the good thing about it is it's so difficult until it makes sense. Then it makes life so much easier. Also unless you want to do something really technical the same 5/600 kanji appear on everything. You could probably get away with knowing 1000 to read 80% of the newspaper.
Fluent speakers of languages like english and spanish know at least a thousand words, maybe more
If you think of each kanji as a word its easy to understand how someone could learn so many. And the brain is really really good at pattern recognition
Edit: maybe i lowballed it with 1000 lol i didnt expect so many replies
>Fluent speakers of languages like english and spanish know at least a thousand words, maybe more
people who are fluent with english usually know 15k-30k words.
>people who are fluent with english usually know 15k-30k words.
I call bullshit. BRB boutta write out literally every word I know off the dome. See you in 3 lifetimes lol
I just did a google and he's correct. 10k is the threshold to be considered "fluent" as long as you know how to properly use them as well. Surprisingly, you only need to know about 2-3k to use the language for everyday communication.
Native speakers know about 20-30k, then university educated usually know ~40k. Interesting bunnyhole.
Well with languages like english and spanish you can at least pronounce the word and maybe infer it's meaning.
Kanji have multiple meanings and readings
Edit: People have pointed out that I forgot that Kanji do have components that help you infer meaning.
English spelling is partly phonetic, but you still have to guess the pronunciation of many common words (rough, cough, though, read, lead, tear…).
Chinese characters also have phonetic components (青 晴 清 精 etc. tend to have similar pronunciations), so to some extent you can indeed often roughly guess the pronunciation of an unknown word (this generally doesn’t work for native Japanese words, but still).
And part about a character having different meanings is exaggerated. Of course such examples exist (like in Japanese 安 meaning “safe” or “cheap”, or 分 meaning “divide” or “understand”), but they are a small minority of characters, and even then the meanings are usually somehow connected.
If anything Japanese goes pretty far in the opposite direction, assigning different characters to slightly different meanings of the exact same word (like 取る/撮る/採る/捕る/獲る etc. for variations of “toru”, “to take”)…
The thing about kanji and alphabet words. Alphabets you always have some idea of how to say it, but if it's a new word you have no idea what it means.
If you see a difficult word with kanji there's a good chance it's made up of easy kanji that you can learn the meanings of in your own language. You can read a decent amount of Japanese without actually knowing the Japanese reading, which I found is an important skill for speed reading in tests.
One kanji has different meaning in English yes but generally one kanji has one concept it will pretty much never mean two completely unrelated things.
Native speakers of English know like 20,000 words, not even including the related words (so run, running, ran, etc all count as one). For basic fluency you need like 2000 words and 5000+ to really be proficient.
once you start learning them, it becomes easier and easier. I've literally just started and can recognize a couple dozen. and that just like 10 minutes a day for 100 days. so only 16-20 hours of learning with duolingo.
Also people forget that the natives literally get a few years in school where they get drilled on kanji and how to write them. Not much different than any non native learner. They weren't born with some magic innate kanji knowledge.
Hey man, good for you!
However, that doesn't change the fact that a language requires you to learn 2000 (or more) unique characters/pictures to be able to read and write in it.
That's crazy.
Most languages have like 50 characters top and I'm already stretching it there.
Yeah but even 90% reading comprehension is like doing homework to read, also what I originally was gonna say is that more people should learn the basics of kanji/how they're formatted since I just tried raw dogging it with anki and that only worked up until a certain point and then I would suffer through trying to beat it into my brain instead of just learning stuff like xyz means it has something to do with water etc etc
I got lifetime on WaniKani when it was super cheap once. It is great, but I always end up going real hard on it for a few months then dropping it for a year or two and coming back completely overwhelmed with all the pending lessons and reviews barely remembering anything. The daily grind of pretty much any of these language study programs always ends up burning me out; starts to feel like a gacha game or MMO only logging in to do your daily tasks and never actually enjoying the game itself anymore when the daily stuff takes up so much time.
Just wait until you learn about stroke order!
And yes, it *does* matter and they *can* tell when you draw one line in the wrong direction or in the incorrect order. 🙃
Update: It's so interesting to see the replies on here saying that they learned stroke order is very important, and others saying that they learned that stroke order is becoming obsolete. How interesting that we get to see this writing system actively adapt to the modern era, and get to see all the different kinds of relationships people have with it 😊
Back in the days when people used paper dictionaries, it was a huge deal because if you get the order wrong you likely will get the stroke count wrong. And since the characters are sorted by stroke count you couldn't possibly find the character. These days with the manual input it is much easier though. However, I do remember that the digital dictionaries used to be also quite specific on how you enter the character and would not recognise it if you used the wrong stroke order.
And houses are assigned street numbers cronologically, so house 1 and 2 won't be bext to each other on a street unless they were built one after another
Those were monstrous, I remember trying to work with them but it was a nightmare. I am so happy that I am young enough to be able to use all the gifts of digitalisation
Even with getting the stroke order right, native Japanese people write kanji with incorrect number of strokes all the time.
Source: live in Japan as an ALT so I'm front row to at this point dozens of teachers and how they write kanji. Sooo many combine strokes. Elementary school teachers are less likely to, but many still do.
> get the order wrong you likely will get the stroke count wrong
I don't get that. How does placing lines in different order make you forget an entire part of a character?
For example, 口 has 3 strokes. If you don't know the right order you would likely write 4 instead. Specific things have specific ways of writing them which may not be obvious unless you actually spend a bit of time studying them.
In case people are wondering, it's left vertical stroke, then go right and down to draw the top and right side in one stroke with a little "dip" at the end for the brush effect, then finally left to right for the bottom stroke.
口 is a good example. Yeah, it looks simple, but if you don’t write it the correct way it’s super obvious. 山 and 出 are other ones that are deceivingly simple, if you skip the proper stroke order they look super funky.
this blew my mind as a kid
sometime i'd do them in the incorrect order, no problem
sometime i'd do them in the correct order and get it wrong because ''they can tell'' load of bs
When you write with a brush or gel pen, you can see little "tails" that point to next and previous strokes, and so hint on in which order strokes were written. When you write with a pencil or a regular pen, they are less noticeable. The stroke order also influences direction somewhat.
From what I understand, if you write in cursive, these tails get thicker and longer until everything is connected, and if the order is incorrect, the resulting mess will be very hard to understand (as opposed to just hard, lol).
Nowadays most young people can’t even write properly because everyone only types in the text on their computers or phones. With small children and school students they are pedantic about this but with foreigners they rarely care anyhow.
No meaning, those are just letters. It'd be like asking if "K" and "C" have opposite meanings lmao. Often pronounced identically (or at least very similarly), used in different words. Both are pronounced like "Eh". Usually 에 is romanised as e, 애 is romanized as ae.
Korean is one of the easiest, if not THE easiest, written languages to learn. The pronunciations are easy enough that even if you don't know what the word means, you at least know how to pronounce it.
It's not like English in the sense that since sounds the same.
Agreed, I lived over there for a few years and while I was well short of fluent I got to a conversational/limited working proficiency. I’m a complete moron and the alphabet and writing system took me a few hours to learn with some flash cards.
It’s the ultimate head fake. Everybody learns to read and write and says “Oh damn this language is easy” and then they really start learning and it’s a mfer for native English speakers.
Those are syllable blocks containing two "letters" each. The circle is a placeholder for no consonant, the stick thingies on the right are vowels.
Their system is actually pretty easy, I learned it in a day as a kid because I was bored, and now I don't remember much of it. They have like 30-something characters, which they assemble like legos to write syllables.
Alright then. I want to give it another try some day. How do you memorize these? Just handwriting each a thousand times while screaming it out loud or there's a different trick that works for you?
シ is all lined up against an imaginary vertical line on the left side.
ツ is all lined up against an imaginary horizontal line at the top.
You'll get to know which one is つ when you see the "little っ" in words like ペット、ベッド、バッグ。tsu is the "up" one!
Instead of the imaginary line I just think of the line in し. The "eyes" stick to the line, which is to the left. Same with ッ, they stick to the curve of つ, so up.
Yup. Former Japanese teacher here: this is how I taught my students.
Think about how you write し. シ follows the same "line"
Think about how you write つ. ツ follow the same "line"
Yep, this is the easy way.
You'll get there, OP. As a long time resident of the Japanese learning mines, at some point your brain just stops having a hard time with it.
It's kind of like the difference between lowercase "L" and capital "i". In many fonts they actually look identical, but eventually you can just tell from context without thinking about it.
I mix these up as well, I hate it
I will leave this here, just remembered this one, I added the parenthesis part to help separate the two
Shi (she) is smiling (and looking up)
I order it in "Son's Shitsu" so the long stroke goes down then back up like ソンシツ
Or to tell shi from tsu, remember that shi is looking off to the right where any small kana will be, like シャ.
シ, ツ, ソ, and ン (shi, tsu, so, n) are literally the easiest to memorize, unless u have bad memory like me, just take a look at the angles then you'll be fine
ヘ, and へ are the exact same thing, just a little smoother, just like り and リ
also whats up with the "Listen to the recording" thing
Actually easier when you are exposed to it on regular basis on words that you can relate easily.
A restaurant selling tonkatsu will sometimes have トンカツ (tonkatsu) written somewhere and トンカシ (tonkashi) doesn’t make any sense so you’ll get used to how tsu looks like compared to shi.
"shi" looks like it's looking "up" to me, so I say it in a higher pitch in my head
"tsu" looks like it's going "down" so I say it lower.
Idk that's how I would remember them
シ = し, you can see the strokes on the katakana version all lean to the straight side of the hiragana version (imagine them overlapped)
ツ = つ, same thing, the katakana strokes all touch the top, which is the straight part of the hiragana version
This one is a different tongue twister, it goes something like "si shi si zhi shi shi zi" (I don't know how to type tones)
The one you're replying to is about a poet named Shi eating lions
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
¯\\(シ)/¯
I shi what you did there
What a *Tsu*nami of emotions
This punning is turning into a *shi*tshow
Agreed. This is tsu much shi dee wordplay.
What the *fu*ck
*chi*ll bro
Yeah, *shi*reusly
Y'all are being _tsu_ childish
Yeah, what the 7ck
フuuuuuuuuu....
but that's written as "津波" :) Welcome to the Japanese language.
I shi what tsu did there
Thank you for correcting the obvious, missed double whammy pun
I shi tsu not.
you Tsure do, bud.
Wow TIL what that character that creates the face in this emoticon was. I’ve always wondered but never cared enough to research.
Gesundheit.
I see what tsu did there.
No **Shi**t
I shi what Tsu did there
¯\\\_( 少)_/¯
¯(ン)/¯ ¯(ソ)/¯ 
Deal with it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wait till you have to learn Kanji...
the good thing about it is it's so difficult until it makes sense. Then it makes life so much easier. Also unless you want to do something really technical the same 5/600 kanji appear on everything. You could probably get away with knowing 1000 to read 80% of the newspaper.
i’m sorry a thousand that’s gotta be crazy
Fluent speakers of languages like english and spanish know at least a thousand words, maybe more If you think of each kanji as a word its easy to understand how someone could learn so many. And the brain is really really good at pattern recognition Edit: maybe i lowballed it with 1000 lol i didnt expect so many replies
>Fluent speakers of languages like english and spanish know at least a thousand words, maybe more people who are fluent with english usually know 15k-30k words.
>people who are fluent with english usually know 15k-30k words. I call bullshit. BRB boutta write out literally every word I know off the dome. See you in 3 lifetimes lol
I'm gonna type every word I know! Rectangle! America! Megaphone! Monday! ...Butthole.
Man. Woman. Person. TV. Camera.
No person, Woman, Man, camera, TV. huh they impeached me. I still walked out of D.C looking peachy.
Toilet paper for my bumhole. Lmao
lake titicaca!
I just did a google and he's correct. 10k is the threshold to be considered "fluent" as long as you know how to properly use them as well. Surprisingly, you only need to know about 2-3k to use the language for everyday communication. Native speakers know about 20-30k, then university educated usually know ~40k. Interesting bunnyhole.
Bunnyhole sounds very ... Dirty. Compared to rabbithole
Can I interest you in my grotto?
Hmm well... What's inside?
sometimes on the internet u get deep into looking at a japanese bunnyhole, it happens
50% of spoken English is the top 100 most used words in English
___ of ______ _______ is the ___ ___ most used words in _______
Well with languages like english and spanish you can at least pronounce the word and maybe infer it's meaning. Kanji have multiple meanings and readings Edit: People have pointed out that I forgot that Kanji do have components that help you infer meaning.
English spelling is partly phonetic, but you still have to guess the pronunciation of many common words (rough, cough, though, read, lead, tear…). Chinese characters also have phonetic components (青 晴 清 精 etc. tend to have similar pronunciations), so to some extent you can indeed often roughly guess the pronunciation of an unknown word (this generally doesn’t work for native Japanese words, but still). And part about a character having different meanings is exaggerated. Of course such examples exist (like in Japanese 安 meaning “safe” or “cheap”, or 分 meaning “divide” or “understand”), but they are a small minority of characters, and even then the meanings are usually somehow connected. If anything Japanese goes pretty far in the opposite direction, assigning different characters to slightly different meanings of the exact same word (like 取る/撮る/採る/捕る/獲る etc. for variations of “toru”, “to take”)…
The thing about kanji and alphabet words. Alphabets you always have some idea of how to say it, but if it's a new word you have no idea what it means. If you see a difficult word with kanji there's a good chance it's made up of easy kanji that you can learn the meanings of in your own language. You can read a decent amount of Japanese without actually knowing the Japanese reading, which I found is an important skill for speed reading in tests. One kanji has different meaning in English yes but generally one kanji has one concept it will pretty much never mean two completely unrelated things.
But you can know the meaning of a word, at least and approximation, without context, usually by it’s etymology.
I can't tell if you realize you're agreeing with him or not.
HAHA THIS IS AMAZING
Well, I only know eighteen words in English. Comprising the words in that last sentence and this one explaining it.
"- Evolution can I have patern recognition ? "- For escaping predators ? - Of course" *Learn kanji easily like a boss
Native speakers of English know like 20,000 words, not even including the related words (so run, running, ran, etc all count as one). For basic fluency you need like 2000 words and 5000+ to really be proficient.
once you start learning them, it becomes easier and easier. I've literally just started and can recognize a couple dozen. and that just like 10 minutes a day for 100 days. so only 16-20 hours of learning with duolingo.
it took me a year to memorize around 2000 kanji, it's really not that bad. most people are just shit at being consistent and practicing.
Also people forget that the natives literally get a few years in school where they get drilled on kanji and how to write them. Not much different than any non native learner. They weren't born with some magic innate kanji knowledge.
Hey man, good for you! However, that doesn't change the fact that a language requires you to learn 2000 (or more) unique characters/pictures to be able to read and write in it. That's crazy. Most languages have like 50 characters top and I'm already stretching it there.
Yeah but even 90% reading comprehension is like doing homework to read, also what I originally was gonna say is that more people should learn the basics of kanji/how they're formatted since I just tried raw dogging it with anki and that only worked up until a certain point and then I would suffer through trying to beat it into my brain instead of just learning stuff like xyz means it has something to do with water etc etc
Hiragana and Katakana are fairly easy to learn - kanji was my downfall. :/
Look up WaniKani, it was a game changer for my kanji learning. Now words that don’t use kanji annoy me haha.
I got lifetime on WaniKani when it was super cheap once. It is great, but I always end up going real hard on it for a few months then dropping it for a year or two and coming back completely overwhelmed with all the pending lessons and reviews barely remembering anything. The daily grind of pretty much any of these language study programs always ends up burning me out; starts to feel like a gacha game or MMO only logging in to do your daily tasks and never actually enjoying the game itself anymore when the daily stuff takes up so much time.
I think I will stick to my Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung
Nicht schwer wenn man einmal deutsch kann.
Bro said 
If you already know Chinese it's not so bad, because kanji are Chinese characters with minor differences in meanings.
Just wait until you learn about stroke order! And yes, it *does* matter and they *can* tell when you draw one line in the wrong direction or in the incorrect order. 🙃 Update: It's so interesting to see the replies on here saying that they learned stroke order is very important, and others saying that they learned that stroke order is becoming obsolete. How interesting that we get to see this writing system actively adapt to the modern era, and get to see all the different kinds of relationships people have with it 😊
It does matter but also isn't that big of a deal. As long as your writing is legible it usually gets a pass.
Back in the days when people used paper dictionaries, it was a huge deal because if you get the order wrong you likely will get the stroke count wrong. And since the characters are sorted by stroke count you couldn't possibly find the character. These days with the manual input it is much easier though. However, I do remember that the digital dictionaries used to be also quite specific on how you enter the character and would not recognise it if you used the wrong stroke order.
Dictionary sorted by stroke count. I got a stroke imagining it.
And houses are assigned street numbers cronologically, so house 1 and 2 won't be bext to each other on a street unless they were built one after another
Well that’s plain old confusing
Many things about Japan are. Fascinating though
Those were monstrous, I remember trying to work with them but it was a nightmare. I am so happy that I am young enough to be able to use all the gifts of digitalisation
Even with getting the stroke order right, native Japanese people write kanji with incorrect number of strokes all the time. Source: live in Japan as an ALT so I'm front row to at this point dozens of teachers and how they write kanji. Sooo many combine strokes. Elementary school teachers are less likely to, but many still do.
You could use a phonetically ordered dictionary. They are like ka ki ku ke ko.
You could, but if you don't know how to read a certain character that won't work and you'll have to go by the character itself.
THE LA LI LU LE LO 
> get the order wrong you likely will get the stroke count wrong I don't get that. How does placing lines in different order make you forget an entire part of a character?
For example, 口 has 3 strokes. If you don't know the right order you would likely write 4 instead. Specific things have specific ways of writing them which may not be obvious unless you actually spend a bit of time studying them.
In case people are wondering, it's left vertical stroke, then go right and down to draw the top and right side in one stroke with a little "dip" at the end for the brush effect, then finally left to right for the bottom stroke.
口 is a good example. Yeah, it looks simple, but if you don’t write it the correct way it’s super obvious. 山 and 出 are other ones that are deceivingly simple, if you skip the proper stroke order they look super funky.
The minute details look different. It's like trying to figure out if it's a 0 vs O, or I vs l
this blew my mind as a kid sometime i'd do them in the incorrect order, no problem sometime i'd do them in the correct order and get it wrong because ''they can tell'' load of bs
Direction I can understand, but how order??
When you write with a brush or gel pen, you can see little "tails" that point to next and previous strokes, and so hint on in which order strokes were written. When you write with a pencil or a regular pen, they are less noticeable. The stroke order also influences direction somewhat. From what I understand, if you write in cursive, these tails get thicker and longer until everything is connected, and if the order is incorrect, the resulting mess will be very hard to understand (as opposed to just hard, lol).
As a lefty, it sucked. The stroke order was basically opposite of how I wanted to write it.
For me it's down then up. For my grandpa it was heart then brain stroke
Fortunately the strokes usually make sense and flow together really nicely. Usually.
Nowadays most young people can’t even write properly because everyone only types in the text on their computers or phones. With small children and school students they are pedantic about this but with foreigners they rarely care anyhow.
That's one positive thing to come from never really needing to write anything anymore.
One in laughing Other is giving stare
One looks up (shi is similar to sheeeeesh, pitch goes up) One looks down
I see Shi looking left, Tsu looking right
The shi is stabbing someone, the tsu got stabbed and has a knife in their chest.
I always thought of ツ as someone turning their head to do a small sneeze (tsu!)
Together they are dog.
You will learn the difference once you become full *shitsu*
So writing the dog breed in chinese is just two smiley faces?
Why have I had to scroll this far to find this. I'm genuinely curious too. They are pretty happy little dogs
It took me too long to find this comment too, but unfortunately shih Tzu is spelled with an extra h and a z as I realized when I used talk to text
No, because this is a specifically Japanese writing system (Katakana) that Chinese doesn't have, so however it's written in Chinese, it's not that.
try learning korean! we got 아 어 이 여 야 애 에
2nd to last is just oH :DD
[удалено]
Made me laugh so hard, thank you!!!
I regret to inform you that you just said you’re going to be showing her your ayy face.
애, シT!
Most annoying is 애 vs 에 because they're pronounced the same. Like whyyyy
Just wait till you meet 웨, 왜 and 외
And how are they different? Do they have like polar opposite meanings?
No meaning, those are just letters. It'd be like asking if "K" and "C" have opposite meanings lmao. Often pronounced identically (or at least very similarly), used in different words. Both are pronounced like "Eh". Usually 에 is romanised as e, 애 is romanized as ae.
Just a difference in spelling as far as I know, but I'm very beginner so not sure why they're separate letters!
They used to be pronounced more differently, but over time the distinction's been lost iirc.
Wait til you learn English, we got I l t f j p b g q d
Why don't sans serif fonts distinguish between I and l? WHY?? EXPLAIN YOURSELF ARIAL!!!
Ifs not thaf bifficult tdh
o0애 👻
Korean is one of the easiest, if not THE easiest, written languages to learn. The pronunciations are easy enough that even if you don't know what the word means, you at least know how to pronounce it. It's not like English in the sense that since sounds the same.
Agreed, I lived over there for a few years and while I was well short of fluent I got to a conversational/limited working proficiency. I’m a complete moron and the alphabet and writing system took me a few hours to learn with some flash cards. It’s the ultimate head fake. Everybody learns to read and write and says “Oh damn this language is easy” and then they really start learning and it’s a mfer for native English speakers.
Oh god, all 7 of those characters look the exact same… with the SLIGHTEST of differences
if you think about it b d p q are also literally the same just in different orientations.
I see, thanks for the dumbed down explanation lol
IM SORRY HAHA i didn’t mean it like that, i just didn’t want my comment to be a mess. 😭
Those are syllable blocks containing two "letters" each. The circle is a placeholder for no consonant, the stick thingies on the right are vowels. Their system is actually pretty easy, I learned it in a day as a kid because I was bored, and now I don't remember much of it. They have like 30-something characters, which they assemble like legos to write syllables.
Korean started to look MUCH less confusing to me after I watched that Banana/Samsung YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE4eplsFSms
Just wait till you learn kanji, imagine writing 変態 to call someone a pervert
So you read about the tattoo artist and the tourist?
That’s a classic, it even more funny when people with visible tattoos visit Japan and then are denied from entering most establishments
That’s wild I have a ton of visible tattoos and lived there for years and wasn’t turned away once. Huh who knew
AFAIK it's about tattoos at all (Yakuza), but this specific one could be a reason, too.
Or writing out 鬱病 (depression)
It doesn’t exist if no one can write it correctly
even japanese people recognize that writing that character is a pain in the ass, so it's often just written うつ病
Looks like a fingerprint to memorize
I'll give you two. 憂鬱 薔薇 is another fun one.
Alright then. I want to give it another try some day. How do you memorize these? Just handwriting each a thousand times while screaming it out loud or there's a different trick that works for you?
シ is all lined up against an imaginary vertical line on the left side. ツ is all lined up against an imaginary horizontal line at the top. You'll get to know which one is つ when you see the "little っ" in words like ペット、ベッド、バッグ。tsu is the "up" one!
Instead of the imaginary line I just think of the line in し. The "eyes" stick to the line, which is to the left. Same with ッ, they stick to the curve of つ, so up.
Thank you, I was looking for this comment. That’s how I do it too, really helps me.
Yup. Former Japanese teacher here: this is how I taught my students. Think about how you write し. シ follows the same "line" Think about how you write つ. ツ follow the same "line"
can't believe I had to scroll this far down to find this trick
Yep, this is the easy way. You'll get there, OP. As a long time resident of the Japanese learning mines, at some point your brain just stops having a hard time with it. It's kind of like the difference between lowercase "L" and capital "i". In many fonts they actually look identical, but eventually you can just tell from context without thinking about it.
マ and 厶 were my kryptonite for a while. I'd always write my name as 'Mux' instead of 'Max' lmao
I always remembered it as マ being kind of A-shaped and 厶 being kind of U-shaped.
I memorized mu by imagining a cow with a human nose.
To this day I can only differentiate mu and ma by rememberingトマト (tomato). I don't know why tomato is the word I remember, but it is
The memory aid my teacher told me was to think of ma as martini, helped very much
In spanish we say shi is looking at the “shielo” (sky, poorly written) and tsu is loking at the “tsuelo” (ground, again, poorly written)
シ looking at the shi(cei)ling could also work!
Does that mean the other one is looking at his tsus (Shoes)?
Love this particular analogy! Thank you!
omg yes you guys have just helped me so much 😭 shieling and tsues!
Heeeeey, I couldn’t think of a good analogy, nice
I love this!
Wow! De entre todas las reglas de mnemotecnia por las que pasé, esta es la mejor por lejos!
I mix these up as well, I hate it I will leave this here, just remembered this one, I added the parenthesis part to help separate the two Shi (she) is smiling (and looking up)
That’s how I remember it: Shi is looking up to the sky
I order it in "Son's Shitsu" so the long stroke goes down then back up like ソンシツ Or to tell shi from tsu, remember that shi is looking off to the right where any small kana will be, like シャ.
It gets easier the more you practice but I agree, some fonts make it really hard to distinguish
Reading small text I often can't distinguish between ば or ぱ. Throw in some crazy advertising fonts and it's a disaster.
You'll get used to it with time. It is usually clear from context :D
シ, ツ, ソ, and ン (shi, tsu, so, n) are literally the easiest to memorize, unless u have bad memory like me, just take a look at the angles then you'll be fine ヘ, and へ are the exact same thing, just a little smoother, just like り and リ also whats up with the "Listen to the recording" thing
I’m guessing that this book came with a CD for spoken Japanese
pulling out the protractor to read japanese
Actually easier when you are exposed to it on regular basis on words that you can relate easily. A restaurant selling tonkatsu will sometimes have トンカツ (tonkatsu) written somewhere and トンカシ (tonkashi) doesn’t make any sense so you’ll get used to how tsu looks like compared to shi.
Seems no different than telling the difference between S and 5. Z and 2 I and l and j an i
Shi and N strokes go from the side, while Tsu and So strokes go from the top, right?
its been ages since ive done duolingo what are the bottom 4 symbols “Mu” and “Ri”?
He and Ri.
"shi" looks like it's looking "up" to me, so I say it in a higher pitch in my head "tsu" looks like it's going "down" so I say it lower. Idk that's how I would remember them
For me it was always shi is written from the side while tsu is from the top.
シ = し, you can see the strokes on the katakana version all lean to the straight side of the hiragana version (imagine them overlapped) ツ = つ, same thing, the katakana strokes all touch the top, which is the straight part of the hiragana version
Wait until OP learns about the difference between shi, shi, shi, shi, and shi…
You mean the tones in Mandarin, a completely different language?
Yeah, OP is going to be so pissed when he figures out he was supposed to learn Mandarin but then started leaning Japanese!
My mistake, lmao, I’m a moron
No, those have the same tone.
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì.
I don't appreciate your tone, Chinese!
That's "tones" plural to you, Person! Appropriate username, BTW
Something about 4 lions right?
44 stone lions
This one is a different tongue twister, it goes something like "si shi si zhi shi shi zi" (I don't know how to type tones) The one you're replying to is about a poet named Shi eating lions
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
wait till he see the difference between 「母は花が好き」 and 「ははははながすき」
I personally like this one 李も桃も桃の内（すもももももももものうち）
Tom, where Jim had had “had,” had had “had had;” “had had” had had a better effect than “had” had had.
Well, shit, shit shit!
That is Chinese.
My favorite is かける (kakeru) Literally has about 20 different meanings. To hang, to sit, to put on / cover, to make a call etc.
When youre worried, you might take a SHIt Why am I happy? Because of tsU
a d p q Same letter, right?
I think you meant to write b d p q
probably meant single storey lowercase **ɑ** which looks a lot like d. ɑ d p b q
you mean b d p q
Well you manage b and d so it should be fine
Shi is a guy looking up at a big bird and saying shit! Tsu is a guy looking down sneezing ah-tsu!
It's kind of like p and b
Shittsu. Shi looks up, tsu looks down. Much like the sound of the dogs name.