Elements of Japanese that made you laugh/smile

The word for ‘backscratcher’ is 孫の手 meaning ‘hand of grandchild’
I was really confused reading that example sentence.

3 Likes

婚 - marriage

If you like “offensive” ones. That would literally mean “woman’s family name getting day” if you look at radicals alone.

They for sure would be surprise there can be people like me and my wife (we opted to have different surnames since it was not worth arguing over more than 5 minutes) xD

They clearly were thinking about that as transfer from one family to another, when in modern times it is more of a starting point for new family. Or an act of merging two into one if you are lucky and both family like each other (not my case xD).

マンチェスターシティー

Yes they most definitely are :L:L:L

2 Likes

I watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyXQXDkR26Y) where there was some reasonable worries about marrying foreigners. But one was funny to me since a lady did correct herself. It was something like that:

“I would be worried can’t communicated with our grandchildren spouses” a few minutes later: “Actually… Who cares? We don’t speak to our grandchildren spouses that often any way” xD

That would be a bit of cultural shock for me xD

On top of the Heisig approach, and Wanikani approach, there is plain old Japanese school 教育 kanji learning order. That’s what I did.

Most people do not recommend this, but it worked for me. The only thing that I can strongly positively say about the school grade order is that it teaches easy ‘concepts’ first, rather than easy kanji. This helped me a lot from a logic standpoint, as I felt I could understand the logic of 読み方 used in later kanji, that also appeared in early kanji. But then again, I don’t use mnemonics at all, so I’m a bit weird :joy:

3 Likes

I consider myself - in terms of kanji learning - to be a happy child from an unhappy marriage between Cure Dolly and Heisig. Parents hate each others but since they provided for me and I want to move out asap anyway, it is not my problem xD

I was pretty much exactly the same when I started learning Kanji. I still have my notebooks just full of the Kanji written out 50 times each haha.

I think mnemonics for Kanji are a bit gimmicky, and I don’t understand why the method by which the entire Japanese nation learns Kanji to a higher literacy rate than we learn English is fround upon by foreign learners. I guess we’re just Old Skool

3 Likes

Yeah I was the same. Mnemonics just seemed like even more extra information that I needed to memorize, that doesn’t actually help me communicate at all. But it works for a lot of people.

2 Likes

I would blame it on the philosophy of science if I may. We like our toys that science gave us so we are inclined to adopt some of its core principles. We just do not trust the argument “it was that for centuries for a reason” if reason is not blindly obvious and even then we are not sure.

I don’t say it’s always a good thing. Paraphrasing somebody much smarter than me: “Sometimes we are like monkeys with a wrench trying to repair a military helicopter. Bang! Look: it’s better now!”

I have no clue if that is the case here. But when somebody is proven that his methodology is not working we at least have new knowledge about what is not working.

If you manage to find one thing that works for you at the moment it is good enough for now :hugs:

Well there is definite merit is using mnemonics to get to grips with difficult concepts, I’m not sure it works as well as people think when it comes to learning to differentiate between 2000+ very similar looking pictograms though, especially when you get passed kyouiku grade 1 kanji.

2 Likes

For sure it does not work that well, so your distrust is 100% justified :hugs:

It would be adapted as common sense by now if it would be even half as good.

I just noticed :joy: we are not in this thread:

:scream:

Is there a way to move it? It would make better sense there I believe :hugs:

Btw: most of those “mnemonics” i do for this thread only xD when something “funny” clicks in my mind.