The word ‘kanji’ refers to a group of thousands of symbols that are used in Chinese, Japanese and other Asian languages.
Bone and tortoise shell carvings that were used for fortune telling show the use of kanji in ancient China as far back as about 1,500 B.C.E. When Buddhism spread to Japan around fifth century, kanji was brought together. At that time, Japanese had no writing system and common class of people had no education that required them to read the thousands of characters.
At first, Japanese adopted a very small set of Chinese kanji whose sounds can be used to express spoken Japanese language. This set is eventually called manyogana; generally their meaning in Chinese was ignored and was used to represent the Japanese sounds only.
Modern Japanese uses between 2000 and 3000 kanji. Currently, public schools teach the “Jouyou kanji”, meaning ‘frequently used’ which is a list of 1945 characters often encountered in daily life in Japan. Jouyou kanji was established by the national Language Council to replace the slightly smaller touyou kanji. These characters were considered the minimum number for functional adult literacy and were required learning over the period of compulsory education. The government's aim is for Jouyou kanji embody a standardised norm and widely used in general social life including laws and decrees, official documents, newspapers, periodical magazines, visual media and so forth. The existence of this basic set does not restrict the use of other kanji in science and technology, art and other special academics.
Bone and tortoise shell carvings that were used for fortune telling show the use of kanji in ancient China as far back as about 1,500 B.C.E. When Buddhism spread to Japan around fifth century, kanji was brought together. At that time, Japanese had no writing system and common class of people had no education that required them to read the thousands of characters.
At first, Japanese adopted a very small set of Chinese kanji whose sounds can be used to express spoken Japanese language. This set is eventually called manyogana; generally their meaning in Chinese was ignored and was used to represent the Japanese sounds only.
Modern Japanese uses between 2000 and 3000 kanji. Currently, public schools teach the “Jouyou kanji”, meaning ‘frequently used’ which is a list of 1945 characters often encountered in daily life in Japan. Jouyou kanji was established by the national Language Council to replace the slightly smaller touyou kanji. These characters were considered the minimum number for functional adult literacy and were required learning over the period of compulsory education. The government's aim is for Jouyou kanji embody a standardised norm and widely used in general social life including laws and decrees, official documents, newspapers, periodical magazines, visual media and so forth. The existence of this basic set does not restrict the use of other kanji in science and technology, art and other special academics.
Example of common kanji characters
Japanese kanji are pronounced with the sound of kana. Nearly all Japanese kanji have sounds that fall into three different categories, and some characters have as many as five or more different sounds. Sound of which one should use depends on the type of word it is used to make.
The “onyomi” method of reading kanji produces the kana sounds that mimic the character’s original Chinese language pronunciation. In kanji dictionaries, onyomi sounds are normally written in katakana. As a rule of thumb, the onyomi pronunciation is most often used for any word that is comprised of two or more kanji characters. The majority of these words are nouns, their adjective derivatives, and group 3 Japanese verbs. Group 3 verbs which are also called irregular verbs, are two character Japanese nouns that become verbs when “suru”, or ‘do’, is added onto them. For example, the noun “shinpai”, ‘anxiety’, and its verb form”shinpai suru”, ‘to worry’.
The “Kunyomi” method of reading kanji produces sounds for words that are considered as being entirely of Japanese origin. In kanji dictionaries, Kunyomi sounds are normally written in hiragana. As a general rule, Kunyomi pronunciation is most frequently used in words that are written with a single kanji character or single kanji character whose pronunciation is completed by one or more hiragana characters. There are many nouns in this group, but most are group 1 and group 2 verbs. In these verbs, a single kanji character represents the words root and the inflection on the end is written in hiragana.
The “jinmeiyomi” is the way characters are read when they are used in proper nouns; people’s names and often name of places. The sounds may be the same or similar with the character’s Onyomi or Kunyomi sounds although usually they are not.
REFERENCES
1. Perkins, D. (1991). Encyclopedia of Japan: Japanese history and culture, from abacus to zori. Facts on File.
2. Takezaki, K. (n.d.). An Introduction to japanese Caligraphy. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing.
2. Takezaki, K. (n.d.). An Introduction to japanese Caligraphy. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing.