Lesson Notes
Unlock In-Depth Explanations & Exclusive Takeaways with Printable Lesson Notes
Unlock Lesson Notes and Transcripts for every single lesson. Sign Up for a Free Lifetime Account and Get 7 Days of Premium Access.
Learn the basics about kanji script
Unlock Lesson Notes and Transcripts for every single lesson. Sign Up for a Free Lifetime Account and Get 7 Days of Premium Access.
Hi! |
Welcome to the Japanese Kanji video series. |
My name is Alisha and I'm joined by... |
Hi everyone. |
I'm Risa! |
In this series, we'll teach you the best method for learning Japanese kanji and teach you some of the most useful kanji characters along the way! |
That's right! |
And we're here to help guide you through your journey. |
In this first episode, you'll learn exactly what kanji is and why you need it, the best method of learning kanji, and about the building blocks that make up a kanji character. |
Okay Risa, let's get right into it. |
First, let's explain what kanji is exactly. |
What is kanji? |
It's quite simple actually. |
Kanji is the use of Chinese characters, in Japanese writing. |
So, Japanese actually uses Chinese characters in part of its writing. |
That's because Japanese writing actually originated from China right? |
Right. |
A long time ago Japan only used Chinese characters. |
Today, we use three different scripts together to write Japanese. |
Those three scripts are: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. |
So for comparison English only uses one script, the 'English alphabet', but Japanese uses three different ones. |
Kanji is the interpretation of Chinese characters into Japanese. |
And hiragana and katakana are scripts created after by Japanese people; you can kind of think of the latter two as the "Japanese alphabet". We refer to them as... |
かな。 |
Learning kana is easy, it's just like learning the alphabet. |
You learn a limited number of letters and using those letters, you can put them together to form words. |
On their own though, they don't really hold any meaning. |
Kanji however, is different. |
There are thousands of them. |
And hidden beneath each one lies a secret message. |
One kanji character can say more than a hundred of these letters because it represents an idea. |
A wealth of meaning can be uncovered from this single character. |
The concept and meaning however, will only reveal itself if you know where to look. |
And this is the true power of kanji. |
Okay, now that we know what kanji is, how do we actually start learning kanji? |
How to learn kanji? |
There are many ways to start learning kanji. |
The most obvious way, although not the most effective, is to simply memorize them. |
Like learning the alphabet, or learning new words, you can start learning kanji by memorizing a few each day, every day, until you've memorized them all. |
Unlike learning the alphabet however, which consists of only a small set of letters, there are thousands and thousands of kanji characters, each with their own unique concept and meaning. |
And let's pray that you don't forget a few along the way. |
Memorizing each individual kanji one by one just isn't practical. |
There's simply too many of them. |
You can memorize the alphabet in a few days, but memorizing every kanji there is? |
Let's just say that you'll be at it for a very, very long time. |
Thankfully, there's a more effective way to learn kanji. |
And that's by learning the "radicals." |
What are radicals? |
A kanji character can be broken down into smaller components. |
These smaller components are called 'radicals'. |
You can think of radicals simply as "the building blocks of kanji." |
Every kanji character has at least one radical. |
Sometimes, the radical itself can be a kanji on its own. |
And several radicals put together could be another kanji. |
By learning radicals, the building blocks of kanji, you can understand the general meaning of kanji characters you've yet to learn. |
Instead of learning individual kanji characters one at a time, we essentially learn the building blocks instead. You only have to learn a few radicals to be able to read some of the most common kanji characters out there. |
In this series, we'll teach you 10 useful radicals that'll get you started learning kanji quickly and easily. |
We've covered quite a lot of things already, so why don't we wrap up the first lesson and recap on what we've learned. |
In this lesson, you learned that Kanji is the interpretation of Chinese characters into Japanese writing. |
Kanji are characters that represent an idea, and therefore contain a wealth of meaning. |
And the quickest and most effective way to learn Kanji is by watching this series at JapanesePod101.com, where we teach the building blocks of kanji - radicals. |
In the next lesson, we'll teach you one of the most common, useful, and basic radicals used in kanji - the person radical. |
See you in the next lesson. Bye! |
Bye~! |
Comments
Hide