so annoying. i cant read it yet

why cant everything be in ひらがな？

if someone can help break it down, how ひらがな　is converted to かんじ i will pay



ALSO. if you have a activation key for rosetta stone japanese i will buy that as well.



This post was edited by MadeInJapan on Nov 22 2011 05:13am

It's because our ancestors in Japan imported it from China a few centuries ago. yep and so that our sentences become shorter and concise or cohesive or whatever. If u cant write kanji that means ur uneducated in japan as far as i know lol

Well first, you're going to have to learn how to read them. After learning the meaning or how to read them, you will probably learn おくりがな which are letters you put after the kanji to make sense for example 送る　変える　 the bolded letters are the おくりがな
おくりがなis always in hiragana to make sense.

But not everything has okurigana. And the confusing part is that there are generally two ways to read kanji, くんよみ[訓読み] and おんよみ[音読み]

These are おんよみ : 単語　熟語　訓練
When you read them in onnyomi they dont have any okuriganas if I am not mistaken.

Think of it this way.. if I can recall my days in elementary school right one of the first kanjis I learned was tree 木
It is said that the shape of the kanji resembles tree and there for each character has meaning. It's very basic but that's all I can think of for now.

This post was edited by eivissa on Nov 22 2011 10:28am

made in japan and cant read kanji
mind=blown

we should go easy on him. im still trying to learn korean and it hasnt progressed over an year lol maybe i should start watching dramas

fff

This post was edited by nikefreak01 on Nov 24 2011 03:05pm

made in japan
soshi sig
mind=blown

sonyoshide immnida lol 少女時代 ftw

When reading, you're supposed to use the meanings of kanji to skim over a word quickly and interpret the meaning without having to have it broken down into hiragana. I'm sure you'll agree that, assuming you're familiar with kanji, it's easier to read 弱肉強食　than じゃくにくきょうしょく (Survival of the fittest). All languages do this to an extent; look at English, for example, and our usage of contractions ('shouldn't', 'couldn't', etc.). The Japanese also do this in spoken language with their omission of the subject when it is already understood. The technical linguistic term for this is 'Linguistic Economy', which pretty much means 'expressing yourself as succinctly as possible'.

Because the Japanese phonemic system is so limited, you would end up with hundreds of homonyms and ambiguity if you had pages full of nothing but hiragana. As an example, 八 (eight) and 蜂 (wasp) are both pronounced はち. How do you tell the difference if it is merely written thus? Context, of course, plays a part, but mainly it's the different kanji that show us what is meant.

I'm not certain what you mean by 'converted to kanji'. Hiragana just represents the phonemes in the kanji. Take ひらがな itself. Its kanji are 平仮名. They, together and in this case, are pronounced　ひらがな.

Also, don't bother with Rosetta Stone, it's a terrible, terrible piece of software that will get you into some pretty bad habits.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions or need help with anything.

This post was edited by Razzattack on Dec 1 2011 04:46pm

selfownt