Kanji is the most used script for writing Japanese, which means that unfortunately you will not get very far with just Hiragana and Katakana. That can be very useful: if you write something like “female toilet”, only English speakers will be able to understand it, while □ would be understood by a far greater number of people, even though most would not be able to speak it (in English, at least). Like Kanji, that symbol has meaning, but no indication of how to read it, in other words, no indication of how it sounds. Still confused? Let’s think about some “kanji” that we already use in our day-to-day life, like this symbol here: □. While we combine letters to create meaning – say, writing the word “human” – Japanese speakers have already one symbol just for that: 人. That can be confusing for Western learners, as the opposite is true to our Latin alphabet – after all, the letter “m” by itself has no meaning. Kanjis are ideograms (ok, linguists will tell you that they actually are logograms, but the difference will not matter for our studies). For example, the character 人 does not instruct you on how to read it, as ひ or カ do 人 represents the concept of a “person”, a “human being”. The characters do not necessarily represent any particular sound or phoneme instead, each Kanji represent an idea or concept. Kanji, differently from Hiragana and Katakana, is not a syllabary. We will be using Hiragana and Katakana in this article, so if you cannot read them and haven’t checked our previous articles, we strongly recommend you to read them first. Instead, we will learn the very basics: what are Kanji, how we use them, how we write them, and how we speak them. Differently from Hiragana and Katakana, there is no way we can cover all 2,136 Kanji characters in one article. Learning Kanji is a continuous process (Japanese children learn it over nine years from age 6 to 15). On the other hand, as we will see later, this late adoption has created some issues that can still create hurdles for learners of Japanese. Since Kanji is also the origin for the other two scripts (Hiragana and Katakana) used to write Japanese, it is no exaggeration to say that it has been the single most impactful development for the Japanese language. Actually, Kanji (漢字) means “Han (Chinese) Letters”, and were brought from China to Japan around the fifth century AD before that, the Japanese language had no written form. Kanji is the most used script for writing Japanese, but it is not native to Japan. In this article, we are going to learn the basics of Kanji, by far the most complex (and unfortunately, used) script. Last time, we learned how to speak and write Katakana, one of three scripts used to write the Japanese language. We are back in our series “Introduction to Japanese”.
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