Kanji MADNESS!

~Now that I've learned hiragana and katakana, it's time to tackle the third Japanese writing system: KANJI! By far the most complicated and difficult of the three, kanji (which literally translates to "Chinese characters") are a form a writing that were brought to Japan by Buddhist monks from China in the 5th century. They are a form of picture-writing, where each symbol represents an entire word. Here are some examples of common kanji:

^ I know about half of these...I'm still working on the rest!

Today, there are over 50,000 kanji, but Japanese citizens are only expected to know the approximately 2,000 kanji on the "Jōyō kanji", an official list of common symbols compiled by the government. The number changes from year to year as some symbols are dropped from the list and others are added; currently, the Jōyō kanji has 1,945 symbols. Japanese students continuously study them in school and are regularly tested; by the end of high school, they are expected to know them all. As for me, I use the book 'Essential Kanji' by P.G. O'Neill, which presents the entire Jōyō kanji in a marginally-easy to learn form.

Complex kanji are derived from simpler kanji, or even hiragana and katakana symbols. This means that a person knowledgeable in kanji can often determine the meaning of the symbol by drawing upon their existing knowledge. For example, when a native English reader sees a new word, they can often deduce its basic meaning from word parts, prefixes, suffixes, etc. All kanji contain radicals, comparable to the word parts of English words. Compared to the thousands of kanji, there are "only" 214 radicals. Here's an example of a simple kanji being used as a radical in a more complex kanji:

山 --------> 岡

^On the left is 'yama', which means mountain. On the right is 'oka', which means hill. Note the small 'yama' inside of the more complex 'oka', indicating that it has something to do with mountains (there's more than one radical in 'oka', but yama is the only one that I currently recognize). Both of these kanji occur in the word" Okayama", the city that my company training took place in. 'Oka' also appears in "Nagaoka", the city that I live in.

Another way of understanding unknown kanji is a handy linguistic tool called furigana. These are small hiragana and katakana symbols that are sometimes placed above kanji to tell you how the kanji is pronounced. Here's an example of furigana:

^ dai (big) and gaku (university).

Do you see how the little symbols 'spell out' the larger ones? Newspapers are legally required to use furigana for any kanji that's outside of the 'Jōyō kanji' list; most of the kanji outside of the list are used in books aimed at older readers, or represent family names. Writing intended for younger readers uses furigana for all but the simplest of kanji. I recently picked up a copy of Weekly Shounen Jump, a weekly boys' comic book, and every kanji had furigana. Very convenient for learning!

The upshot of all this is that while kanji are very difficult to learn, they aren't arbitrary; there is a logic to them (however vague it may be). Of course, learning to read the kanji is not all there is too it; if you really want to learn Japanese, you have to learn how to write the damn things as well. Just to scare you, here's an animation of someone writing a very complex kanji:



^The kanji 'yo', meaning 'day of the week'. Note that no less than eighteen separate strokes are required to create the symbol! The truth is that writing kanji is very time-consuming; it would be a lot easier to simply write out 'yo' in hiragana ( よ ), which would have the exact same meaning. But kanji is considered more sophisticated/civilized, so it's used in almost all writing.

This is the same as how some people and writing use 'big words' that mean the same thing as smaller words, in order to convey a sense of complexity/intelligence, and to specify a more exact meaning. Kanji is the same; except that in this case, each kanji symbol has multiple meanings, depending on how it's used with other kanji. So not only do you have to learn to recognize and write 1,945 symbols, you have to learn all the different meanings for each symbol. Yikes.

This large number of different strokes required to create a complex kanji creates an interesting effect when the symbols are written out with a pen or pencil: the sound of someone writing in Japanese is very different from the sound of someone writing in English. It sounds to me like the pencil is tapping against the paper repeatedly at very high speed; a 'tap-tap-tap-tap' sound, as opposed to the 'scratch-scratch-scratch' sound of English writing. Just another weird observation from David!

As I said before, kanji literally means 'Chinese characters'. The Chinese language is written entirely in kanji; there is no hiragana or katakana on that side of the Sea of Japan. Because the symbols are written the same, the Japanese can read Chinese writing, but the pronunciation is very different. Chinese is a tonal language, where pitch and tone can change the meaning of a word. Japanese, thank the gods, is NOT tonal, and because of this it is actually easier to learn spoken Japanese than Chinese.

As you can see, the subject of kanji is too large to be contained in a single post. Expect more in the future as I make an attempt at learning some more simple kanji. ~Oyamsumi!