Flabbergasted at actually bieng able to understand kanji :)

Do you ever just look at all the Kanji you are supposed to know and think - there is no way i could possibly know all of those? - and then you randomly flick through and to your amazement - you do !!! :smile: such a good feeling !
So glad i started using WANIKANI !!! :star_struck:

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And the flipside of it is when you get annoyed while reading a sentence that has too many kana (such as children’s books) because even with the spaces it’s difficult to read without kanji.

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Ikr! I love WaniKani so much. :two_hearts:

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I love thinking about what Japanese looked like over a year ago when I could barely read any of it, compared to now. It’s amazing being able to look at almost any Japanese text I see now and be able to read most of it.

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Hahah is this a reference/inside joke about RuPaul’s Drag Race?

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Haha sorry, no. Just your regular shortened ā€˜I know, right’.

Anyhow, +1 for RuPaul!

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Recently on reddit someone posted a link to a ę˜”č©± and the first thing I thought was: isn’t there a version with kanji? This is just kana, it’s impossible to read!

That was definitely not a sentence I ever thought I would say. So far, that was my biggest ā€œwhat the hell is happening to me?ā€ moment since I started learning Japanese a year ago.Thank you, oh mighty :crabigator: :bowing_woman:

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Heh… when I first start talking to a new language partner, they’re always surprised when I ask them to use kanji because it’s easier to read.

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I agree! However, one exercise that I have done once or twice with this is to go to Aozora Bunko and look for a children’s story with only/mostly kana. Then, I try to transcribe the story from kana to kanji (except of course words usually written in kana). I’ve done this with ć‚ćŖć†ć•ćƒ”ćƒ¼ć‚æćƒ¼ć®ćÆćŖć— (Peter Rabbit), which has the additional benefit of already knowing the story in English.

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I was thinking about this just the other day: In English we have most of the same concepts, but no ā€œlittle picturesā€ to help out. Think about it: for the concept of ā€œkillā€ there is the sort of Kun Y’omi ā€œkillā€, then there is a sort of On Y’omi ā€œcideā€ that we make words out of, like suicide, homicide, genocide, etc. But we lack the kanji to help us visualize it, so we have to memorize these things. I’m sure those of us for whom English is our first language never thought of it like this.

…okay, i am avoiding work mostly…

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Now grab a pen, and try to write some kanji without looking them up… and see the world crumble apart around you.

I know there’s the tree radical and two-face somewhere…

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I’m actually fascinated with trying to write kanji by hand, I used this method to learn katakana/hiragana and can write them fluently although not as pretty as I’d like. But I realize that with computers/phones being the main mode of writing nowadays you don’t really NEED to know how to write Kanji by hand anymore.

All that being said as I get better (just started WaniKani, been doing duolingo for a couple of months) I’m still going to get a calligraphy set and practice writing kanji in a pretty manner!

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Ha ! so true - even though i’m not great at reading, at lessons when the teacher asks us if we know what something she has written on the board means, i feel like asking her to write in Kanji ! cause otherwise i’m lost ! haha

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ha - yeah, i did start writing kanji out from the first 10 levels - then i realised i had a full time job and had to eat and sleep and wash. :wink:

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Even though I just started WK, I’ve been studying Japanese for several years so I am not starting from zero with kanji. During my study abroad last year, I was designated the ā€˜reader’ in my group of friends because I knew the most kanji and easily read katakana. However, my experience is varied, some of my kanji was learned in classes while others were learned from just existing in Japan. I don’t always know all of the readings (occasionally I don’t know any of the readings, just the meaning). Often they were learned by rote memorization, which makes learning more advanced kanji even more difficult for me.

Today I did the vocab section for the first time and came across two words I didn’t already know (äŗŗå£ and äŗŗå·„). I was absolutely stunned when the words first popped up and I said the pronunciation without being told what they were, just from having learned the on-yomi already! That kinda blew my mind and makes me want to keep going.

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I’m a bit of a lurker on these here forums but it has made me pretty happy to see others feeling the same as me. It’s amazing to see some Kanji ā€œin the wildā€ (not all that rare in London) and have some vague idea as to what it means.

As someone in the age bracket of, oh, a bit over 25 (and then some), it’s been a long while since I’ve consciously attempted to learn something. So thanks to WaniKani and whoever’s behind it :slight_smile:

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This is a great feeling for sure! Looking over at my bookshelf, seeing manga on there, being able to point to some and be like, ā€œI’ve read that one, and that one, and this oneā€ and it keeps going as I keep reading more and more. It’s wild and I love it :smiley:

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ā€œKun y’ omiā€ reading for european languages is Latin and Ancient Greek. If you studied them you see that western European languages have most words coming from one or the other. Even if you didn’t study Latin and/or ancient Greek, you can still recognise some patterns (like ā€œcideā€, as you pointed out). We don’t have ā€œpicturesā€, but there are stems that carry meaning, if you know the stems because you studied them, you can guess the meaning of words you’ve never seen before or understand in a deeper way the meaning of words you already know.

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All this, and I’m liking having the kanji as a whole new level of inter-connectedness of a language.

If only Swift 4 was as fascinating…or even as related to its predecessors…

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