#And then there's Korean's hangul writing system. It's SO BEAUTIFUL. Actual marvel of linguist engineering

[solradguy]

Do you think one could attain decent-ish ability to read Japanese just by studying kanji? Specifically asking because the kanji learnin' service "wanikani" is the single Japanese resource that works best with my brain, but then there are separate resources for grammar and vocab and and and.....

You will get REAAAALLLLLYYY far knowing only the kanji but you're going to have to know hiragana and katakana at some point too. Tofugu, the company that did Wanikani, has two mnemonics-based guides for the kana that are basically Wanikani Lite. They're how I learned the kana and I swear by them.

Here's hiragana: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

And katakana: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/

Hiragana are especially vital to learning kanji; you won't be able to use 99% of Japanese-English dictionaries without them. BUT they're pretty easy and the rules for using them are consistent. You won't have to remember any irregular exceptions for any of them.

I haven't tried it yet, but I've heard really good things about the Crystal Hunters manga series as a fun/low stress way to learning Japanese vocab and grammar. It eases the reader into new concepts and then repeats them throughout the chapter so you remember them. There are free vocab and study guides/lists for each chapter too. Might be worth checking out once you get some kanji and the kana under your belt? The first book is also free.

Official site: https://crystalhuntersmanga.com/

Good luck!!

#asks #Japanese takes like a bajillion hours forever to learn because of the 2200+ kanji lol........... #But it's sooooo consistent grammatically and with the spelling. I love it #Kinda spoiled me tbh. I look at English now and I'm like #'Why can't you be more like this. Why are you such a mess. Get your act together' #And then there's Korean's hangul writing system. It's SO BEAUTIFUL. Actual marvel of linguist engineering #The Japanese lexicon is also a lot smaller than English's too. Which is both a blessing and a curse #Less words = quicker to learn. BUUUUUTTTT less words that mesh well with English. Translation is hard!!! #Holy fuck. Ok so Wikipedia says that the English language has 755`865 words as recorded by Wiktionary #and Japanese has 500`000 according to Nihon Kokugo Daijiten #BUT THEN KOREAN. ACCORDING TO ONLINE DICTIONARY URIMALSAEM (open source dictionary) HAS 1`149`538 WORDS #The biggest lexicon is Tamil's with 1`516`952 unique headwords as recorded by online dictionary Sorkuvai #That's absolutely nuts #I got massively distracted. Enjoy my word vomit tags