The Kanji for “small” is almost as easy to visualize as its opposite （大）, if you think of the strokes as representing three tiny things.
Similar to 「大きな」, 「小さな」 is another one of those funny adjectives that you can’t conjugate and only use as is. Stick with the i-adjective 「小さい」 for conjugations eg 「小さくない」 NOT 「小さじゃない」.
I’m back! Most of you probably don’t know this (or care) but I actually have a real full-time job. And this being Japan, full-time means more like 9 to 8 rather than 9 to 5. So those of you who think I sit at home in my boxers working on my computer, I’m actually stuffed in a crowded train disguised amongst hundreds of Japanese businessman. And since our project is running late on the release date, I’m working more like 9 to 10… and I don’t mean one hour. No really. マジで。 And I suppose that’s just as good as any lead-in to the topic at hand: “How to use マジ to talk about what’s real.”
What is マジ?
Once you start practicing Japanese with real people outside of the classroom, you’re bound to run into the word 「まじ」 probably sooner rather than later.
You probably already know 「本当」, the word you use when you want to say things like, “Really?” or “Yes, really.” But most of the time, you don’t want to sound like a wimp by saying things like, “Oh really? That’s nice.” What you really want to say is something like, “For real?” or “No way!” or maybe even, “You’re shitting me!”. That’s where 「まじ」 comes in. 「まじ」 is often said to be a shortened form of 「真面目」 which means “to be serious” (although there are other theories regarding its origin). 「まじ」 is also often written in katakana to show that great emphasis that 「マジ」 contains.
A: クリス、彼女ができたんだって。
– I hear Chris got a girlfriend.
B: へ～、マジ？
– Heh, for real?
Using the 「で」 Particle for マジ
One thing to remember in terms of grammar is the use of particles. When you use 「本当」 as an adverb, you attach 「に」. However, for 「マジ」 you attach 「で」. There’s no logic that I can figure out to this but then we are talking about slang here.
A: 本当に忙しくて大変だったよ。
– I was really busy and it was tough
B: そうなの？
– Is that so?
A: あいつ、マジで退学しちゃったの？
– Did that guy really drop out of school?
B: うん、マジで。
– Yeah, for real.
Differences between 「本当」 and 「マジ」
Besides the difference in the particles, 「本当」 and 「マジ」 are quite different in their tone and usage. For instance, 「本当」 sounds cuter, more polite, and more feminine than 「マジ」 which sounds very rough and crude. In fact, you should take care in using 「マジ」 with your superiors. Having said that, I think 「マジ」 is a really useful word to know that you’re going to hear over and over again in daily conversations.
One of my pet peeves is when somebody says the phrase “learn Kanji” such as, “I learned 100 Kanji in one week!” Kanji has way too many parts to simply say that you “learned” it. Saying you learned Kanji is like saying “I learned computer!” or “I learned a car!” What does that even mean? Let’s break down the concrete things you can learn with Kanji.
Learn the meaning(s)
Learn all the readings
Learn the stroke order
Learn how to write it
Now, let’s see how useful all these possibilities are for learning Japanese.
Learn the meaning – Useful
Learning the meaning of a Kanji is great if it’s a word by itself. For example, 「力」 is also a word meaning “strength” so the meaning directly translates into a word you can actually use. However, you can also argue that since 「力」 is also a word, you are essentially saying that you learned the meaning of a word. So in the end, this is really the same as learning words and doesn’t really count as “learning Kanji”.
Having said that, knowing the meaning of a Kanji is certainly very useful for simpler words and concepts. Memorizing the meaning for Kanji such as 「続」 or 「連」 will definitely help you remember words such as 接続、連続、and 連中. In conclusion, there’s nothing wrong with learning the meaning of a Kanji and something I would recommend.
Learn all the readings – Waste of time
To put it bluntly, learning all the readings of a Kanji is a complete waste of time. Yes, as a general rule of thumb, Kanji compounds use the on-reading while single characters use the kun-reading. However, this rule is nowhere consistent enough to make it more than a good guess (this is particularly true for 大 which we can’t seem to decide to read as おお or だい).
In addition, many Kanji have multiple readings kun or on-readings such as 怪力(かいりき or かいりょく?), 外道(げどう or がいどう?), or 家路(いえじ、うちじ、やじ?). Even if you guessed the correct reading, it might be voiced or shortened such as 活発 and 発展. Also, Kanji such as 生 have so many readings, it’s completely pointless to memorize them because you won’t know which one will be used in a word such as 芝生、生ビール、生粋、and 生涯. Not to mention the various words that only use the Kanji for the meaning while completely ignoring the reading. These words such as 仲人、素人、and お土産 are literally impossible to guess the readings for. At the end of the day, if you see a new word, you always want to look up the reading to make sure you learn the correct combination. In addition, the readings will be easier to remember in context of real words that you can actually use. Essentially, memorizing the readings by themselves is a complete waste of time.
Learn the stroke order – Essential at first
I’m not going to go into all the reasons why memorizing the correct stroke order is important. Without going into detail, of course you want to make sure to remember the correct stroke order. However, you’ll find that once you’ve mastered the basics and all the radicals, stroke order for most Kanji are consistent and easy enough that you no longer need to look it up. Every once in a while, you’ll run into odd Kanji such as 飛 or 鬱 where you’ll want to check the stroke order. So yes, definitely look up the stroke order and make sure you’re not developing any bad habits until… you don’t need to look them up anymore. That happens sooner that you might think.
Learn how to write it – Depends
This is going to be a controversial stance but nowadays, technology has progressed to the point where we never really have to write anything by hand anymore. Yes, it’s embarrassing if you’re fluent in a language but can’t write it by hand. This is an issue even for Japanese people.
By “writing Kanji”, I don’t mean just 2,000+ characters based on keywords. Unless you know which combination of Kanji to use for any given word with the correct okurigana, that is a useless parlor trick.
Being able to write any word in Kanji is an extremely time-consuming goal that may not have much practical value. If your daily life requires writing a lot by hand such as teaching Japanese, I feel that necessity and practice would naturally lend to better writing ability. In other words, if you don’t need it, it’s extremely difficult to keep up your memory of how to write Kanji by hand.
However, that is not to say you should never bother practicing writing in general. For beginners, it’s highly recommended to practice writing in general (especially kana!) in order to help develop muscle memory for stroke order as well as getting a sense of proper character balance.
Conclusion – Learn words with Kanji!
I hate the phrase “learn Kanji” because almost every time someone says that, they don’t realize that they haven’t really learned anything that’s directly applicable to Japanese. Compare “learning Kanji” to learning a word. In order to learn a word, you obviously need to learn the definition, reading, Kanji, and any Okurigana if applicable. There is no question of what you learned and whether it’s useful for Japanese. And yet the idea of learning 2,000 Kanji is so attractive that we can’t seem to get away from that broadly undefined notion.
I don’t consider a Kanji as being learned until I know the most common words using that Kanji with the correct readings and can write those words randomly months after I initially memorized it. Unfortunately, given that standard, I probably know about 100-200 Kanji but hey, we all need goals, right?
Whatever cool method to “memorize Kanji” someone tries to peddle you, at the end of the day, you still have to do lots of reading and memorizing tons of vocabulary. This involves daily struggles starting with remembering that 「き」 in 「好き」 is okurigana and continuing with which Kanji to use for 真剣 vs 試験 vs 検査 vs 険しい, or constantly forgetting which kanji is for net vs rope （網／綱）. You may be thinking, “Wow, 2,000 is a lot!” But don’t worry, it pales in comparison to the tens of thousands of words that an adult has memorized in her lifetime. And believe it or not, having a fixed set of characters with mnemonics and compounds actually helps with the much bigger job of learning vocabulary. Once you’ve learned a new word in seconds based on characters you already know, you’ll know what I mean. Trust me.
Addendum: Learning the radicals
Many of the simpler and common characters such as 口 are also radicals that are used as parts of more complicated characters. Obviously you want to learn those as words by themselves. However, there are some radicals that are not characters on their own, for example, 儿 or 辶.
Memorizing them if it helps is fine, especially those that are conceptually easy to visualize such as 儿 for “legs”. In particular, you should learn to recognize when they are derivatives of actual Kanji such as 亻 from 人 and 忄 from 心. A common example is to remember the person radical 亻 next to a temple 寺 as meaning “samurai” （侍）. Learning the radical meaning will really help differentiate from other similar Kanji with different radicals eg 「時持詩待特」.
However, I personally can never remember some of the more abstract ones such as 攵 so while useful, I wouldn’t go full speed and memorize every single radical in existence. Again, learning in context and with actual words is your best bet.
Q: What’s the best way to learn Japanese?
A: It depends.
Q: What’s the best way to learn Kanji?
A: The question is vague.
Q: How long until I can become fluent?
A: What does “fluent” mean? Also, it depends.
I get very short emails of this kind all the time and I usually don’t respond (sorry if this was you). But really, 99% of these generic, vague questions I can answer: “It depends”.
Time Management
Learning a language is a big job. You’ve been practicing and learning for pretty much your entire life starting with your parents, to school, and all the way up to adulthood and beyond.
Don’t believe the stupid “fluent in 3 months!” marketing lies of various paid products (who does really?) and be prepared for a long term significant time commitment. There are countless strategies for maintaining dedication and achieving goals, which I’m not going to get into because different approaches work better for different people.
What I can say definitely based on basic memorization principles is that it’s far better to spend a little time regularly rather than a large chunk with big gaps of neglect. The best way to achieve this is to integrate Japanese into your daily schedule.
Personally, I did a lot of studying back in the old days when I had literally nothing better to do (no TV or internet). Nowadays, with smartphones, there’s obviously a lot more distractions to deal with. Depending on your schedule, try to find a regular time that you can dedicate such as your commute or scheduling conversation practice once a week.
Allocate a regular time in your schedule
It would be even more ideal if you can take one of your existing hobbies or interest and apply Japanese to it. The obvious example would be switching media such as music, movies, TV, books, and games to Japanese, perhaps with subtitles. Even if you spend an hour or so browsing on the internet or social media, consider watching Japanese Youtube videos or joining some Japanese Facebook group for example.
Of course, language is a tool for communication so you also want to make sure you’re not holed up by yourself and that you get out and socialize (more on this later). Ultimately, it’s very important that your “study” is enjoyable and provides some degree of satisfaction and positive feedback in order to prevent burn out and giving up.
Make it fun!
Prioritization
Assuming you are able to devote some amount of time on a regular basis, there’s still the issue that you have a lot of catching up to do compared to a native adult who has a head start of 2+ decades of education and immersion. So it’s time to set some priorities and have realistic expectations.
Even if you don’t set priorities, they will get set whether you like it or not. Of course like you (I hope), I strive to be natively proficient at everything but frankly, my writing skills can use work, a LOT of work. That’s because instead of writing in Japanese, I’m spending my time writing this blog post in English and mostly reading. Even though I can naively wish my writing would magically improve, it won’t happen unless I work on it (I’m not).
So if you need Japanese for your work, have family, interested in anime or whatever, you can easily break it down into one of four skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing. Once you have your priorities, you need to work on improving those skills by actually DOING IT.
Triage and focus on one of:
listening
reading
speaking
writing
However, when it comes to output skills, you need input otherwise you’re just making up random nonsense. So if you want to work on speaking, start by listening, reading before writing (about 2-4 times more input over output).
2-4X input over output:
listening > speaking
reading > writing
Finally, even if you triage (which will happen regardless), you should still work on the other areas. Our brains are a complex neural network and stimulating different parts of it helps retention. So if you spend all your time buried in a book, get out and talk to some people. If you’re just winging it in Japan, go home and do some reading.
Having a visual image of an object for example, a “vending machine” with the Kanji 自動販売機 “self moving sell machine” after hearing the word in conversations is the best way to cement it in long-term memory.
Maintain a good balance
Counter examples
Take these stereotypical examples and it’s easy to see where the problems lie because priorities were not in line with desired result.
Stopped studying Japanese because “busy with life”
Spends several hours watching Youtube on the weekend.
Advanced Japanese student who can’t hold a conversation
Didn’t actually spend time outside classroom speaking to people.
Cannot speak with Japanese significant other
Always speaks in English with significant other. Has some excuse for not studying or reading.
Loves anime, can’t understand a word
English subtitles always on. Doesn’t spend time looking up the words. Doesn’t read manga or light novel with a dictionary.
Can’t write Kanji by hand (this is me)
Always uses an electronic device to type. Rarely writes by hand.
Can’t write that novel in Japanese
Writes English blog post about learning priorities (yeah you know who you are).
Grammar is confusing
Didn’t read my book (shameless plug).
As you can see by this image of the Pope, 「大」 is yet another one of those simple Kanji that is easy to memorize AND visualize.
The only tricky part is figuring out which reading to use in Kanji compounds. There is no rhythm nor reason for why 「大学」 is read as 「だい」 vs 「大使館」 as 「たい」 except perhaps those readings roll easier on the tongue. If you’re new to Kanji, you’ll see this is often the case for common characters with multiple readings.
As for 「大きな」, this is one of those funny adjectives that you can’t conjugate and only use as is. Stick with the i-adjective 「大きい」 for conjugations eg 「大きくない」 NOT 「大きじゃない」.
A: What are (you) saying? There’s no way I can say a Kanji in conversation, right? Or what? Are you concluding that what I’m saying materializes and is visible to the eye? It’s not like this is a Manga.
B: So why are you using such confusing Kanji and difficult words and grammar? People that just started studying Kanji will fall into a panic and run away!
This is one of those rare instances where the Kanji components fit with the definition perfectly. The Kanji for 「怖」 is made up of the 「心」 (heart) radical and 「布」 (cloth). It fits the stereotypical ghost with white cloth trying to trigger a heart attack with the good ol’ “BOO” routine. You can skip to the next suggestions if you want to learn about these characters first.
You might be asking why is mouth a square, not a circle? Honestly, I have no frickin’ clue. Oddly enough, circle is a shape that is not used in Kanji （○ is a symbol, not Kanji）. Even the Kanji for “circle” （丸） is not round in the slightest! Maybe something to do with how brush strokes work, I dunno.
Anyway, it is what it is, a square to symbolize a big, open mouth. Take EXTRA care to learn the stroke order because this is also a very important radical that will be used in quite a few other characters.
Also, this is visually identical to the Katakana: ロ but totally different OBVIOUSLY. (Rolls eyes)
This post is about how you shouldn’t be reading this post.
Still here? Tsk tsk.
Lately, I’ve been wrestling with how much English vs Japanese to use in my guide. The more Japanese there is to read, the better. However, if there’s too much, it will be too difficult and overwhelming, which would be counter-productive.
If your Japanese study material consists of mostly reading in your native language, you might want to try something that has more Japanese text. This post is in English as well, so really, you probably should stop reading and spend your time on something more productive.
When I first started writing the grammar guide, I wanted to cover every possible topic. Today however, my goal is to kick you out of the bird’s nest so to speak but perhaps a bit more gently than a sink-or-swim approach. I certainly DO NOT expect visitors to be reading about every nuance in grammar or vocabulary in English, especially those who have already mastered the basics. My primary goal is to cover the core concepts and illustrate how to teach yourself and maybe even have some fun in the process. Teach a man to fish and all that jazz.
So, if you understand all the particles, sentence structure, and how to use dictionaries to learn new vocabulary, maybe it’s time to consider trying to fly out of the nest. Take your time though, I won’t kick you out!
As a fellow Japanese learner, I should probably be writing this in Japanese too… でも、めんどくさいからやめとこう。
Well, the easy ride is over but it was great while it lasted, wasn’t it? 「一二三」, let’s see, that’s 3 out of about 2,000+ characters so… progress?
漢字いけるかもしれない？
There’s several explanations on how 「四」 came to be and most of them involve the fact that it comes from a combination of: 口＋八. However, the inside part more clearly resembles the 「儿」 leg radical (note: this radical is not a kanji by itself). If these Kanji are new to you and you prefer to learn in radical order, you may want to skip to the next suggestions.
One suggested memonic was an image of an open mouth to signify that your breath is impossible to count (one, two, three, many). This one must go back to the caveman days where four was considered a bigly number? In any case, this Kanji is still common and simple enough you could probably memorize it by brute repetition anyway. Hmph!
「切れる」, the intransitive version of 「切る」, not to be confused with the short-hand potential form 「切られる」, is one of those common words with many definitions and usages.
If you look up 「切れる」 on Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, you will get a huge list of definitions:
切れる 【きれる】 (v1) (1) to cut well; to be sharp; (2) to break (off); to snap; to wear out; (3) to be injured; (4) to burst; to collapse; (5) to be disconnected; to be out of; to expire; to sever (connections) with; (6) to be shrewd; to have a sharp mind;
If you’re just starting out, I would NOT recommend using these definitions verbatim. It’s important to see how it’s used in context in order to see the specific types of situations and common particles used together. Let’s take a look at some examples.
For instance, what if you wanted to say something ran out or expired?
１）電池がもうすぐ切れるから、新しいのを買った方がいい。 – The batteries are going to run out soon, so you should buy a new one.
２）この商品はもう売り切れです。 – This item is already sold-out.
３）賞味期限がもう切れたから、捨てた方がいいよ。 – The sell-by date has already expired so you should throw it out.
Or what if your connection gets cut off such as on the phone?
１）トンネルに入ったら、電波が届かなくて電話が切れた。 – Once entering the tunnel, the signal didn’t reach and the phone got cut off.
You can even use it for when you lose your temper.
１）もう我慢できなくて、切れた。 – I couldn’t take it anymore and I lost my temper.
Perhaps, one of the most useful thing about 「切れる」 is that you can take the negative and use it as a verb suffix for things you can’t cut off and put an end to. This has a similar meaning to the expression 「切りがない」 for things that have no cut-off point and seems to be endless. As you can see by the examples, you just take the stem of the verb and attach 「きれない」 .
１）こんなにたくさん食べきれないよ。 – I can’t eat this much (you know).
２）どう頑張っても、この宿題は絶対やりきれないよ。 – No matter how much you try, there’s no way you will finish this homework.
３）状況はまだ把握しきれてないため、明日まで検討させてください。 – Because I haven’t finished getting a handle on the situation, please let me consider/investigate until tomorrow.
