We learned two types of Japanese writing systems
--- ひらがな and かたかな so far. Both hiragana and katakana comprise the
phonetic writing system called かな. Japanese has a third,
non-phonetic writing system called kanji. Kanji
characters originally came from China around the 4th century. Both ひらがな
and かたかな are derivatives of kanji.
Kanji |
加 (read as "ka") |
奈 (read as "na") |
original character from China |
カタカナ |
カ |
ナ |
parts taken from kanji |
ひらがな |
か |
な |
simplified from kanji |
In normal writing, all three writing systems are used together. Kanji
characters are primarily used to write content words such as nouns (本 {ほん}), 車 {くるま}, verbs 来{き}ます and adjectives 白{しろ}い). ひらがな are used to write grammatical markers such as particles (は, が,
を), and the conjugational endings of verbs and adjectives. かたかな
is used to write words of foreign origin, and onomatopoeic words
such as barking of dogs (ワンワン) or the honking of a horn (プップー). In addition
to ひらがな, かたかな, and kanji, written Japanese also includes Roman letters
and Arabic numerals, so that even in one short headline or small newspaper
ad, one can find a mixture of these five different types of characters.
Although some tens of thousands of kanji exist, only some
3,000 are in actual use. Of these, about 1,950 have been selected
by the Japanese Ministry of Education as 常用漢字 {じょうようかんじ}, or "Characters
for General Use," and of these, some 1,000 have
been designated as 教育漢字 {きょういくかんじ} or "Characters for Educational
Use." Japanese students, by the end of the 9th grade, must
learn to read and write all of the educational-use kanji
and to read all of the general-use kanji. Japanese publications such as books,
journals, and newspapers generally limit themselves to the use of
general-use kanji, which are most essential for everyday communication.
Kanji characters beyond the general-use kanji, if used, are often
attached with the reading help appearing above or on the right
side of kanji (called よみがな or "ruby"
text like this):
While each ひらがな or かたかな character represents a sound, kanji characters
represent meanings. For example, "H2O" or "water" is represented by the kanji character 水 (pronounced as みず) and 水 means water. Because of this, kanji is often referred to as ideographic or
logographic. In contrast to the English alphabet which represents
pronunciation which in turn evokes awareness of meaning, kanji is
used to represent meanings which in turn evoke awareness of pronunciation.
Kanji characters have two kinds of pronunciations or readings: くんよみ
(くん readings), which are of native Japanese origin, and オンよみ (オン readings),
which are Japanese approximations of Chinese pronunciations. Most kanji
characters in use in Japan have at least one オン reading and one くん
reading (although many characters have more than one くん and/or
オン reading). Some kanji characters only have オン readings. Therefore, the same kanji can be pronounced differently depending on the context. For example, the kanji 本 in 日本 ("Japan") is pronounced as ほん while 本 in 山本 ("Yamamoto," family name) is pronounced as もと.
It is also possible for different, unrelated kanji to have the same pronunciation as shown below. These kanji characters with the same pronunciation are not interchangeable. Be sure to learn the right kanji for the word.
In a typical
kanji dictionary, くん readings are typically written in ひらがな and オン
readings are in かたかな as shown below.
In this textbook, we will follow this distinction of writing オン readings in katakana and くん readings in hiragana when we introduce individual kanji characters for the first time. Once kanji characters are newly introduced, only hiragana characters will be used to write the readings of those kanji characters.
Kanji characters can be categorized into
one of the following four groups.
Stroke order and direction are very important in writing kanji. Note
the following rules of writing kanji.
- A horizontal stroke goes from left to right, top to bottom.
- A vertical stroke goes from top to bottom, left to right.
- A box is completed in the following order. You close the box last.
There are three distinct stroke endings.