"Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" - Learn Kanji from Japanese Anime!

We believe learning in a fun and interesting way is the best way to study. Also, it tends to be easy to remember something when you enjoy it.

So we're introducing kanji lessons from Japanese anime in this corner! yay :)

The first is "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind", one of the famous Ghibli masterpieces.

We will introduce mostly grade one and two level kanji today.

The Japanese title of "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" is "風の谷のナウシカ". In this title, 風 and 谷 are kanji.

 Kanji Lesson 風 (Grade 2) 

The main meaning of the kanji "風" is "wind". 風 represents also "wind" in this title.

You can check the kanji stroke order, example words, and pronunciation in the kanji lesson 風 video!

Here's the kanji lesson 風 video:

 Kanji Lesson 谷 (Grade 2) 

The kanji "谷" represents either valley, or depressed place or condition. In this anime title it means valley.

Here's the kanji lesson 谷 video:

Let's study more kanji! 

We found a sentence from the Japanese version of "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind".

"木々を愛で

虫を語り

風をまねく鳥の人"

The English translation is "A bird person who loves trees, talks about insects, and invites winds".

The Japanese part "木々を愛で" translates to English as "loves trees".

*Tips

々 is a symbol that represents repetition of the previous character, and is not kanji. If we write 木々without the "々" symbol, it would be 木木. Furthermore, the pronunciation of the second character in 木木 becomes a muddy sound, so it's pronounced "kigi".

 Kanji Lesson 木 (Grade 1) 
木 means a tree or wood, and 木々 represents "trees".

Here's the kanji lesson 木 video:

 Kanji Lesson 愛 (Grade 4) 

愛 is a fairly advanced kanji.

愛 means "love" as a noun.

When making this into a verb or abject form in Japanese, we normally use

kanji + hiragana.

Thus, we need to know that the combination of 愛 and で becomes a verb tense in this case. The basic style of 愛で is 愛でる and it represents the verb form of "love" or "admire".

Here's the kanji lesson 愛 video:

The next sentence, "虫を語り", means "talk about insects" in English.

 Kanji Lesson 語 (Grade 2) 
The basic style of 語りis 語る, and means "talk".

Here's the kanji lesson 語 video:

 Kanji Lesson 虫 (Grade 1) 
The next kanji, "虫", means "insect" or "insects".

Here's the kanji lesson 虫 video:

2 more kanji to go!

The last sentence, "風をまねく鳥の人", means "a bird person (鳥の人)" and "invite winds (風をまねく)" in English.

 Kanji Lesson 鳥 (Grade 2) 
鳥 means "a bird" or "birds"

Here's the kanji lesson 鳥 video:

 Kanji Lesson 人 (Grade 1) 
We learned "winds" at the top of this post. The last kanji, "人" means "person" in English.

Here's the kanji lesson 人 video:

You learned 8 kanji today!
Nicely done! :)