Kanji: 5,000 Years of Chinese History Can't Be Wrong

Now it's time to start on a quickie overview of kanji.

Kanji (lit. "Chinese characters") came from China through Korea in the 6th century, and it was the beginning of Japanese literature, culture, little MD players, the train game "Let's Go by Train," and Hello Kitty. Chinese and its character system is to Japanese what Latin is to all modern Western languages -- the basis of cognition, of higher thinking, and you can't learn Japanese without it.

As a general rule, kanji have two pronunciations, the "on" (rhymes with bone) or Chinese reading, and the "kun" (rhymes with spoon) or Japanese reading. (To remember the two, I pictured a little Japanese kid named Takeshi-kun studying his Japanese readings.) Since all Japanese pronunciation exists over a network of the sounds found in hiragana and katakana, pronunciations for kanji can be expressed in the two kana. When you're learning Japanese, it's customary for the hiragana readings to appear above the kanji for you (furigana, or "hurrygana" since you're in such a hurry you can't look up the reading, as my old textbook joked). When both the kun and the on readings are given, they're often given in hiragana and katakana, respectively, so you can tell which is which.

Let's throw out the first three kanji that Japanese kids learn.

I shouldn't have to tell you that these are the first three numbers, ichi, ni and san. You can see just from how the characters look that there's often a clear cognitive reason why kanji has the meanings they have.

Some more simple kanji:

These are the kanji for sun (hi), book or "root" (hon), moon (tsuki), center or "in" (naka) and country (kuni). These are all the kun readings (the Japanese readings)

Look again at these kanji, and try to envision how they grew out of logical pictures of the sun, a tree with its roots in the ground, the moon, and so on. Kanji are not random scribbles, but a beautiful, complex machine that has powered culture and literature throughout Asia for many thousands of years.

I remember confusion about the two readings kanji have -- when should I use the Japanese reading, and when the Chinese reading? Unfortunately, the use of the "two" readings (actually, some words have many more, but in general there are two) is a system riddled with many exceptions.

As a general rule, when you read a word that is made of one kanji standing by itself (such as naka, above), you use the Japanese reading. When you use two kanji together to make a combination word, such as nihon "Japan" (lit. "origin of the sun," written with the characters for "sun" and "root" above), you generally use the Chinese reading.

Here's a sentence:

(We'll explain grammatical particles like "wa" "no" and "ni" later.) The above means "Gunma Prefecture is in the center of Japan." (Gunma Pref. is where I live, in Japan.) See how a general sentence mixes kanji (where necessary), with hiragana (as the "base" of the writing system.)

Some words that combine the examples, above, are:

Nichiyoubi (Sunday), getsuyoubi (Monday), and chuugoku (China) all use the above five kanji, but require that the reader use the on reading (the Chinese reading, based originally on the Chinese pronunciation of that kanji). Note the first characters of all three above words: by themselves, they're usually read "hi" "tsuki" and "naka" (the kun readings); but as part of a full word, you use the on reading.

To the untrained eye, kanji seem like a bunch of random scribbling. But actually, the study of kanji's development, and how words are formed from various building blocks (called radicals), is quite interesting. Take the kanji for iu (to say):

Does it look like a stack of books on a table? Very literary. Many kanji which have to do with spoken or written communication have this radical (the left half of the kanji) in them:

These are hanasu (to speak a language), yomu (to read), and yakusu (to translate). The left side of the kanji all have the stack of books on a table radical in them, which allows you to cognitively organize the kanji by function. When you look up kanji in a kanji dictionary, you usually do so by counting the number of strokes in the radical (which is partially why it's important to lean the correct way to write each kanji).

I was told by a Korean student of Japanese that Kanji are always the stumbling block for Westerners; and judging from the number of non-Asian people who took the Nihongo Noryoku Shiken level 1 along with me (about six people in a room of 100), I can say that Chinese and Koreans have a built-in advantage here. (We cream them on foreign loan words, though.)

Kanji is difficult, to say the least; but it's also a challenge, one of the most beautiful and fun to learn writing systems in the world. Learn to write some, and it's a great thrill. Look at writing a kanji as a fun and challenging activity, like solving a challenging math problem, and your view of kanji will be great.

There's a lot more to kanji, to say the least: but time and tides wait for no one's Mac, and I've got to get on with the next section.