bigmit3737 said:
Ahhh thank you. I decided not to get the Hesig book because it was really confusing me.
When I saw those three characters, I didn't even know it was for one word, Japanese...I thought there was a sentence that involved a tree and Sun/Day because I was only studying the Kanji characters.
I personally feel It's important to study the words associated with the Kanji as well.
Now I understand what one of the above poster meant by studying the vocabulary as well.
I'm actually going through the Heisig stuff now (in parallel to expanding my vocabulary), and what you did was the big mistake of trying to read when you can't, which isn't the point of the book. It's meant to learn how to write them along with associating them with one of their individual meanings (the majority have multiple meanings when used in compounds). As for telling when it's one word or more, they'll usually be separated by a particle, though it isn't always true, so you just have to know what's being said.
Evenwithoutspacesyoucanreadwhatiswrittenherebecauseyouknowallthewordsused.
However, it can prove interesting what the symbolism behind the words are. Like, 日曜日 literally means "sun day", and 月曜日 literally means "moon day", which I found interesting as those are the names we came up with for the seventh and first days of the week independently of them.
In case you were curious, the meaning behind 日本 (にほん, aka Japan) is actually "sun's origin", which makes sense when you take the first kanji, meaning "sun", and the second, which means "origin" (hence "Land of the Rising Sun"). Though, oddly, the second kanji is pronounced "ほん", which is the reading for "book". The reading to mean "origin" is "もと". Go read the Wikipedia page on "Names of Japan" if you care about the history behind that one.
Therefore, you get 日本 (にほん, Japan) and 語 (ご, language), so putting them together (日本語
gets us "Japan's language".
/trivia
edit(s): Grammar, fact correction, etc.
