Ahh, Kanji! They’re the beautiful, intricate, seemingly endless set of characters that are the bane of a prospective Japanese learner’s existence.
As you may recall, Kanji are picture-words borrowed from Chinese writing. Around 2,000 to 3,000 of them are used in everyday Japanese.
This is just a handful of them!
Unlike Hiragana, Katakana, or the English alphabet, Kanji do not represent sounds, rather, they represent one or more meanings and can be read one of several ways.
Take for example this Kanji - 日.
日
day, sun, Japan
音読み (On’yomi): ニチ nichi, ジツ jitsu
訓読み (Kun’yomi): ひ hi, か ka, び bi
Kanji readings fit into one of two groups: On’yomi, the native Chinese readings (or close approximation thereof), and Kun’yomi, the Japanese language sounds made to fit the character.
Here’s three words you can find 日 in:
毎日
まいにち
Mainichi
“Every day”
日本
にほん
Nihon
“Japan”
金曜日
きんようび
Kinyoubi
“Friday”
The bolded portions are the readings of 日 in each word.
Note also that the words can be written using kana only – remember that every native Japanese word can be written this way. This might make you question – why is Kanji even necessary?
Technically, written Japanese could still function without Kanji, but writing with only Kana is somewhat less ideal.
Part of the reason is that Japanese grammar doesn't use spaces.
This sentence reads as Kyou watashi wa kouen ni sanpo wo shimashita, which means, "Today I went for a walk in the park."However, without spaces, the kana all start to run together, so picking out individual words can get difficult.
It'slikehowyoucantechnicallyreadthissentencebutitdefinitelyisnotcomfortabletodoso.
This is the same sentence as the above example, but with the appropriate Kanji. Notice how the Kanji stand out a little more, especially the more complex ones, creating visual breaks. Also, it's several characters shorter!
So, uh...I wanted to finish out this section with discussion of radicals and memorization techniques, but this is due tonight and I still haven't studied for my final tommorow. So this is it for now. I guess this is what happens when I invest more time into randomizing an animation with Javascript than into writing my actual page content - ha! I'll learn how to prioritize...someday.
(That said, I'm really proud of how the kanji animation on this lesson's first slide turned out! If you refresh the page and click through again, the characters will appear in a different order each time.)
ありがとございます！Thanks for reading!