I know that situation very well…
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Yeah, at the end of the day a guess is a guess, and you don’t know until you check it. A guess once every 10 pages isn’t really going to affect comprehension. A guess several times every page though, and you really have no idea if you’re actually reading what you think you’re reading.
We’re all there at some point. I’m kinda used to dealing with it at this point.
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Who’s guessing now? You don’t know me, or what I did. You just have internal biases and hunches to go on. Whereas I have personal experience of doing it and enjoying the process.
It wasn’t perfect, for sure. I wouldn’t attempt it for manga with a complex plot. But the typical HS hijinks or battle manga could be easily understood based upon a combination of the artwork and the kanji. Enough that I could follow the story. And with a lightweight story like that, there isn’t a lot of deep meaning to miss. And there is a lot of that kind of manga out there. Oddly, I had a lot more trouble with stuff aimed at younger readers, due to the lack of kanji.
Sure, a lot of stuff flies over one’s head in that circumstance. But really, that doesn’t matter. Really. Watching my children grow up, I’ve come to appreciate how little of the stories they watch and read (in L1!) they don’t get but still enjoy. Going back and reading stuff that I read as a kid has also been eye opening. There was a lot of stuff (mostly dealing with sex) that flew right over my head at the time, but didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story. Missing stuff is also part of the reading experience. But you can’t say it isn’t “true reading” because of missed details. If you did, you’d be saying anyone who’s ever skimmed wasn’t “really reading”. Sorry. Doesn’t work like that.
Anyway, if you don’t believe me, ask any fluent Chinese reader who doesn’t speak Japanese if they can understand Japanese manga. This is incredibly commonplace thing, especially in places where there are large multi-ethnic communities. I live in Los Angeles. It’s crazy common here. It’s not BS by even a small stretch.
So yeah, I’m going to chalk this up to agreeing to disagree. I think the conflict might be our different views on what constitutes ‘reading’. You want 100% comprehension, and that’s ok. For that, you do need more skill with a language (though not as much as you seem to think). To me, reading is (again) about getting meaning from written content, for pleasure or understanding. End of the day, that’s what matters.
Anyway, yeah, we’re done.
Ight man, I guess you did it.
Yeah I think so. I personally want 100% comprehension, but I don’t think you need 100% comprehension to consider it reading so that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’m pretty well aware of what skill level you need for 100% comprehension when it comes to the texts I read, however.
Regardless, yeah it seems like we just have very different ideas of what constitutes reading and knowing what you’re reading. I am an elitest after all who thinks college grad natives are familiar with more than 2000 kanji however, so y’know.
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I’ve never seen any Chinese learners or even natives claims they understand Manga or (Manhua in case of Japanese natives). They just know like 10-20% of what they are talking about like “Oh that his mom right? I know this letter”
And I grew up with many of my friends are Chinese bilingual. Even my family (my grand father) migrated from China, but my generation don’t learn Chinese anymore. My bi-lingual friends and my grand father don’t understand manga or Japanese books.
However, you might be right. It just from my perspective and limited experience. I don’t know Chinese anyway.
I think we have more Chinese here.
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True. Understand is probably an exaggeration. I’ve had this conversation with multiple adults, though, and they would swear up and down that they read and understood it, even going so far as to claim that “Japanese is just bad Chinese” and other similar stuff.
The vast majority of Chinese reading manga I’ve seen have been children, who are exactly as you describe. But they’re probably not so solid on their Chinese either, to be fair. I also see a lot of “What does this mean?” “How should I know?” spoken to (and by) their Japanese ethnic friends. It’s entertaining, but I don’t read too much into it.
Probably. I don’t know where you are. It’s not as if there aren’t large Asian communities all over the globe. I can only speak to my experience with the multicultural melting pot nature of the communities where I live/lived.
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@MegaZeroX
very interesting, that’s cool to know.
it makes sense, i was basing it off of my experience from seeing german speakers learn english, but the overlap in suffixes/prefixes is most likely large enough that focused study like that might be unecessary in that case, while being really useful for japanese people learning english.
i personally think focused study when it comes to individual kanji readings or stems is really great, especially how wanikani does it, i was honestly just trying to give an argument why their teacher would be against it, not criticize the method itself.
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Well, as for the latin based words, we have most of them in German, too, we just pronounce them with an English/American accent when speaking English 
But most people do actually know the meaning of those latin (and in some cases greek) prefixes and suffixes (and stems) which enables them to understand the meaning of the words.
Is he Japanese? No offence, but as a Chinese native speaker, I thoroughly disagree. There are so many things I’ve deduced throughout my life based on basic meanings, and sometimes, I did them with components within a kanji in order to get an idea of what unknown/new kanji meant. Some compounds have no clear link to the meanings of their component kanji, and that’s much more common in Japanese because there are so many 当て字 – kanji chosen primarily for their sounds, and not for their meanings – but that doesn’t mean that knowing the basic meanings of those kanji is useless. For that matter, it wouldn’t be surprising if some 当て字 were chosen for the purpose of roughly conveying an equivalent meaning, precisely because there are so many kanji with similar pronunciations, which means many choices are available. For example, 可哀想 is 1000% 当て字, but if you ‘can think (of someone/something) in a sorrowful/sympathising fashion’, then you’re definitely feeling that that person or thing is worthy of pity. In what way does that not help? It’s just slightly weird syntactically, and 哀想 is not an actual verb, but who cares? Can it still help you? The answer is obvious.
Right, and that’s why it can be read ことわり and be used to mean ‘principles’ and even be used in, say, magic spells in Japanese fantasy novels. I mean, seriously? I’m sorry for being sarcastic, but this idea itself just makes me so angry. Single syllables on their own rarely mean anything, sure. Single letters too. However, kanji? Basically the only thing they exist for is representing meaning. That’s something that one has to understand. Don’t believe me? Never mind the fact that Japan imported kanji. Look inside China: some Chinese dialects are so different that they’re no longer mutually intelligible, and yet they can all be written with the same writing system, at least in theory. What do kanji represent then, if not meaning? And if your answer would be ‘they have to be in compounds’, you couldn’t be more wrong: standard modern Mandarin and Japanese use tons of compounds, yes. Chinese dialects other than Mandarin, however, don’t, and Classical Chinese was very poor in compounds. So no. Just no. I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable, but the very idea of rejecting that individual kanji have meaning tortures me as someone who’s lived with and used them for over twenty years (i.e. all my life). That’s utterly wrong. Adding other kanji makes meaning more precise. That’s all. It doesn’t create meaning ex nihilo. There’s rarely a complete, unpredictable change in meaning, with a few exceptions that are mostly 当て字 or phonetic transcriptions of some other variety.
The only thing I agree with in your teacher’s remarks is the idea that perhaps there is no need to study kanji individually. Chinese speakers (and Japanese speakers, I suppose) probably have a few years in school during which kanji are tackled individually on the board with a teacher. Afterwards, kanji are no longer taught individually, and we simply learn words containing new kanji as necessary. Do you need to study the basic meanings of kanji from there? Not really, because you can just remember the new words. However, honestly, when you see a new compound with a familiar kanji in it, even if you’ve never explicitly studied the meaning of that kanji, you’ll have a natural tendency to triangulate that kanji’s meaning based on the other compounds it’s used in. Just thinking of those compounds already gives you an idea of what the new compound means. In other words, you’re effectively using a kanji’s basic meaning to deduce its function in a new compound.
Also, one other thing I want to point out is this: one of the biggest problems with learning ‘basic meanings’ is that sometimes, the basic meanings we’re given are far too restrictive, which is – in my opinion – the wrong approach. Basic meanings should be historically accurate as much as possible, but more importantly, they should be broad. In addition, people studying kanji hoping to make this knowledge useful need to develop one thinking habit: lateral thinking. Without that, all basic meaning knowledge is effectively useless, because you get hung up on why the meaning words you learnt don’t seem to fit, when the truth is that a plethora of ideas related to those words actually fit in context. After all, how do you think so many kanji acquired multiple meanings? It’s almost always a case of lateral thinking and extension of logic. If you want an example… why does 支 appear in compounds related to preparation, support and control? How are they linked to each other in any way? Well, all I can say is… too bad, the problem is probably that your basic meaning is too narrow. The original meaning of 支? ‘Branch’, like on a tree. Branches provide support, and when things branch out, they get distributed, which is a step in organisation and allocation, which are key elements in preparation and control or leadership. If you stick to narrow basic meaning words and don’t apply lateral thinking, then yes, basic meanings are utterly useless. If you know how to apply lateral thinking though… you can collapse all your knowledge related to one kanji into one keyword and still know everything. I’ll leave you to judge how useful or otherwise such a skill is.
To sum up, I don’t think anyone has to learn the basic meanings of new kanji – it’s not like I do a full study of the basic meanings of kanji I’ve only seen in Japanese whenever I see new ones, or go out of my way to see which meanings exist in Japanese but not in Chinese – and it’s not necessarily the most efficient approach to spend tons of time learning basic meaning keywords instead of just roughly picking those up and immediately moving to vocabulary so you can absorb what that meaning keyword really means in context, but paying attention to those basic meanings is by no means useless.
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⠀ 
I wonder why you can see these on a lot of doors in Japan - since they are supposedly just some characters that don’t mean anything on their own 
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I think I also explained there is indeed a type of kanji, which I call level 1, that have a 1 on 1 meaning.
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Um… I think that the latter was the main point of the argument actually. Perhaps it was a bit poorly worded, but from what I understand, the OP’s teacher doesn’t claim that kanji don’t have any meaning or that learning kanji meanings is meaningless, only that for a certain portion of kanji, the meanings get so abstract or rarely used that it makes more sense to learn them as vocabulary. Where you draw the line might be different, but I’d say there are certainly cases where this is true. 押 and 引 are on one end of the scale, but there are also kanji like 挨 and 拶, for example.
With all due respect, you provided an example right after talking about level 3 kanji, so I think it was reasonable to assume that 理 was an example of such a kanji, according to you or your teacher.
I did not and do not mean to be insulting, but I think I’ve already provided an example of why 理 has a fundamental meaning. It is heavily associated with the idea of ‘order’, which manifests itself in various ways, and in multiple compounds. If that was not sufficiently convincing, I’d also like to point out that 可愛い is also completely logical: that which ‘can be loved’ is by definition ‘lovable’, which is similar to ‘adorable’, which therefore means ‘cute’. Exactly the same phrase exists in Chinese and means exactly the same thing. 嫌味 is similar: something that leaves an ‘unpleasant taste’ is ‘nasty’, which can also be extended to related meanings like ‘sarcastic’. As for 皮肉, it fundamentally means ‘skin and flesh’, which also has the meaning ‘surface’ or ‘superficial’, and it seems that this was considered in contrast to understanding the true essence of something in the context of religious/monastic practices, which leads us to the idea of criticism (for example, by claiming that someone else’s understanding is too superficial). However, I can see how that last example’s link to its most common meaning (‘irony/sarcasm’) is hard to see.
When you know that 挨 means ‘to be close to’ or ‘to receive/suffer/take’ and 拶 involves the ideas of closeness and pressure, they still make sense. What happens when you greet someone or respond to someone in conversation in order to show you’re listening? You approach each other, and one pushes the conversation forward, while another receives that ‘pressure’ and responds. 挨拶 is not an entirely illogical compound.
Also, while that may have been OP’s main point, OP also asked for opinions on whether or not it’s true that ‘basic meaning’ knowledge is useless. As I think my responses to OP’s examples above have just shown, the answer is still no. Among all the compounds I know, only in very few cases are individual meanings completely irrelevant. As a final thought… if it were really that useless, why is it that one of the question types in the Nihongo Kentei Level 1 (the highest level of a Japanese test for native speakers) is ‘choose the compound in which the meaning of the one kanji common to all these compounds is different’? It’s an important part of understanding Japanese and kanji.
EDIT: to be clear, I did not say (and do not think) the best way to learn such things is the way people do it on WK or via RtK – learning meanings first in isolation, which I think isn’t as good as learning in context – but I still think it’s important to be aware of the existence of such meanings.
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Yes, I can see your reasoning, but I still learned them as “the first part of 挨拶” and “the second part of 挨拶”, respectively. And that’s the crux of the argument, really. Is it enough to just learn the basic usage of those kanji or do you need to understand them separately to make them work just for that one compound?
Knowing what the compound means as a whole is sufficient for just that compound. But if you want a more complete understanding and the ability to intuitively tackle new words, you need basic meanings. You can develop a feel for them simply by learning compounds, yes, but you need to be aware of the fact that individual meanings exist for that to happen, otherwise you’ll just retain them as monolithic objects in your memory. That’s all.
PS: for the sake of fairness, let me quote the original post. I was responding to this claim:
The question is one of ‘absolute’ uselessness. I am saying that that is not the case. Nothing more.
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Yeah, that’s not a difficult argument to shoot down, when it’s that extreme.
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That is true. I only know those kanji in the word 挨拶 and nowhere else, but it is entirely possible that as my knowledge expands, I will need to study them more thoroughly. But I figure that’s a bridge I will cross when this time comes and for now my needs are more than served by knowing just this one word.
Well, as I said, I think the OP was worded somewhat poorly, but I took it to mean “for certain kanji” in order to give a benefit of doubt and tackle the strongest possible version of the argument.
Yeah, the word useless gets thrown around a lot, and when taken literally basically none of the arguments stand up. This word is useless, this kanji is useless, etc.
I think we can all appreciate that from a learner’s standpoint, the question can instead be asked as “is this practical”. From a practicality standpoint, it seems like most people agree that for some kanji, yeah, learning them through words is totally a good idea.
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I don’t think I agree, personally. There are plenty of words where knowing the root kanji won’t help you, sure, just like there are plenty of words in English where knowing the latin root won’t help. But as a couple people have said already, there are also plenty of words that do make sense if you understand the root kanji, not to mention that yeah, mnemonics are a thing that I’m sure all of us here are familiar with.
Also, I’ve definitely had times where I could not for the life of me remember the reading of a word, but I looked at the individual kanji and could remember what it meant. And unless I’m trying to learn Japanese at some sort of emergency break-neck pace where every second counts against me, I don’t really think it’s gonna hurt to have a more well-rounded understanding of the language and its building blocks.