Japanese Kanji

The Japanese writing system consists of three different character sets; Kanji, Hiragana and
Katakana. Learn Japanese Kanji consists of Chinese characters which were introduced in
Japan in the fifth century through Korea.

Kanji are basically ideograms; each character has its individual meaning and corresponds to a
word. By combining such letters, more words can be made. For example, the combination of
electricity and car means train. Before Japanese Kanji was introduced in the Chinese
characters, there was no writing system in place. While adopting these characters, the Japanese
didn’t only introduce the characters’ original pronunciations but also linked them to the matching
native Learn Japanese words and their pronunciations.

Most Kanji can be pronounced in more than two ways, a Chinese (on yumi) and a Japanese (kun
yomi) way, which further complicates the Japanese language as a whole. Kanji are basically
used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. However like the Chinese language, the
Japanese language also cannot be written totally in Kanji. Grammatical endings and words which
do not correspond to Kanji, two additional syllable based scripts: Hiragana and Katakana, each
containing 46 syllables.

There are approximately ten thousand Chinese characters, or Kanji, which were used in the
writing Japanese. In 1981, Japanese was made easier to read and write by the Japanese
government by introducing joyo Kanji hyo, a list of Chinese characters for general use. These
included around 1,945 regular characters and 166 additional special characters used only for
people’s names. The government documents, newspapers, books and other publications for non-
officials use only Kanji.

Japanese children are supposed to learn all of the joyo Kanji by the end of their high school, but
for the Kanji used in the special publications or ordinary literature, they need to know another two
or three thousand more characters.

The word Kanji is Japanese for the Chinese word hanzi, which means ‘Han characters’. Han
refers to the Han Dynasty (206BC-220BC) and is used to call the Chinese. When the Japanese
adopted Chinese characters for the Japanese writing language, they also took many Chinese
words. You will be able to find that at least half of the vocabulary of Japanese has been taken
from the Chinese language. Japanese Kanji is used to represent both Sino-Japanese words as
well as the native Japanese words which mean the same.

For example, the word mizu is water in native Japanese, whereas in Sino-Japanese water is sui.
Both the words are written with the same character. The former word is known as kun yomi
(Japanese reading) and the latter is known as the on yomi (Chinese character).

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