I just had the experience where I saw a word in a sentence that I don’t remember ever seeing before (作曲家, to be specific) but I just immediately intuited both the reading and the meaning from the composite kanji, and when I looked it up both were correct, so I just felt like gushing about it. Although kanji meanings and readings are far from regular, there certainly are some patterns, and it seems like they gradually become internalized in your subconscious over time. It’s just nice to know that you won’t truly need to memorize every single vocabulary item individually, but that you can build on what you already know and infer some things almost automatically.
27 Likes
Congrats! I’ve had this too, but sort of the reverse way, it’s a great feeling!
There’s a few words which I can automatically read because I’ve seen the same kanji in other words. E.g. from seeing lots of different words with 中 in (e.g. 中学校・中身), I can guess that it’s usually ちゅう or なか.
Which is why I’ve stopped drilling kanji/radicals, which I found really boring and demotivating, and just carried on with stuff I enjoy more like learning grammar/vocab, playing Japanese video games, listening to Japanese music, etc.
Now, like you, I’m often able to guess the pronunciation of familiar kanji words, and like you say, it’s nice to know that I didn’t have to spend hours on kanji drills to understand meaning and/or pronunciation intuitively. I think it’s because I learn best when seeing how knowledge is applied/works in practice, so it’s easier for me to remember kanji within words within sentences, than just standalone kanji.
3 Likes
I love when it happens to me !
It’s the very reason why I put a lot (maybe too much actually) of emphasis on learning kanji meanings and on readings when I started learning Japanese, it’s a bit tedious at first but it’s incredibly useful in the long run.
1 Like
Congrats on this breakthrough, I hope you will enjoy all the ones that will follow. I think knowing the meaning of kanji is something people underestimate.
We don’t have a railway commute system where I live, so when I was on my last trip to Japan, I didn’t know what it meant when a line was listed as the “local” line. I was confused, but then I saw the kanji.
各駅停車
And I’m like oh, a car that stops at every station. Or 各(every) 駅 (station) 停 (stop) 車(car)。And that made sense to me immediately. I feel like things stick better that way.
6 Likes
Yeah, I’ve found that too, even if I forget how to pronounce a kanji I can still understand the rough meaning of a phrase I’ve never seen before, it’s neat. 
That’s happened to me, too.
Another fun thing about studying kanji I’ve come to realize is that after studying a certain number of kanji, I can just guess at the stroke order. I guess that’s why knowing the radicals helps! (I haven’t really studied radicals by themselves, but I’ve just picked up patterns during my studies.)
2 Likes
Same, I never formally learned stroke order for most, but I’ve just picked up some rules that seem to work 80% of the time.
1 Like