Why Japanese People? Or how kanji are crazy nonsense

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One of the first things most people try to do when studying kanji is try to find patterns to help them memorize and understand how they work. But that’s not always easy…

大  太  犬

We have the kanji for “big” 大 (dai). If we add a small stroke and it becomes “fat person” 太 (futo). A fat person is big, so more or less, it can make some sense. But if we move this small stroke up, it becomes “dog” 犬 (inu). Now, how can this make any sense?

一  二  三 四

Numbers are some of the basic kanji everyone tries to learn first. One 一, two 二, three 三. See the pattern? Not so difficult, isn’t it? Ok, let’s continue. Four 四. Makes no sense…

角 + 䖝 = 触

Some kanji are formed by two different smaller components. For example 角 horn + 䖝 insect = 触 to touch. I personally don’t see any pattern on how you can relate an insect with horns with touch. Would you touch an insect with horns? I would definitely not…

That’s what the popular Atsugiri Jason tries to show in this popular funny video. It’s in Japanese with English subtitles.

The last kanji he writes is the one for depression 鬱. It has so many strokes (29) that he becomes depressed after trying to memorize it.

Have you ever thought Japanese kanji are crazy nonsense?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk-Gn3w2gt0

Animated Ukiyo-e 浮世絵

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Ukiyo-e 浮世絵 is a genre of Japanese art based on woodblock prints produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries. Although it was considered cheap because it could be mass produced, it has created some of the most famous iconic Japanese paintings.

Some user in gifmagazine has created animated versions of some of the most famous Ukiyo-e scenes. While they keep the original simplicity, the animation adds a very interesting and original touch. What do you think?

You can find more in 瀬川三十七 Gifmagazine page.

Compressed gifs taken from PixFans

Examples improved!

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examples

Learning a new language is a very difficult task. But in the case of the Japanese it can be even more difficult because of the many different symbols its writing system has. That makes it more complicated to read Japanese sentences and get used to the way they are written.

To solve this problem, we have improved the way the examples are shown in the dictionary. First of all, we are showing more sentences than before, taken from the great tatoeba project. But also we are now separating the sentence in words and you can now click in every word to get more information about it.

We believe this change will make it easier to understand how a word can be used in a sentence and will make the sentence easier to read for that people who is still not ready to understand kanji.

Some examples:

I hope you enjoy those changes!