There are three basic types of variations: variant kanji for a word, variant components for a kanji, and variant proportions within a kanji. In almost all cases, there is essentially no difference in meaning.

Kanji variants

くう with 口偏

くう without 口偏

There are multiple kanji that can be used to write some words. くう can be written as both 喰う and 食う with essentially no difference in meaning. However, there are also many words that can be written using completely different kanji. In these cases, there is usually a slight difference in meaning. E.g., さびしい can be written as 寂しい or 淋しい. Normal Japanese fonts have all these variant characters.

Component variants

贖 with 四

贖 with 罒

逞 with ⻍

逞 with ⻌

Sometimes there are variations within components of a kanji. Normal computer fonts only have one variant available and there is basically no difference in meaning. In the above examples, the component below 士 in 贖 can be written as 四 or 罒 (like a 目 turned on its side in case your computer can’t display this character). The radical in 逞 can be written with either 3 or 4 strokes (⻌ or ⻍).

Stroke style variants

雨 (long 一)

雨 (short 一)

The stroke style and proportions can vary as well. 雨 can be written with a 一 at the top that is wider than ⼌ (the bottom part) or one that is narrower than ⼌ (the bottom part). Again, normal computer fonts will only have one variation.

Once you get used to seeing the different ways of writing the same kanji, you won’t even notice they’re different when reading them.

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If we break the viewpoints into extremes, it seems there are two camps: those who advocate learning words exclusively from context and those who suggest that you can’t learn words without a dictionary. Oddly enough, both sides use the same argument for why their way is better. The supporters of context say that if you don’t learn a word in context, your usage of it will be unnatural, and the supporters of definition say that if you don’t learn a well-defined meaning, your usage will be unnatural. There are other arguments, but I’ll leave those for another day.

In reality, both definition and context are necessary to some degree and that varies with the word. Some words are very well defined and as such are well suited to being learned from their definition. Others have very vague definitions and are difficult to understand even if you look them up.

Technical terms are the extreme of well defined. Take the term “divergent series” from mathematics. It has a very specific meaning that is well defined: A series which is not convergent. Series may diverge by marching off to infinity or by oscillating. This concept is tied more closely to math than language. There’s no need to learn the term of divergent series in Japanese from context. In an English-Japanese dictionary, you can look up divergent series and you’ll find 発散級数. That term will be right 99% of the time.

For a Japanese to English example, consider 文部科学省. In English it is the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). That will again be correct 99% of the time. No context is necessary.

On the other hand, we have words that are not well-defined at all. They are generally words that are tied to the language itself more than to biology, philosophy, government, or any other external field. Consider the word 君. You look it up in a dictionary or ask a friend and learn it means “you”. But if you base your use of 君 just on that information, you’ll end up using it when it would be inadvisable, unnatural, and rude. There’s much more contextual information that you need to know in order to use 君 naturally. There are words far less defined than 君, but it is an easy to understand example.

Most words require both context and definition to some degree in order to understand and use words and phrases naturally. Sometimes a simple, one word definition suffices; other times you need a page explaining the word. Similarly sometime a single sentence of context is sufficient to understand; other times you need to see the word 50 times in 50 different situations before you get a good grasp of it.

I hope you all have fun learning Japanese! As always, I welcome any further discussion, questions, comments, or criticism.

Technorati Tags: context, definition, How to learn Japanese, learn to speak Japanese

Wanting to try my new found powers, I decided to explain a recipe in Japanese. The following words were part of my list, so I figured it would be easy enough since I knew the basic rules of Japanese grammar.

The phrase I proudly came up with was 熱い水を追加して….  Let’s just say that it generated quite a few laughs because no one would ever describe it using those words in Japanese.  In English, “Add hot water,” works perfectly well, but in this context the words used to describe that action in Japanese are much different than I has assumed using the list. It turned out that お湯を入れて… is the right way to say what I wanted to.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, the same idea can be explained in both Japanese and English. The problem occurs when you rely on your knowledge of English sentence patterns and word lists. In this context in Japanese, hot water is お湯 and is a completely separate word from water, 水. Similarly, in this case 入れる can be used and 追加する can’t even though both can be found in a Japanese-English dictionary with the meaning “add”.

After this, I realized that it was critical to learn Japanese sentence patterns and not just words from a list. Of course, the best place to learn Japanese sentence patterns from is natural Japanese.

Japanese and English are fundamentally the same

One of the lies some people like to spread is “Japanese is so much more difficult than English, French, German, Swahili, or your other favorite language”.  Bull!  This is totally baseless.  Fundamentally, both Japanese and English or any, other language for that matter, use the same parts of your brain: they’re both human languages.

The only fair comparison is to look at an 8-year old Japanese child and see how well he speaks Japanese, look at an 8-year old American or Canadian and see how well he speaks English, and compare the two.  Surprise!  They both speak their respective language just as well.  You can try British or Australian children too, but with their accent, the Japanese child may be easier to understand.  Conversely, if you’re not from North America, you probably want to stay away from those crazy Americans and Canadians.

The point is virtually everyone learns his or her native language with equal ease.  You don’t need to be super intelligent, a genius, or a polyglot.  Whether you have three degrees or decided to leave school early, you’ve already learned one language!  You just need to do it again.

Japanese grammar is simple

Japanese grammar is extremely well structured with very few exceptions.

• Where English has hundreds of irregular verbs, Japanese has two.  That’s right, just 2.
• English has singular and plural; Japanese doesn’t.  Think about it.  You don’t even have to worry about whether there are three books on the table or just one.  Just use the same word, no changes necessary.
• English verbs conjugate for person and number.  Japanese verbs don’t.  Remember “to be, I am, you are, he is, we are, you are, they are”?  None of that matters in Japanese: it’s always the same.  Just like “to be, I be, you be, he be, we be, you be, they be”!
• You can omit more with Japanese.  My favorite example is, “I love you.”  In Japanese, you can say the same thing with just one word!  I’m speaking, and I’m talking to you, so I don’t need to explain me and you.

Of course, you can write Japanese that competes with the intertwined clauses and subclauses of Silentio’s translation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, but the beauty of it is, it’ll be easier to understand in Japanese.

Japanese pronunciation is simple

Unlike English, with its 30 some vowel sounds that can be combined with 20 or so consonant sounds to make hundreds and hundreds of syllables, Japanese only has about 100 syllables.  To make things simpler yet, the Japanese phonetic alphabets have one sound for one letter.  There’s nothing confusing like the ‘a’s in bat, balm, paw, fate, peat, barrow, boar, and mare, which are all slightly different.

This doesn’t mean they’re aren’t tongue twisters in Japanese, but you don’t walk around saying, “She sells sea shells . . .”, do you?

Learning to speak Japanese

I won’t lie to you.  Like any other language, learning Japanese will take some time.  Maybe even a little more time than a language more similar your, but by no means it is difficult.  So if you’re interested, dive in.  A great place to start and get help at is Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar.

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Disclaimer

Note that this is a glossary, not a comprehensive reference.  Explanations are intended to give a basic understanding of the terms and as such occasionally contain simplifications and omissions.  E.g., in the entry for 読み方, I say that the reading for 私 is わたし.  It also has 16 other alternate readings, many of which (わちき, わて, etc.) are very unlikely to be encountered unless reading texts from hundreds of years ago.  As such I have chosen to only list わたし since it is most common.

Glossary entries

First sound

• Word【Pronunciation (kana)】English word if applicable − Explanation in English.

か

• 片仮名【かたかな】katakana − One of the two variety kana.  Used mostly for words borrowed from other languages, but has other uses including indicating emphasis and showing sounds.  For every katakana character, there is an equivalent hiragana character.
• 仮名【かな】kana − The Japanese phonetic characters.  Similar to the English alphabet, except simpler because one character corresponds to one sound.  There are two ways of writing kana: hiragana and katakana.
• 漢字【かんじ】kanji − The Chinese characters that are used in Japanese.  Note that some of the characters used in Japanese are different than the same ones in Chinese.  There are also a small number of kanji that were created in Japan.

こ

• 五十音【ごじゅうおん】ー The fifty (46) basic sounds (kana) of Japanese.  This is used to order lists (五十音順) similar to how the alphabet from A to Z is used to alphabetize English lists.  The order is: あいうえお　かきくけこ　さしすせそ　たちつてと　なにぬねの　はひふへほ　まみむめも　や　ゆ　よ　らりるれろ　わゐ　ゑを　ん.  Don’t worry, you’ll know this by heart in a month.  See the Wikipedia entry for a nice if rather detailed chart.

に

• 日本語【にほんご】Japanese − The language of Japan.  Note that in English the word Japanese can refer to the people, the culture, or the language, but in Japanese there are separate words for these.

ひ

• 平仮名【ひらがな】hiragana − One of the two variety of kana.  Used most of the time.  For every hiragana character, there is an equivalent katakana character.

よ

• 読み方【よみかた】reading − In written Japanese, kanji convey meaning, but don’t directly indicate how to read the word aloud.  Eventually you learn how to read them, but because there are a lot of kanji, it’s common in books for children and people learning Japanese to also show the reading.  E.g., 私 is one of the kanji for “me”, but if you haven’t seen it before, you don’t know how to read it.  The reading is わたし.

How should I go about learning Japanese?  Where should I start?  What resources should I use?  These were just some of the questions I had when I started.  I was totally lost and bounced from method to method, trying them one-by-one until I finally found one that works, and works amazingly well.  In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing what works, what doesn’t, and a little bit of why.

What works, of course, involves much more than just study methods or a textbook.  It’s more importantly actions, attitudes, and beliefs.

There are always rumors going on about how Japanese is difficult, so I want to start off by getting rid of that idea: Why learning to speak Japanese is easy.

Do language, not math

I’ll be honest with you.  I like math.  I’m one of those strange people who think it’s interesting.  So, I made a horrible mistake and tried to treat Japanese the same way.  The textbooks worked nicely with that technique.  I studied the all rules: grammar, the parts of speech, the system of writing.  I knew the difference between an 已然形 and a 仮定形 verb, all the possible verb and adjective conjugations, I was learning a ton of words from the vocabulary lists in my textbook, and thought I was doing great.  I wrote a Japanese proficiency test and scored well (not the JLPT, but about equivalent to the JLPT3).  Then I had to speak . . .

It didn’t work.  I had failed.  Well, that’s how the painful 10 minutes of my first conversation felt.  I knew all these things: vocabulary, grammar, structure, and they were all useless because I couldn’t actually speak Japanese, and I had to ask the other person to repeat himself time and time again before I could understand him.  After this incident, I had to seriously think about how I was going to learn Japanese.

When all’s said and done, I wanted to be able to actually use Japanese: listen, speak, read, write.  Whether I knew the rules or not was totally irrelevant.  But, the way I was studying Japanese was just like the way you study math: you start with the rules.  Unfortunately for me, Japanese is a language, not math.

Japanese vs. Math

When you solve a problem in math, you look at the problem, then you to break it into simple parts using rules, you solve the small parts, put them back together, and finally write the answer.  With Japanese, this is like taking sentences, breaking them down into their parts of speech, analyzing the meaning and creating a response, putting the response together using rules, and saying the resulting sentence.  This technique works wonderfully for math, but Japanese isn’t math.  It uses the wrong part of your brain and is far too slow for language.

After thinking about how I use English, I realized that language is much simpler than math.  The part of your brain that you use for language is able to handle breaking things apart and putting them together all without you realizing anything’s happening.  Of course, I studied English grammar in school too, but that was after I had already learned it naturally!

I decided that I could learn to speak Japanese the same way I learned English!  I learned all the basics of English far before I had even heard of math or studying.

Preview

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing practical techniques and musings.  In the mean time, have fun learning Japanese!

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Latest version

rikaichan-words.jar with English glosses removed (EDict dated 2008-10-28)

Instructions:
1. Replace your existing rikaichan-words.jar file from under your Firefox settings directory with the one you download from here.  Note that you’ll need to rename the file you download from here.  If you’re not sure where rikaichan-words.jar is on your computer, just search the files on your computer for one called rikaichan-words.jar.  On mine its full path was ~/.mozilla/firefox/a53yayd2.Default User/extensions/{6D898772-AD34-4c16-86BB-9DE787A5DEA0}/chrome/rikaichan-words.jar; on yours it will probably be somewhere else.
2. Restart Firefox.
3. Enjoy furigana without glosses! ＾＿＾

Note that if you want to update the dictionary file yourself, you can use the more detailed instructions I posted this on Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum.