Insights on kanji, readings, and Japanese language learning
Spelling, not arithmetic Some kanji compounds aren't compounds at all — they're spelling. 大人/words/otona reads otona, not daijin or oohito. 今日/words/kyou reads kyō, not konnichi well, sometimes — s...
A word for silence Japanese has a written word for the sound of silence — シーン — and you will find it stamped across mangahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga panels at exactly the moment when nothin...
Six boxes, every compound in exactly one Every Japanese compound noun falls into one of six buckets — and which bucket it sits in is the single most useful fact about it. 漢語https://en.wikipedia.org...
The API contract between your hand, the dictionary, and the OCR engine Stroke order is taught as etiquette. Draw the strokes out of order and sensei frowns. That framing is wrong. Stroke order is t...
The feature hiding in plain sight Tokyo Japanesehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyodialect is a pitchaccent languagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanesepitchaccent. Every word carries either a si...
Most kanji are not pictures. They are spellings. The single most useful fact about kanji: roughly four in five are phonosemantic compoundshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinesecharacterclassificatio...
Japanese grammar looks vast from outside and small from inside. The trick is to find the small set of design choices that generate the rest, then derive everything from there. Three properties do a...
What an honorific actually is An honorific is not vocabulary about politeness. It is politeness as morphosyntax — the social variable fused into the verb stem, the pronoun paradigm, the noun, the s...
The ROI of your first 100 characters 100 kanji sounds like rounding error against the 2,136character joyohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8Dkanji set. It is not. The frequency distribution...
A hash function from 1716 The 214 Kangxi radicalshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxiradical are not a learning aid. They are an indexing system — a piece of premodern infrastructure for the proble...
The scheduler is the whole game A card appears. You answer. The app picks the next interval — tomorrow, next week, three months from now. That single decision is the product. Get it right and you k...
Not one Chinese — four On'yomi is "the Chinese reading." Kun'yomi is "the Japanese reading." Technically true, and it papers over the interesting bit: on'yomi is not one layer. It's four. Four borr...
Kanji Is an Information Technology The character 鬱/kanjis/9b31 depression encodes in one glyph what English spells out in ten letters and 29 strokes. That is not calligraphic trivia. It is an engin...
The shelf, honestly benchmarked Most Western learners' kanji shelves end the same way — a halfread Heisig, a Genki, a dictionary used twice. The Japanese scholarly shelf is a different artifact. De...
The empirical case for structured kanji study 2,136 joyo kanjihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8Dkanji is not a willpower problem. It is a scheduling, encoding, and retrieval problem — and...
Third in the world at reading — while carrying the heaviest script Japan scored 516 on PISA 2022 readinghttps://www.oecd.org/pisa/ — third globally — while asking every child to internalize the mos...
Kanji are a compression algorithm Unicode's CJK Unified Ideographs block encodes 97,680 characters. The KanjiJumphttps://www.kanjijump.com/browse/atomic decomposition reduces the 3,500 mostused Jap...
The oldest classification for any writing system — and what two thousand years have done to it In 100 CE, the Han scholar Xu Shenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XuShen 許慎 finished the Shuowen Jieziht...
An indexing algorithm that has survived 310 years Pick a character — say 漢. Open a paper dictionary. How do you find it? There is no alphabet. There are tens of thousands of glyphs. You need a key....
3,200 years of continuous deployment The kanji you study tonight were carved into turtle shells under the late Shang dynastyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangdynasty. Anyang divination pits on one...
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