BASIC PARTS OF THE SYSTEM OF KANJI

Bushu () are the smallest units (we call them "radicals"). They are like letters of
the alphabet, but there's over 200 of them. Just like English letters, radicals don't
have any real meaning. And again, just like English, radicals are combined in largely
random combinations to make kanji.
Kanji () are single words, made of radicals. There's over 5,000 of them, but most
of them are only used in people's names. You only need to know around 2,000 to read
a newspaper.
Jukugo () are compound words: Just like English, several kanji compose a jukugo.
(think of the English words like "butt pirate", "can opener," "douche bag" or "hat
rack"). Once you learned enough kanji, you can comprehend Jukugo almost without
trying.
I'll go on about these 3 in unrelenting detail later. For now, let's deal with...
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RADICALS AND KANJI?
1) ABSOLUTE RADICALS
Guys like Nest, #{image_tag 'radREALLYsmall/net.jpg', :height => 25, :width => 25},
and #{image_tag 'radREALLYsmall/open-scissors.jpg', :height => 25, :width => 25}
are what I call ABSOLUTE radicals. They are never kanji on their own, only building
blocks. They don't have any pronunciations, and they don't have any meaning.
2) SYMBOLIC RADICALS
...are like the ABSOLUTE RADICALS (no pronunciation, never kanji by themselves),
except that they DO HAVE MEANING. For example Sickness is associated with
sickness. It is used in maybe 10 kanji, and all those kanji have to do with sickness.
For instance, (hurts), (sick), (get tired), (diarrhea), (symptom), and so on.
If you're like me and often forget the meaning of a kanji, these SYMBOLIC RADICALS
can help you guess.
3) KANJI THEMSELVES
Here's the mind-blower: All kanji, even complex ones, can be radicals- if they wind up
inside a bigger kanji! For instance, (director). You'd think would be big enough by
itself, since it is made out of 3 smaller radicals, but the whole damn thing winds up
inside (expert opinion).
A more common example would be the kanji for water and tree ( and ). These are
both legitimate words, with their own pronunciation and meaning, but they become
radicals when you stuff 'em inside bigger kanji: , , , , or .
Often, these simple-kanji-which-are-used-in-bigger-kanji are ALSO symbolic radicals kanji with a tree in them have to do with wooden things, kanji with fire in them are
about fire, etc.
2: DISPELLING THE TWO MOST PERNICIOUS MYTHS ABOUT KANJI!
MYTH #1: RADICALS ALWAYS MEAN SOMETHING.
MYTH #2: KANJI LOOK LIKE THE THINGS THEY DESCRIBE.

Remember what I said earlier about "half the difficulty of Japanese is how it is
taught?" This is a perfect example.
Students always say, "Why does 'wind' () have 'insect' () in it? Why does 'muscle'
() have 'bamboo' () in it? Why does god damn sake () have 'west' () in it?"
Before you curse Japanese for being "all crazy and shit," ask yourself, what if some
ESL guy pointed at the word "fire" and asked you, "What does "r" mean? What does
"e" mean?"
"It means .... it , uh.... it...."
Then he points to the word fighter and asks you, "Why is the "r" at the end? Why isn't
it in the beginning?"
"Because - because mind your own business is why!!!"
See, it hurts your head to even think about questions like that in English ... and yet
when it comes to Japanese, gaijin students can spend years asking nothing BUT those
types of questions. I know I did.
This is not a "Japanese is crazy" problem. Nor is it a "noobs are dumb" problem. This
is a problem because Japanese teachers and textbooks suck. Most new students are
led to believe that radicals have meaning, and that kanji look like the things they
describe. That's not merely wrong, it makes kanji feel very foreign and illogical, when
in fact kanji is basically structured the same as English!!
Check it out:
radicals = letters
words = kanji
jukugo = compound words
Radicals don't have meaning any more than the letter "F" or "G" does! That's why it
makes your head hurt if some ESL guy asks you, "What does the "f" in "fighter"
mean?"
On the other hand, if that same ESL guy asks, "What does "fire" mean? What does
"fighter" mean?" In that case, it's easy for you to answer. Not only that, but once he
knows what "fire" and "fighter" mean, he can easily guess by himself what a "firefighter" is - he doesn't even need to ask!
And, the good news is that kanji is just the same: Jukugo (compound words) basically
shriek their meaning at you. If you learn 1,000 kanji, you AUTOMATICALLY learn how
to read 2,000 jukugo for free.
Here's what a teacher should tell you on Day One of class:
DON'T ask 'what does this radical inside a kanji mean?'
DO ask 'what does this kanji inside a jukugo mean?'
Think about it like this: if kanji really DID look like the things that they describe, you'd

have to memorize 2,000 complicated drawings that had nothing in common with
each other. But with radicals, all you got to do is learn around 200 simple shapes and
you can draw and read almost all kanji - which was exactly the intention of kanji's
inventors.
I will try to explain this with A HISTORICAL TANGENT:
In the beginning, Chinese dudes wrote pictographs - pictures that looked like the
things they represented. The drawback was that writing a paragraph took as much
time as drawing a comic book, because IT WAS drawing a comic book! So they (Who?
Sages, motherfucker, sages! Who else?) simplified the pictographs into what we now
call Kanji. How?
Step one: They chose 200 or so RADICALS as their building blocks.
Step 2:
Any pictograph that was too hard, they said, "OK, what radical does the top part most
closely resemble? Swap 'em! What radical does the left part most closely resemble?
Swap 'em!" and so on.
For example, the old, complicated kanji for country is . And the current kanji for
country is .
Now, from the foreigner's point of view, this change is retarded in two ways.
1) the radical that was swapped into the center of the new version means " jewel." (a
jewel in a box? What does that have to do with a country?)
2 ) the simplified looks almost the same as the kanji for treasure; (more
confusion!).
But try looking at it from the point of view of the sages: they didn't have computers,
they got bad arthritis, and they had to draw these crazy hard pictographs all damn
day. So one of the sages, in his wisdom, said, "OK, fuck this! Can't we swap the
center bit for a simpler radical?" And the other sage replied, "Dood, if you drink
enough sake, the center bit looks kind of like ."
And the first sage was like, "Man you are just high as hell, but it's late and I got mad
poems to write about seasons and shit, so yeah, let's just say is now officially
and call it a day."
So that is how that went down.
So, the bad news is that the kanji for 'country' () has nothing to do with the
meaning of balls ( ), nor the meaning of box ().
The good news is that IT DOESN'T MATTER.
What matters is that, thanks to the existence of radicals, you have an alphabet now,
instead of 2,000 unrelated pictures of things. Just like English, you can 'read'
individual kanji like the same way that reading the letters 'c','o', 'u', 'n', 't', 'r', and
'y' allow you to read the word 'country' - in fact, kanji is simpler, because you only
had to learn two radicals instead of seven letters!

Put another way, if you know the 'balls' and 'box' radicals, you can easily make a
mnemonic to help you remember the kanji for country: "A country is a big box where
the citizens keep all their balls." Then you can chuckle because you just said "balls."
"But Schultzzz," you ask: "If radicals don't have meanings, why do you give them
names like 'box' and 'balls' ? Why do you need mnemonics at all?" First, those are not
meanings, they're arbitrary keywords. And second, English has mnemonics too, to
help you spell. For example, "I before E except after C, or if your daddy's GAY with the
NEIGHBOR from around the WAY."
3: THE TERRIBLE SECRET!!!!!
Check out these two groups of kanji:
Group ONE: (complex kanji)

Group TWO: (simple kanji)

Which do you think are college-level words? And which are simple kid-words?
ANSWER:
Group one:

put on pants

tooth

purple

monkey

face

me

listen

nose
Group two:

a color called 'cinnibar,' which I didn't even know ENGLISH had a word for that color

a garrison of 17th century troops under the command of a Shogun

unit of measurement only used with bread loaves

a specific kind of cedar

'dowager Empress', a word only used by retainers in the Imperial Court.

....THE TERRIBLE SECRET IS:
THERE IS ALMOST NO CONNECTION BETWEEN HOW USEFUL A KANJI IS AND HOW
COMPLEX IT IS!
Put another way : kanji with easy meanings are often hard to learn, and kanji with
obscure meanings can be really simple to learn, but you'll never use them. Here's
why this is important:
If you're teaching a normal language, like German (or even a pretty illogical language
like English), you'll start with "kid words" and then work up to "adult words." But if
you try teaching kanji that way, you'll start new students off with hellaciously
complex kanji, and then 3 years later, you teach them simple kanji. Dumb! To add
insult to injury.. ..after the hapless students bust ass learning common-but-complex
kanji like and ... a year later, they'll learn less-used kanji like and ... WHICH
ARE COMPONENTS OF and ! And the students will say, "DAMN! Why didn't you
teach me and first!?! Then learning and would have been easy!" (even
worse... this is how Japanese teach their own children. WTF?!? And the gaijin teachers
copied this method?!?!?)
That's why nowadays, people generally agree that gaijin learn kanji best if they learn
'em from simplest-to-most-complex.
The simple-to-complex method might seem like a waste of time when you are
learning words like (bamboo) and complex abstractions like (meaning variously,
'et cetra', 'vague', or an obsolete form of 'to say'). You might grumble, "Dude, I don't
yell out "Bamboo!!" on a daily basis, why do I need this?" But in fact, in Japan you
need the bamboo radical in order to say box " () " or even laugh "()! " And you
need to say childish-meaning-yet-complex-shape kanji like cloud (). Learning
beforehand makes learning way more doable.
4: BUSHU (radicals) - the most overlooked tool
Here is an example of how useful radicals are:
('outdoors')!!!
It looks like a huge, messy pile of chicken scratch, doesn't it? It is a 21 stroke
character .Trying to memorize where to put each of the 21 strokes is a huge
depressing pain, and then trying to memorize each individual stroke for ALL 2000
KANJI makes you even more depressed, until you just wish Flanders was dead.
BUT, if you have been learning radicals, instead of 21 random chicken scratches, you
see only 3 parts: rain , foot , and each . These three radicals are combined into
the one character for outdoor (). Not only that, if you have learned those 3 radicals,
you can use them to help figure out dozens of other kanji too! For example, ALSO
makes . And ALSO makes ; ALSO makes , and so on.
In other words, radicals are the ABCs of kanji. If this seems like a "DUHHH" statement
to you, then guess what? You're way smarter than most textbook publishers or
teachers!

Because, I ain 't seen even ONE JAPANESE TEXTBOOK YET that actually uses radicals
like ABCs.
They'll teach you like the one radical in the upper-left corner of the kanji and then
say, "OK you're on your own, Hoss!" That's like trying to teach some ESL kid how to
read the phrase "Black Sabbath" by telling her "OK, you got your 't' ...and , uh, a little
while later there's an 'a' and oops gotta go, BTW learn that and 10 more words by
tomorrow KTHXBYE!"
For some reason (perhaps because they imported kanji from China), Japanese are
only conscious of maybe 10% of the radicals they're using. For example: if you show
the kanji for warm () to your Japanese friends, they might insist it has only one
radical: sun (). So what is the other 90% of it?? 9 random chicken-scratch lines?
This despite the fact that the upper-right part appears in exactly the same shape and
position in over 10 other kanji (, , , , , , etc. ). What is that, some kind of
wacky coincidence??? And the lower right part appears in even more kanji: , , ,
.
""Oh, but Nest and are not radicals!" Whatever, kid. Have fun spelling 'Black
Sabbath'
Here's what English would look like if it was taught the way Japanese is taught:
Blacksabbath-copy
For a complete list of all the radicals I use, please check the 'radicals in order'
appendix.
ANOTHER HISTORICAL TANGENT:
Back in the days of books, if you wanted to look up a kanji in a dictionary, you
couldn't type the hiragana into your iphone and wait for the kanji to pop up. You had
to try to comb through an actual paper book packed with over 5,000 kanji - without
using abcs OR hiragana! Dictionaries were organized by "the main radical." In other
words, some damn sage looked at every kanji and arbitrarily decided, "This part is
the main radical," and then "alphabetized" all the kanji based on that. So instead of
being structured like a, b, c, d, etc. The dictionaries were structured like, " main
radical =water() ", "main radical = fire() ", "main radical = earth() ", etc.
Long story short, as long as you knew one radical per kanji, (the so-called "main
one"), then you were capable of looking shit up, and that's why you never learned
any of other radicals. Great for dictionaries, but lousy for memorizing kanji.
And you know who is even weirder than Japanese? Stupid effing foreigners!! Because
every foreign kanji book I have read copies the Japanese method. All "I had to learn it
the hard way, so should you!" style.
So I arbitrarily decided, if the exact same pattern of lines is used in three or more
kanji, it's a damn radical, and I made up a name for it, and listed it in my kanji
dictionary right next to the "real" kanji.
In other words, in my system, not only does every part of have a name, but by the
time we get to , you will already have LEARNED all the parts, and so learning will
be easy! Let me break it down further:

First you learn 'day' (), a real kanji.

Then you learn 'nest' (Nest) an 'absolute radical', with no meaning.
Then you learn 'friend' () (another real kanji), and combine it with 'nest' to make
the 'crow' (Crows) radical.
(mnemonic: the crows are friends, so they live in the same nest).
Finally, you put day () and crow (Crows) together and you have warm: .
And to make sure you remember how to 'spell' , you say, "The crows get warm in
the sun." - QED.
And you know what? It turns out that I'm not a TOTAL crackpot; professional linguists
have been aware of these 'un-named' radicals for years, and always use them when
studying Japanese (they call them 'graphemes'). But for some reason, this knowledge
stayed in the ivory tower and the average Japanese teacher never found out about it.
(If you want to explode your brain, go download this pdf and go to page 147)
"But Schultzzz, doesn't that mean you're giving me even more crap to learn? What
makes you think I have the time?"
OK, good question.
I used to think that, too! It took me a long time to realize that, rather than saving
time by skipping the radicals, I was actually WASTING my time, and here's why:
Each radical only requires you to learn 3 or 4 lines at a time - AND those 3 or 4 lines
are used in dozens of kanji. If you want to learn kanji, you'll be learning those shapes
ANYWAY - wouldn't it be easier to learn them once, instead of dozens of times?
Let's sum up what we've learned so far this chapter:

In KANJIDAMAGE, every part has a name! And every kanji can be assembled like a
math equation, hella rationally:
(go) + (mountain) + (pi) + Taskmaster>(director) =
AND then all the radicals are tied up in a mnemonic to help you remember:
The director makes you go the mountain and get a TEENY WEENY LITTLE SLICE OF
PIE.
5: KANJI, FOOL!
Besides radicals, each kanji has hella ATTRIBUTES. Here they are:
STROKE ORDER: Psyche! I don't care about this even a little bit.
KUN-YOMI: the way the kanji is pronounced by itself, for instance, the KUNyomi of is
"SAKE" and the KUNyomi of is MIZU.

ON-YOMI: the, er, "Chinese" pronunciation of the kanji, which is only used when the
kanji is combined with another kanji to form a compound word. For instance, the ONyomi of is "SHU", so drunk-driving () is pronounced in-SHU-un-ten.
(ON-yomi are about as 'Chinese' as Chop Suey and the phrase "Wing Wong," but I
digress).
Unlike other teachers, I teach the ONyomi as just another radical - albeit a radical
that you hear, rather than see. Here's why : A kanji may have 4 or 5 KUNyomi, and it
may be part of dozens and dozens of jukugo, but it will only have one bottom-radical,
only one left-side radical, only one top-radical, and they only have one ONyomi.
Mostly. Furthermore, there may be 100 other kanji with the same onyomi, the same
way there are a hundred kanji with a water () or tree () radical. So that's why it
makes more sense to consider ONyomi as a kind of radical.
In practice, this means that:
1) like the written radicals, I give every ONyomi its own English keyword (for instance,
the SHU of is "See Her Underwear," and all the other kanji pronounced SHU have
the same keyword....just like all the kanji with the radical have "water" as the
keyword for that radical.)
2) the mnemonics always include ONyomi along with the written radicals, so you
learn all of them at the same time.
For a list of all the ONyomi I use, and their corresponding keywords, please check the
ONyomi appendix.
A lot of textbooks and flashcards list 2 ONyomi or even 3 ONyomi per kanji! But
usually the kanji in question uses onyomi #1 90% of the time, and only uses onyomi
#2 with one specific jukugo. So, fuck it!! Erase that shit! Like I said before, I cheat!
OK! Kanji have two pronunciations, the KUN and ON. But why? This simple question
requires yet...
.... ANOTHER HISTORICAL-CONTEXT RANT:
When the Japanese, um, borrowed kanji from China, they got it wrong. There's no
other way to say it. According to Google, the shit came over in the 5th century,
because Japanese traders needed to communicate with their Korean and Chinese
counterparts. For every existing Japanese word (what we today call the 'KUNyomi'
word), they tried to find the corresponding Chinese kanji, and pair them up.
Furthermore, they decided to use the Chinese pronunciation of the words, too, but
got it wrong ... It's kind of like Canada: everyone in Canada has to learn Quebeqois
French, even though real French can't understand Quebeqois-French! Anyway, the
decision to force the square peg of Chinese characters in the round hole of the
existing Japanese language leads to some really janky situations!
JANKY SITUATION 1: 150 words all having the same ON-yomi.
Whichever seafaring trader decided to import kanji to Japan obviously couldn't speak
Chinese! Duh - Chinese has tones, and Japanese doesn't. The Japanese trader was
like, "It all sounds the same - KOU, SHOU, wing, wong, whatever. So let's import
something we don't understand!"

And the Japanese land-lubbers for some reason were heard to reply, "Here is a whole
new vocabulary that adds nothing to our existing language, and which can't be
understood by Chinese either! OK, we'll learn it, but only if we can keep our existing
language, so now we have to learn twice as many words for shit we already knew
how to say!"
And the seafaring traders were like, "OK deal."
And then, "Hey! Someone's trying to be Catholic over there!"
"That's over the line - let's massacre the whole village!"
That is how Japanese multiculturalism went, back in the day.
JANKY SITUATION 2: Kanji which have two (or more!) ONyomi.
China has hella different dialects. So one Japanese trader would come back from
Shanghai, where they pronounce (blue) as SEI, and he'd teach everyone in his
town to say SEI. Meanwhile, another Japanese trader would come back from Hong
Kong, where they pronounce as SHOU, and he'd teach everyone in HIS town to
say SHOU. So there's that.
JANKY SITUATION 3: Duplicate kanji.
Even after assigning each Japanese word to a kanji, they still had hella kanji left over.
So they took native Japanese words (KUNYOMI, remember) with 2 or 3 nuances and
ASSIGNED EACH NUANCE TO A DIFFERENT KANJI, WHILE KEEPING THE KUNYOMI THE
SAME. The most infamous examples are the 3 katais (, , and ), the 3
hakarus(, , and ) , and the 3 tsutomerus(, , and ).
As if that were not pernicious enough, they frequently picked kanji which looked as
similar as their meanings:
- intense - extreme
- pattern - model
- incline - lean or be predisposed to
Another example: to freeze is , and frost/ice is - both clearly came from
the same Japanese word. But when they were picking Kanji to assign to the Japanese
words, became and became . So now you have to learn twice as
many kanji, PLUS you STILL have to learn the original Japanese words (koori and
kooru) in order to PRONOUNCE them. So nothing was achieved!
Can you believe that shit???
Beginner students have been known to weep openly in class when the teacher tries
to explain about this.
HOWEVER, THERE IS GOOD NEWS: Despite all the jankiness, it's pretty simple to tell
when to use the KUNyomi and when to use the ONyomi:

WORDS WHICH CONTAIN ONLY ONE KANJI (i.e. , , , ) use the KUNyomi.
PROPER NOUNS use the KUNyomi ...usually. ( is Tanaka, is Urayama, etc.)
JUKUGO (compound words i.e. , , , etc.) use the ONyomi.
HOWEVER ...jukugo which have hiragana in 'em (i.e. , , )
use the KUNyomi, not ONyomi.
The Japanese have a word for these hiragana letters that dangle off of the ends of
jukugo: OKURIGANA (literally, 'letters which are sent out from the kanji') . Please learn
this word.
For instance, when I started studying, I didn't learn ON yomis for the whole first year,
which caused catastrophic problems for me when it was test time. The fuckin'
teachers, they never came out and said in plain English, "You need ON-yomi for
compound words!!" I figured the ONyomi was some optional, formal thing, like
sonkeigo, stroke order, or flower arrangement.
Anyway.
Just to make things clearer, here's a chart, showing various flavors of kanji words:
KANJI BY ITSELF (uses KUNyomi)
(cat)

kanji WITH OKURIGANA (uses KUNyomi)

(cloud)
(butt)
(big)
(kill)
(around here)
JUKUGO (uses ONyomi)
(secret)

JUKUGO with okurigana (uses KUNyomi)

(reporter)
(washing machine)
(calm down)
(repeat)
(all you can eat)
It's worth noting that a) the no-okurigana words are almost always nouns, and b) the
compounds with okurigana are almost always verbs.
666: JUKUGO

More good news:

Compound words are the MOST LOGICAL part of kanji: if you know the component
kanji, you can easily guess both the pronunciation AND the meaning of a compound
word ... even if you've never seen that compound before! Just like English!
I try to include a few example jukugo along with each kanji.
"Why bother including example jukugo at all? Isn't just learning 1800 kanji hard
enough??"
Well, if you have never studied kanji before, you should definitely ignore the jukugo!
But after you get some confidence, you'll find that learning jukugo has 4 benefits:
1 - JUKUGO EXPLORE THE VARIETY OF MEANINGS OF A KANJI:
Just like English words such as 'foot', 'joint', and 'bitch' have double-meanings, many
kanji ALSO have several unrelated meanings - For instance, means 'play guitar' but
it is also the noun for 'bullet!'
is even weirder - meaning 'mysterious,' 'brown rice,' AND 'entryway.' Including a
bunch of example jukugo is a way to show all the different meanings and uses for the
more nebulous kanji.
2 - LEARNING ON-YOMI THROUGH REPITITION:
Some students find that repetition helps them learn. If you say to yourself: is
honnin, is hontou, is honrai, is honba ...it sort of pounds it into your
head that is HON!
3 - INCREASE YOUR VOCABULARY:
Unlike certain other kanji textbooks or flashcards, ALL the jukugo here are totally
basic useful words . These are all words you'll be learning ANYWAY in your first 2
years of study. And learning those compound words is way easier if you just
memorized the component kanji!
4 - UNLIKE MOST BOOKS OR CARDS, I TELL YOU HOW TO USE THE JUKUGO
In any language, verbs are used with a particle or a preposition: Go OVER the cat.
Come FROM the store, etc. In Japanese, 90% of verbs use the preposition ' '. But
the other 10% of verbs use seemingly random particles, and there is no overall rule
to it! This causes gaijin a lot of pain. Some verbs, such as "," are only used with
the prepositions '' or '' and others, such as "" or "" are only used with ''.
As bad as Japanese is, the REAL problem is the teachers and textbooks. I find myself
yelling at the textbooks: "Why don't you douchebags just teach the particle as if it
were part of the verb?!?" And in this book, you bet your ass that's how I'm fuckin'
doing it!!! Plus I'll try to explain a little about the context and usage of the words: is
this word childish? Formal? Read in newspapers but not spoken? Is it always used
literally, or also figuratively? And so on.
7: SYNONYMS AND HOMOPHONES
Among linguists, Japanese is notorious for having hella same-sounding words which
have totally unrelated meanings. Get out your electric dictionary and type in . Or
. Or Or .
Pretty fuckin' insane, eh?

These same-sounding words are called homophones, and they are almost all the
ONyomi-usin'-ass jukugo. In other words, the homophones largely result from
Japanese people trying to speak Chinese without tones - Janky Situation #1 of the
Historical Context Rant.
Even the word "kanji" ITSELF has like 3 homophones : , , and
Fortunately, this is mostly a problem when one is LISTENING - maybe that's why most
JTV shows have subtitles ... in Japanese! But if you're READING two homophones, the
kanji are really helpful in clearing up the meaning - If you analyze the English
keywords, you'll see that the first "kanji" () means "Chinese + Letter" - so clearly,
THAT'S the "kanji" you want. On the other hand, breaks down to "main office +
action" - in other words, it means "a secretary."
This is actually one of the few things where the complexity of kanji makes it MORE
logical and MORE handy than spoken Japanese.
Moving on to synonyms: all languages have synonyms. Some people say that
synonyms lend variety and shades of nuance to a language, keeping it colorful and
alive. I am not one of those people.
Most synonyms are dead-wood. They have the same meanings AND nuance. And
what's worse, you can't even use them interchangeably - For instance, you can say,
"Travel to the ends of the earth," but you can't say, "Travel to the ends of the globe."
You can say, "I'm going to the repair shop," but you can't say, "I'm going to the fix
shop." ... even though repair and fix mean the same thing! Can you imagine how
fucked-up that is to someone learning English??? It's like we only keep those
redundant words around to specifically to fuck up ESL goons.
The real problem comes when certain kanji are homonyms AND synonyms at the
same time! These are what I call the 'duplicate kanji' - for instance, , , and
are all pronounced , and they all mean HARD.
Or do they???
Before you give up on Japanese, ask yourself this: Why do E/J textbooks identify all 3
of those kanji as "hard" TO BEGIN WITH?? Wouldn't it be simpler if the books
identified one as, "hard," the second as "firm," and the third as "solid"? Once again,
it's not a problem with Japanese, it's a problem with how it's taught. God damn it!
To help solve this problem, I give each Japanese synonym a HELLA different English
keyword, so that you can tell them apart.
Also, on the good-news tip: I have made a list of all these 'duplicates' and explained
when to use which.
OK, that's it for the theory of kanji. Now let's find out how to use the kanjidamage
dictionary - and put that theory into practice"!