No Stupid Questions

I've been studying Japanese for almost six years now and I would say YES kanji is difficult, but it's not insurmountable. It's also one of the most interesting and fulfilling parts of learning the language.
There's a certain level of "you have to know the rules before you know how to break the rules" but kanji can often be used in interesting nonstandard ways in literature & manga and just in general carry so much meaning and depth.
There's always something new to learn. Did you know that there's another version of 探す (to search) that has a slightly different connotation? 探す is usually used to search for something you want, but 捜す is used to search for something that's missing.

By the way, do we have a Japanese learning community on Lemmy?

Yes, because I find hard memorizing a lot of symbols before becoming capable of minimal reading proficiency.

I once tried to learn to count in Japanese, but had to stop because I got an itchy knee.

The lack of phonetic information is a challenge. If you see an unfamiliar English word, you can guess the pronunciation, and usually be pretty close (sometimes you’ll get a phoneme wrong or stress the wrong syllable, but listeners will be able to infer what you meant). With kanji, as well as not knowing what it means, you have no information of how it’s pronounced. It is theoretically possible for kanji to exist which not only lack meaning but also have no pronunciation, and indeed, there are about a dozen meaningless, soundless “[ghost kanji]”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_characters) that ended up in Unicode due to bureaucratic errors at the Japanese standards agency.

Yes: It seems very complicated.

To counter your argument about English: English is very complicated, reportedly it's one of the hardest languages to learn because of all the exceptions to rules and the fact that it's actually a bunch of different languages melded together (hence the many exceptions).

I haven't tried learning Japanese (precisely because of Kanji) but what you're describing in English is also the hardest part of English. There are plenty of languages where you can easily spell and pronounce words you've never seen before.

Yes I find them hard and also not a very good writing system. Especially in Japanese where you have four writing systems. Drawing pictograms means I have to learn a spoken word, a pictogram (or worse pictogram combination) and a meaning for both. I know that English isn't always written as it is spoken but for the most part it is. Even if I only hear a word I can have a guess at how it's written and from the writing I have an idea how it might be spoken.

Since I know 0 of them, yeah.

Kanji is easy.

(I went to school in China till 2nd grade 😉 close enough lol)

It was hard at first. Now I'm about 600 kanji in, and while they are still hard they are starting to make sense. New ones are quite a lot easier than before because of pattern recognition, and I'm even able to sometimes guess reading/meaning. It has also massively improved my learning, I had always heard that it wasn't necessary nowadays, and I've been studying on off for a long time now, but the difference on this last cycle is massive

There are over 5000 Kanji

Did you drop a zero? The number I was taught when I was studying Japanese in college decades ago was 48,902. I don't know why it stuck in my head so hard, but it did.

I found kanji to be both difficult and fascinating. It's tempting to just focus on them as a writing system, but I think the readings are at least as important.

Is it that much harder than remembering that some emojis now map onto secondary meanings, like 🍆 meaning penis and 💀 meaning "I find this to be very funny"? Or even the primary meanings of emojis, where you'd totally understand what someone is saying when they type ✈️🇯🇵🍣🍜?

The difficulty comes from the sheer number of them, but human communication is full of things where meaning comes from non-alphabetical symbols.

it's difficult for us Westerners, because the concept is weird to us at first, but when you get hang of it it's not that hard, it's a similar concept to how we don't read words letter by letter but we just see them and know the meaning

Very much. Takes too long to write, and can be difficult to read when hand written or is too small. My ability to listen and understand Japanese is much better than my ability to read, except with Katakana (or the rare occasions something is written out in Romaji)

Nevermind the fact that there are over 50,000 of them. Only around 2000 are used daily, and that is still many magnitudes more than the 26 total letters in Roman characters I've known most of my life as an English speaker.

Kanji aren't really hard, there's just a lot of them. And I can't learn that many at a time. So it takes ages to get to the point where you can actually read stuff, just in terms of volume. At least with my limits.

That said, one issue I'm noticing is that kanji with the default internet fonts are usually too small for me to make out the differences in the more complex ones. I often need to increase the font a bit with a userstyle to actually make stuff readable.

The "real" hard part is numerous readings (depending whether it's paired with kana or another kanji, reflected from kunyomi & onyomi plus nanori when applied in people's names).

Just don't learn all the readings from the start. When the kanji is used alone as a word directly, there's just one reading used for it. Other than that, you're dealing with vocabulary.

We learn "2" as reading "two", not "twe", despite that reading being used in "twenty" and "twelve". We learn the latter two as separate vocabulary words that simply include the "2" character. The same should be applied to kanji. Learn one word for the kanji, and the rest through vocabulary that uses the kanji.

Wanikani iirc takes this approach where they usually teach you the primary onyomi with the kanji, so you can read most vocabulary words right away, while only having to learn one reading. All of ther other readings are taught through vocabulary items indirectly.

No. Studying it was entertaining. I remember plastering my walls at home - the whole apartment - with kanji, it's readings and an example sentence. Every time I went by such a paper, I made it a rule to read it out loud. I also remember filling out whole notebooks with kanji. I also remember learning calligraphy, not because I wanted to learn calligraphy, but because writing kanji with a brush gives you a deeper understanding of why they are written in the way they are. Since I wasn't living in Japan at the time, I needed a way to immerse myself. This was my way.

Native Chinese speaker who is quite decent at Japanese and should in theory find Kanji quite easy, because of Chinese... YES

Not that the other parts of the language is easy, I find the keigo system quite complex so

I successfully read one recently! I was watching sumo, and they show the wrestlers names first in kanji, than add the romaji later, and I saw that trident looking one at the end of a name and I thought -i know that one, that's mountain, so could be -yama, or maybe -zan, at the end of the guy's name, and tried to guess who was coming out next. Turned out it was Kinbozan, so i was right, but also meh.