YEAH. It was really frustrating reviewing those vocab words because I couldn’t remember how to even do in English until I was like oh right yes, yes transitives and intranstives. This has since made learning these sets of verbs much, much easier because now I’m able to connect the Japanaese patterns with like the general grammatical concept I am aware of instead of just…vague…figuring.

I felt very stupid afterwords.

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I recently learned the kanji for laughing and all of a sudden I’m noticing it a lot on twitter. I think Japanese people use it as kind of ‘LOL’. Which blew my mind :grin:

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Yes they do. It’s also abbreviated to “w” (can be extended, e.g. “wwww”).

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I just learned that “stomach” is “Hara”. Hara-kiri… Cutting stomach, duh.
I havent seen it yet, but now that I think of it, I bet “seppuku” is just setsu+fuku. Learning japanese has a way of taking all the mysticism away from the language, when you realize most of the expressions are just the most barebones, down to earth descriptions imaginable :sweat_smile:

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Hi guys, first post from newbie here :slight_smile:

I’m on level 2 so already learned about tama (ball) and ko (child), and I also saw some vocabulary with rendaku.

And I’ve just figured out by myself that tamago might very much be tama-ko (ball-child, ball containing a child - an egg !!). So I went to Google and egg really is 玉子 (even though there’s a difference between uncooked and cooked).

That was really a proud and badass and mind blowing moment. I already knew that tamago means egg (what with tamagotchi and watching anime etc), but being able to figure out the word’s kanjis by myself, that’s totally awesome !!! :star_struck:

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Last night I just realised learning Kanji here is like a day in life… you make many mistakes but you also do right things everyday… sometimes it’s 63% correct… sometimes it’s 90% correct. Whatever it is, it is fine. Just try again next day.
Used to get me quite hard when I made mistakes at work. Now out of work but still make little mistakes in life but I don’t beat myself hard now. It is fine. Just try again.

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Oh, that’s a nice moment!
It reminds of the time when I learned that the Japanese word for “mushroom” was きのこ and then I felt so sure that the kanji for that would have to be 木の子 since that would make sense, right? I mean mushrooms look like baby trees kind of, don’t they? But then the kanji was 茸 and then my little bubble had to be popped.

Oh, well.
There are still a lot of cool stories behind kanji, though.
For example, I think it’s great that the kanji for concave is 凹 and that the one for convex is 凸.

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