Kanji

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This entry makes use of Japanese characters and will require Japanese language support to be installed on your computer in order to avoid the characters being replaced by question marks, or blanked out.


Kanji (漢字) is one of the three scripts used in writing the Japanese language, along with Hiragana and Katakana. They are based on Chinese characters and the word kanji is the Japanese version of the Chinese word hànzì, which means "Han characters". Han refers to the Han Dynasty (206BC - 220AD) and is the name used by the Chinese for themselves.

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What is Kanji?

Kanji are ideograms, i.e. each character has its own meaning and corresponds to a word, which conveys a specific idea or meaning. When written, each character represents one or more syllables in a word, but apart from just spelling a word, these symbols also have meaning by themselves. Even if two words are spelled the same in Japanese, if their meanings are different, then their kanji will also be different. For example "ki" can mean, amongst other things, "pure" or "spirit", but although the romaji spelling is the same, because their meanings are different, they would have different kanji, in this case 生 and 気 respectively. Likewise, the word "genki", which means "healthy", or "robust" is written using the characters 元気, which mean "origin", or "beginning", and "spirit" respectively.

In modern Japanese, kanji are used to write nouns, adjective and verb stems, and compounds, whilst hiragana are used to write inflected verb and adjective endings, particles, native or new Japanese words for which there is no kanji, and words where the kanji is too difficult to read or remember. Kanji and hiragana are often used in conjunction with each other. In addition, numbers can be written out using kanji.

This means that a knowledge of kanji is required to be able to read almost all the words in the language. Not all words are written in kanji, however. For example, while the verb "to do" (surutame) technically does have a kanji associated with it, it is always written in hiragana. Individual discretion and a sense of how things are normally written is needed to decide whether words should be written in hiragana or kanji. However, a majority of the words in Japanese will almost always be written in kanji.

History of Kanji

Although many theories and myths surround the origins of kanji, there is no clear origin of the writing system. One school of thought says it originated in the area around the Yellow River in China around 2000BC, when cracks on burned bones, used for divination, were interpreted as real objects, thus presenting a written representation of that object.

Another traditional Chinese legend involves the mystic Chinese emperor and supposed founder of the Chinese civilization, Huandgi, who had a minister named Cang Jie. The legend credits Cang Jie with inventing a writing system, after observing the tracks left in snow by birds. Kami-sama was so impressed by this display of ingenuity that He caused grain to fall from the skies as a sign of His satisfaction with mankind. This is, however, nothing more than an interesting legend and Cang Jie himself is represented as having two pairs of eyes.[1]

What is known, however, is that the oldest kanji letters yet found, are the inscriptions on animal bones and tortoise shells, introduced during the days of 22nd emperor of the Shang Dynasty (about 1700BC).

Prior to the 4th century AD, the Japanese did not possess their own system of writing and around this time began to adapt the Chinese script, which had probably been introduced to the country by traders from China or Korea. The earliest record of kanji being found in Japan dates to 57 AD, on a gold seal presented by the emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty.

At first, the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese or in a Japanese-Chinese hybrid style. An example of the hybrid style are the Kojiki (Records of Antiquity), written in 712 AD. They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man'yōgana, which literally means "Ten Thousand Leaf Syllabic Script". Here the characters were used for their phonetic values. Over time a writing system emerged in which Chinese characters were used to write either words borrowed from Chinese or Japanese words with the same or similar meanings. This has resulted in two different readings for kanji.

Reading Kanji

Almost every character has two different readings called on'yomi (音読み or おんよみ） and kun'yomi (訓読み or くんよみ). On'yomi is the original Chinese reading, or more correctly a Japanese approximation of the Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was introduced, while kun'yomi is the Japanese reading. Kanji that appear in a compound (jukugo or 熟語) are usually read with on'yomi while a lone kanji character is usually read with kun'yomi.

For example, 水 (mizu - meaning "water") is read with the kun'yomi, while the same character in a compound word such as 水素 (suiso, meaning "hydrogen", or literally "water element") is read with the on'yomi. In the latter case, 水 is now pronounced sui. Likewise, aquarium is written 水族館 (sui-zoku-kan, or literally "water tribe building".)

However, there is an important exception when it comes to using the on'yomi or kun'yomi reading in compounds. In general, on-yomi is used for idioms contained within a compound and kun-yomi for non-idioms. For example, blood-type is written as 血液型 (lit."blood fluid type") and pronounced "ketsu-eki-gata". Here, the on'yomi is used for the idiom "ketsueki", but "~gata" is a non-idiom, and thus the kun'yomi reading is used - the on'yomi reading is "kei", but it would never be pronounced "ketsu-eki-kei". In the tables which follow, these exceptions are indicated in the kun'yomi column by having a "~" either preceding or following the pronunciation.

It is possible for certain characters (especially the most common ones) to have more than one on'yomi or kun'yomi. The kun'yomi for 力 alone would be chikara, meaning "strength", or "power". When used in a compound, such as 能力 (nouryoku, meaning "ability"), the on'yomi reading changes the pronunciation of 力 to ryoku. However, in the word 怪力 (kairiki, meaning "superhuman strength") 力 is read here as riki and not ryoku.

Kun'yomi is also used in adjectives and verbs, in addition to the stand-alone characters. These words often have a string of kana (usually hiragana, in this case referred to as okurigana) that are attached to the word. This is so that the reading of the Chinese character stays the same even when the word is conjugated to different forms.

For example, the past form of the verb 食べる (taberu = "you eat") is 食べた (tabeta = "you ate"). Even though the verb has changed, the reading for 食 remains the same.

Another aspect of kanji are words that mean almost the same thing and use the same reading but have different kanji to indicate a small difference in meaning or context. For example, 聞く (kiku) means "to listen" and so does 聴く (also kiku). The only difference is that 聴く means you are paying more attention to what you're actually listening to. So, listening to music will almost always use 聴く, while 聞く could refer to listening to gossip.

To assist in pronunciation and to remove the ambiguities involved, kanji sometimes have their pronunciation spelled out in hiragana (called furigana in this case), written either alongside or above the characters. This is most common in children's books, guides for foreign students of the language and manga aimed at younger readers. It is also occasionally used in newspapers, for rare or unusual readings of kanji and for characters not included in the official set of essential kanji characters.

Finally, there is one special character, 々 (gat), that is not really a character, and is never articulated, but is used to indicate that the previous character should be repeated. Japanese does not have a grammatical plural form like English does. However, some Kanji can indicate plurality by iterating. Thus, you get 人 (hito) meaning "a person" and 人々 (hitobito), meaning "people". Likewise, 時 (toki) means "time", but 時々 (tokidoki) means "sometimes".

The Official Kanji Characters

Estimates vary between there being somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 kanji characters, although many of these are obscure or obsolete.

Even so, between 5,000 and 10,000 kanji are used in all forms of written Japanese. In 1981, in an attempt to make it easier to read and write Japanese, the Japanese government introduced the jōyō kanji hyō (常用漢字表 or "List of Chinese Characters for General Use"), which includes 1,945 regular characters, plus 166 special characters which are only used for people's names (jinmeiyō kanji 人名用漢字, Chinese characters for use in personal names). All government documents, newspapers, textbooks and other publications for non-specialists only make use of these kanji.

Japanese school children are expected to know all of the jōyō kanji by the time they graduate from high school. The jōyō kanji are broken down into 1006 kanji characters, which must be learned in elementary (primary) school and another 939 taught in middle (junior high) school. The order in which these characters are learned is fixed, as are the the number of characters learned per year.

Kanji Taught in Elementary School

Kanji Taught in Middle (Junior High) School

Additional Kanji Characters

In addition to the 1,945 jōyō kanji and 166 jinmeiyō kanji, there are an additional 365 characters that one should learn, in order to get by in daily life.

The characters are learnt by means of repetition and identifying the radical associated with the kanji. Calligraphy also plays an important part in the learning process, not only as part of the repetition, but also because the stroke order and direction is important when writing kanji (as well as hiragana and katakana) by hand.

However, in order to read specialist publications and ordinary literature later in life, Japanese are generally required to learn an additional two to three thousand kanji characters over time.

Radicals and Stroke Count

Given that by its very nature, kanji cannot be sorted along similar lines as the Roman alphabet, a system based on the number of strokes per character, combined with the radical associated with that character, was developed to simplify both the ordering of the characters and the method of locating them in a dictionary, or software program.

A radical (derived from the Latin radix, meaning "root") is the European term for the Japanese bushu (部首), which literally means "section header", referring to the specific bushu under which all characters containing that radical are listed in the dictionary, normally in increasing order of stroke count.

There are a total of 214 bushu recognized for kanji (as well as Chinese characters). Most kanji are made up one or more of these radicals, although there is usually one "key" radical. This carries the primary semantic field, either currently or it may have done so in the past, and it is this radical that is used in virtually all indexes for looking up kanji in dictionaries).

Most, but not all, of the radicals can be used are kanji themselves.

An example of this would be the kanji 翔 (shou, meaning "soar" or "fly"), which is a 12 stroke kanji, sorted under the six stroke radical 羽 (hane, meaning "feather"). This system also simplifies the look-up process, when typing kanji on a computer, as "multi-radicals" can be employed to rapidly select the desired character.

Why Continue to use Kanji?

There has been some debate about whether or not kanji is still suitable as a writing system, as a more sensible alphabet would make more sense and be simpler than the system of using separate, discrete symbols. In addition, given the fundamental differences between the Chinese and Japanese languages, it is possible that adopting Chinese characters into the Japanese language would inherently create problems.

Given that Korean has adopted their own alphabet, which has greatly simplified their written language, it could, theoretically be possible for Japanese to convert from kanji and kana to romaji, for example, which would greatly simplify the comprehension of the written language, especially amongst 外人 (gaijin, or "foreigners"). In fact, the Japanese government attempted to do just this shortly after the end of World War 2, but it met with little success.

The primary reason behind this, is that when written hiragana is converted to kanji, there are almost always at least two and as many as ten homophones (a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning) to choose from. The Japanese character alphabet, based on set syllabic sounds, does create the problem that homophones are difficult to avoid. A good example of this is the word kikan (きかん), which when converted to kanji provides the following alternatives: 器官 (organ of the body), 基幹 (nucleus), 奇観 (wonderful sight), 旗艦 (flagship), 既刊 (already published), 期間 (period or term) and 機関 (mechanism or agency).

Compared to this, the Korean alphabet has 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Any of the consonants can be matched to any of the vowels, thus giving rise to 140 sounds. In addition, a third and sometimes even fourth consonant can be attached to form a single letter. This results in over 1960 sounds that can theoretically be created.

However, because the visual cues humans rely on when reading are not as distinct in either the Roman or Korean alphabets, spaces are required between words, in order to remove ambiguities. The visual cues offered by kanji both negates the need for spaces and solves the problem of homophones. Without kanji, even if spaces were to be added, the ambiguities and lack of visual cues would make Japanese text much more difficult to read.

External Links

References

  1. ↑ http://www2.gol.com/users/jpc/Japan/Kanji/history.htm
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