Why so many kanji, is that even possible!?

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can some one give me a good website where you can learn all 1945 necesary kanji?
(might be cool to if you know a site where i can continue studying japanese after "japanese coach" is over

Well, I'm learning Chinese which is ALL kanji (or "Hanzi"). You have to know at least 2,000 to know how to read a newspaper. I think I know a few hundred....

I just like some of the 'stories' inside some of the characters in Chinese. For example

Trouble - two women under one roof
Crisis - danger and opportunity, etc.

True, there are about 50,000 Chinese characters, but only Chinese uses them all. Japanese took only a portion of them. About 1,900 or so are mandatory to learn in Japanese schools, and not more than 6,000 are typically used in everyday life.

I found a terrific resource for learning these signs. It's not a website, but a book series. It's called Remembering the Kanji and it's designed for the self-taught who wants to never forget a sign again. I'm still beginning it, but let me tell you, the method is fantastic. Make sure you look for this book series next time you visit a bookstore.

^^would you like to give us some more details/amazon link? sounds like something I'd like to get for Christmas

if i get the chance i will buy the book =)
although i thought only 2000 where necesarie

Links follow:

Remembering the Kanji, vol. 1

Remembering the Kanji, vol. 2

Remembering the Kanji, vol. 3

I know there's a vol. 4, but I didn't find a link for that.

Also, I happened to find a book series I didn't remember had an English version. It's called "Japanese in Mangaland", and it was written by a Spanish guy who lives in Japan. The interesting thing about it is that it illustrates its examples by using real manga excerpts, so you can see the use of Japanese expressions in real Japanese publications. It's not a kanji catalogue, but it has terrific grammar explanations. Links:

Japanese in Mangaland, vol. 1

Japanese in Mangaland, vol. 2

Japanese in Mangaland, vol. 3

.........It's actually about 2,000... Have you already learned Hiragana and Katakana? Don't do Kanji until you've learned the basics. I had to learn Hiragana and Katakana first, then quite a few expressions and words before Kanji even began to make sense.

Hiragana and Katakana are ridiculously easy. I haven't known of anyone complaining about those.

yep, i learned it and practiced it to the fullest although i probably have
to download a torrent-crack of the kanji books if you can buy them here
edit: in matter of fact i just did

I know this topic is old, but I wanted to share my experience with Kanji and was interested in the experience of other autistic ppl..

You really don't need to know 50.000 Kanji. Currently the japanese kids are learning 2136 Kanji at school and newspapers and magazines are using those as guidline. So you can easily survive in Japane just knowing those 2136.
Even in Japan, just a very view Japanese ppl know all Kanji and there are rare Kanjis hardly ever used who even most Japanese ppl won't have ever seen.

At the beginning I thought it's highly komplex learning Kanji, but I figured out two things really fast:
a) learning Kanji is not that much different, than learning vocabulary.
b) I learn Kanji even faster than vocabulary.

So very often I picked up the meaning of the Kanji very very fast, but need a lot longer to remember the Japanese vocabulary to it.

Yesterday I looked at 30 random Kanji in the morning for just a view minutes and looked at them this morning again and I was suprised that I still recognised every single one of them. What you have to know is, that I need a lot longer to learn vocabulary. So I propably could learn easily the meaning of 50-100 Kanji a day. I haven't tryed it so far, but some Kanjis I even picked up subconsiously. So even now in the beginning, my knowlege of Kanji is far better than this of the Japanese vocabulary.

Some ppl are visual learners and others are auditive learners.

I have to say, that I'm dyslexic, so I thought at the beginning learning Kanji would be highly difficult for me, but the oposite is the case, because I don't have to remember any random spelling, for me the Kanjis are like little pictures with a meaning to it and most of the time those are highly logical to me.

So it really depends what type of learner you are...!

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edit:



Made up of 58 strokes, the Chinese character for "biáng" is one of the most complex Chinese characters in contemporary usage, although the character is not found in modern dictionaries or even in the Kangxi dictionary.

Also very interesting:

"Uno (as cited in Itani 2001) and Saito (as cited in Kosaka & Tsuzuki)
say that kana is primarily processed phonologically in the reading process,
whereas kanji is processed semantically. Kana accesses the mental lexicon
via phonological coding. Kanji’s coding is determined by its visual pattern.
Unlike kana, kanji access the mental lexicon directly via visual information
and later it is subject to phonological coding while the visual and auditory
memory is referred to. Kanji are mostly processed visually, so a reading
process (decoding) as such is not necessary to grasp their meaning."

http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~inveling/pdf/Dyszy-18.pdf

This explains very well, why I'm still a highly slow reader in Kana - being dyslexic - but why I am so fast picking up Kanji as a highly visual thinker. Both systems are processed differently.

I memorized 85 Kanjis today and I just learned Kanji in the morning and in the evening.
I figured that I remember them very fast and because of that I decided to learn to recognize until the end of the year at least 1000 alltogether. That would be just a bit less than 38 Kanjis per day, because I've already memorized some.

It'll take a bit longer for me until I figure out the correct pronounciation and Kana spelling. I'm not so good in that...
But I first wanna focus in recognizing so many Kanjis as possible until the end of the year.

I'm already able to recognize, I think about 130 to 150 Kanji and I first started to learn Kanjis the day before yesterday . The fiew Kanjis I knew before, I picked ub subconsiously when I read something and the Kanji was obvious like: 日本語 for example, because I've already seen it so often.

If you're asking "why" there are so many the answer is because its a heiroglyphic writing system. All such systems (ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, ancient Mayan, etc) have one symbol for each word in the language. Since you need a seperate sign for each word in your vocabulary and since even the least educated person has thousands of words in their vocabulary you need to know atleast thousands, if not tens of thousands of signs to write with any facility.

The Hebrews reduced the hierglyphic Egyptian system down to a syllabic system- one symbol per syllable- which paired down the number of symbols to the hundreds. Then the Phonecians changed that system to a phonetic system and invented the alphabet as we know it- one sign per sound- needing only twenty to fourty signs (depending on the language).

Actually modern Chinese and Japansese are a mix of hieroglyphic and syllabic signs. But still you need to know to thousands to write stuff that you only need 26 Roman letters to write in English, or 35 cyrillic letters to write in Russian.

Yes exactly

I wanted to add, that the problem especially with Chinese is that it is a tonal language. So if you say "ma" for example, it has 7 different meanings, because also the tone plays a keyrole if you say it high or low and so on. We are not used to such a system. The problem you have with such a language is, that you can't write down a tone just with 26 or 35 letters, so they needed to come up with another system.
In Japanese it's a bit different. They just have 5 vowels and 13 consonants, so there is a lot of overlapping, but when talking, it is clear out of the context what you mean. But they wanted to have an exact written system, so they came up with a mixture out of Kanji and a kind of letter system - Kana. Also China is next to Japan, so it was easy to use the Chinese system who was already there.

Here are some mental health-related kanji, in case anyone is interested. Here is the character for mania:

http://kakijun.jp/page/E74E200.html

And here is one of the characters for depression:

http://kakijun.jp/page/utsu200.html