LLearn Japanese

I hate this Kanji. I hate it. I the Kanji itself it fine, but the amount of readings and similar meanings when used in vocabulary is absolutely infuriating. Kanji hate thread. Post yours.

  • November 2, 2024

I hate this Kanji. I hate it. I the Kanji itself it fine, but the amount of readings and similar meanings when used in vocabulary is absolutely infuriating. Kanji hate thread. Post yours.

by Grizzlysol

46 comments

  1. Honestly I spent a month learning the top 500 kanji and their radicals and learned readings from vocab and it’s been good 

    Just do RTK or kanji damage for your first 500 and start reading immediately after 

  2. 直 for me. The meaning is not that hard but I struggle with all the vocabulary with different readings (直ぐ、直前、立ち直る、直ちに、正直)

    (Also the character sometimes shows wrong because it appears in a Chinese font)

  3. Any character with the し-shaped “boob curve.” 乳, 比, etc. Just because I have a hell of a time tracing the shape on a touchscreen with my clublike orc fingers.

    Curves bad. Angles good.

  4. There are words that have different reading depend on context.

    方 （かた、ほう）

    止める　（やめる、とめる）

    件　（けん、くだん、くだり）

  5. For me it’s 書… it looks fine on a screen but I can’t draw it, it just always looks bad and messy. Too many parallel lines. It’s the ugliest kanji ever and it has a lot of audacity to be as common as it is.

  6. wanna have it a little easier?

    learn the words having that one , not the kanji or their possible pronunciations.

    get vocab, not kanjis.

  7. The worst kanji by far is 大. Nothing else comes close IMO — when you see a new word it’s just a crap shoot whether it’s だい、たい, or おお.

  8. Meh, only four of them are relevant for most cases. Well, to me, at least.

    い(きる), う(まれる), なま(たまご).and せい(かつ).

    For other compound words like “生地(きじ)” or “生涯(しょうがい)”, you might as well remember them as a completely separate word, kinda like in English where the pronunciation for “ough” doesn’t really stick to any rule because of words like Through, Though, Thought and Rough and it’s all just root memorization.

  12. this fucker:長 bc there are so many goddamn -長 words with similar meanings and its so hard not to mix them all up

  14. That’s not even the worst part. The worst part comes from readings like 桐生 きりゅう. How the hell should I know that from first time reading? There’s another 生word with りゅう reading but I don’t remember.

  15. I always feel that it helps to learn “words”. Then they just happened to be “spelled” this way or that way.

    If you know that 誕生日 means birthday and 生ビール means draft beer – you don’t really “memorize the readings of 生” . And so you don’t really expect the reading to be the same – because you already know the underlying word.

  20. When it comes to remembering, I’ve always had a mental block with distinguishing 問, 間, 聞, and 門.

    When it comes to just my least favourite looking one, it’s gotta be 品. It just irritates me for some reason. It just reminds me of an annoying person

  21. 部 陪 (part, accompany)

    貨 賃 貸 (freight, rent, lend)

    I just can’t tell them apart, so I dread when they come up on Wanikani. It’s like plugging an USB cable, I know how but I only get right on the third try. I’ll never burn them…

  22. I fucking hate trying to write 家, it always looks shit. Also, is looks completely different on all my devices to how it does in my textbook, I checked and it doesn’t seem to be a Han Unification thing either.

  26. My hated Kanji is anything with this radial　⻌ “walk”

    It just squishes anything above and around it and never looks quite right.

  28. Life, arrow, cow, noon, heaven all had me confused for a while

    Stone and right too

    Now it’s copy, number, and something else

    Oh and I keep getting up and stop mixed up when they make up part of a verb

  30. Today in class it was running into “words that sound the same and have close meanings, but use different kanji” like 返す (to return something, i.e., that was borrowed) and 帰す (to send someone back/home), both pronounced かえす, and with identical pitch accent. Probably the not the worst example, but really emphasing that learning vocabulary without kanji will lead to regret. I’m coming to think that vocabulary should learned with kanji, and furigana if necessary or early stages. Even if students don’t memorize the kanji at first, they should at least get used to *seeing* it when they learn the word, so that they know that it’s not the same word!

    Not really happy when a class uses romaji.

  31. Lately, I’ve been struggling with 部屋 / 部室 the second character is sometimes too similar for me to know it at a glance.

    Now that WaniKani allows advanced choice of selecting words, I sometimes will do a bunch of kanji and then do a few levels of vocab all bundled together with the same kanji, so I have to know the subtle differences because otherwise I will get them wrong. I can’t just fall back on knowing which one I recently learned and assume it’s that.

    I feel like WaniKani sometimes doesn’t give a good way to distinguish them otherwise, they just say “this word has x in it, which means it’s to do with y” so by doing them all together you come up with it yourself.

    For example 集める / 集まる

  32. I’m a native Chinese speaker and the list of pronunciations for this kanji simultaneously awes and infuriates me

  33. without a doubt, the worst of all time, the crème de la crème goes to 気. You can learn some of the most common phrases containing this kanji like 気に入る、気が付く、気を使う、気になる, etc…. and you would barely scratch the surface, the list just goes on and on. Anymore of this kanji and i might just 気が違いそうになる

  37. seeing the kanji hate is so funny cuz i hate kanji for an entirely different reason. the meanings being different from chinese fucks me up

  39. As soon as I saw the notification (without seeing the picture) I immediately thought about this one 😂

  40. 右 and 左 : I hate the strokes above, I can never memorise the correct order (why tf is it dif when the end result is so similar? 😭). There’s also 研 which is js bothering me for some weird reason.. Also 図 THE DOOOTS! 藤 why should I learn this? It fking means wisteria and I didn’t know this existed in my mother languages 😭. Then there’s 職, in which there are too many things and the weird mix from the 立 to the 戈 is disturbing lol. Finally idk why but I had a really hard time learning the onyomi of 待, being タイ. There are many many more like 藤, I meannn cmon why should I learn words I don’t even use in my mother languages or in eng :’)

  43. This is the reason why it makes more sense to learn vocabulary phonetically instead of memorizing readings for isolated kanji. Once your vocabulary is rich enough you gonna notice common kanji between words and the readings will become much easier to remember because they will be associated with words rather than fragmentary symbols (I mean it’s much easier to remember the on’s and kun’s in the context of complete words because they are monosyllabic on their own).

  46. Times like this I appreciate how Genki taught me to approach Kanji. Basically you do not actually need to know every reading of a word, nor every meaning of a word on the first go-around.

    When you see a phrase like 生活 you just learn that specific reading of せい, and accept that you do not know every possible reading nor meaning of the kanji 生. While other learning resources encouraged me to learn more meanings and readings so that I can guess the meanings of phrases i never saw before, I realise that this is very inefficient since I don’t have the context to appreciate unrelated readings or meanings and I ended up forgetting the extra readings.

    In a nutshell, “keep it simple stupid” is way too effective

    I do strongly dislike 直 and 将 because they do not render correctly everywhere and I learned the wrong way to write these words for the longest time. I also do not like when different kanji have the same hiragana, rough use-case and even same dictionary entry but have slightly different nuance, and kanji that have multiple readings for the same use-case like 吐く which is read both tsuku and haku

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