That "kanji" when your coworkers are amused by your confusion...

Someone spotted the post-it I had stuck to my desk with some kanji on it that all look very similar but mean different things.  When I see these kanji in a sentence, in context, I don’t mix them up, but when wanikani (the study website I use) throws them all at me in one unit without any sentence context, I get them mixed up.  So I wrote this, stuck it on my desk, and doodled on it when I got bored.  Much to the amusement of my coworkers, who thought this was hilarious. 

On the subject of kanji, most kanji have a number of readings (the on’yomi from Chinese, and kun’yomi from Japanese), which can make it a bit confusing to remember which ones are used in which words.  I actually thought someone’s name was San’ue-sensei for about a month until someone told me to give something to Mikami-sensei, and I replied with “Who?”  They pointed to… San’ue-sensei (or, at least, who I thought was San’ue-sensei).  And that was the day I learned that while 三 is read “san” and 上 is read “ue”, 三上 is not, in fact, read “san’ue” but “mikami”.  

This happened again when I was attempting to read a newspaper and looked at the word 下北 and thought “something-kita… ka-kita?  Kuda-kita?” and stared at it for a few minutes before looking at the conveniently-located map next to the article detailing the upper peninsula of Aomori, which is called… “Oh!  SHIMO-kita!” 

Kanji is an adventure.  (the post title is a bad example of a cross-language pun based on "that feel when..." and the fact that "kanji" also means "feeling")  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯