Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Kanji Time

So I wanted to explain a bit more about kanji, the complex-looking characters that you might imagine if I mentioned reading and writing in Chinese or Japanese.  I spoke of kanji briefly when I was talking about my personal seal way back in October.  Kanji originally came to Japan from China (along with Buddhism and other ideas) approximately 2,000 years ago.  The people in Japan had a spoken language at the time (an older form of Japanese) but didn't have a written language so they decided to adapt the Chinese characters to their language.  It proved to be quite difficult since Chinese and Japanese use completely different grammar structures.  Thus a syllabary (basically an alphabet where each "letter" is a complete syllable) was created called hiragana.  Hiragana uses simpler characters and is altogether rounder-looking than kanji (at least in my opinion).   So, when it was impossible to use Chinese characters for things like verb endings and prepositions, hiragana was used instead.  

To be literate in Chinese means knowing maybe 4,000 Chinese characters (though apparently you can read a newspaper pretty well if you know about 1,000).  To be literate in Japanese means knowing about 2,000 kanji, though again if you know the most common 1,000 then you can get by.  After reading that one might think that Japanese has fewer words than Chinese but unfortunately that is not the case.  For the most part in Chinese either each character represents a separate word and has only one sound to go along with it or two characters together can also represent one word (with two syllables, one for each character).  Some of the sounds of Chinese were also imported into Japanese when the writing system was first being introduced to Japan.  In the beginning, Chinese characters were associated nouns, verb stems, and adjectives which already existed in the spoken Japanese language.  Of course, many Japanese words are longer than one or two syllables and in many cases kanji began to be associated with multiple sounds from the original Chinese and also from Japanese (which can be very confusing).  In general, individual kanji will have the original Japanese pronunciation and "compound" words which combine two or more kanji take the Chinese sounds instead.  Unfortunately many kanji became associated with many different sounds over time as the kanji were simplified to make them easier to write and some kanji which had originally been separate were combined (among other things)...  Now somehow a common kanji like 上 has many meanings (including: above, up, over, top, summit, and on), has three Chinese sounds associated with it, AND approximately 20 Japanese sounds (though this example is a bit extreme).

Actually in English there's one good situation I can think of where we use kanji-like characters, and that's when using numbers.  For example, if you look at "3", you know it means "three" and that it represents a number.  Numbers can also have different sounds associated with them depending on the situation, for example you know that "3rd" represents "third" and not "threerd".  Now you just have to imagine doing that for about 1,990 other characters...

So, now I'm trying to learn the ~2,000 "most common" kanji.  I have a book series that I'm following which uses the Heisig method.  Basically the first book teaches you how to write the kanji and associate them with English meanings, the second book teaches you the different ways to say each kanji, and the third book deals with multiple-kanji words.  I'm proud to say that I've passed the 500 kanji mark at this point (in the first book), though I have trouble sometimes if I see a kanji I know but I can't remember the specific English word I'm supposed to associate with it...  Sometimes it's like my mind is coming up with brain-teasers since I know what the meaning is supposed to be like and can often remember how many letters the English word has.  Last weekend I was trying to think of a word that had a meaning like, "trying to convince someone to do what you say and maybe white-washing it a bit so your way sounds more desirable", and I knew the word was 4 or 5 letters long.  Eventually I had to look it up but the word turned out to be, "urge" (迫).

When I was at Michiue Elementary last week, I was teaching the fourth graders the names of the months in English.  The students were ridiculously impressed by the fact that I could write 一月 on the board correctly (this means "first month" aka "January").  In fact, the students started clapping...  I was a bit embarrassed since 一 and 月 are some of the very first characters that you learn how to write and they aren't exactly difficult... what would the fourth graders say if I told them that I learned , "tailor" yesterday? 

Anyway, I'm traveling to lovely Sapporo, Hokkaido this weekend for the yearly Yukimatsuri (snow festival).  Apparently it's going to be pretty amazing and have tons of winter-related activities like ice sculptures, skiing, snowboarding, and ice skating along with amazing food (king crab, miso ramen, lamb, and beer ~ too bad I don't drink).  Also, even though Hokkaido has a colder outside temperature, they use insulation in the houses there so I might actually be warm!  I'm going up with a bunch of other Miyagi JETs, we're going by overnight-ferry if you can believe it (luckily I don't get seasick!).  Actually, according to my four year-old cousin Rosie I've been "on vacation" in Japan since September and I kind of feel like that's the case with all of the traveling I've done recently!


By the way, if you're having trouble reading the kanji above then just do this:


If you're using Internet Explorer as your browser (in other words, if you press the blue "e" to get on the internet):
  1. Go to "View," and then "Encoding"
  2. Select "Japanese (Auto-Select)"
And for Firefox:
  1. Go to "View," and then "Character Encoding"
  2. Select "Auto-Detect," and then "Japanese"

If that doesn't work then Google your browser's name and "read Japanese online"!

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