somewhere along the line an archeologist will discover evidence of native writing or a form of borrowed script that existed in Japan before it borrowed characters from China. But until that time, what the scholars say must be accepted.
In any case, the Japanese had a spoken language, and when they saw that their neighbor, China, had both a spoken and a well-developed written language, they decided to borrow the Chinese writing system. The Japanese took the written Chinese characters and attached them to the Japanese spoken words of corresponding meaning. Where the Japanese had no equivalent word, they borrowed the Chinese meaning and pronunciation as well as the written character. They called these characters kanji, a compound word composed from two separate kanji, kan 漢, meaning China, and ji 字, meaning letter.
While the Japanese could use these imported Chinese characters to write the basic roots of Japanese words, they could not use the characters to write grammatical word endings because Japanese grammar and morphology were so different from Chinese. In Chinese, there were no grammatical endings to show what part of speech a word is (corresponding in English to endings such as –tion, –ish, –ed, –ful, and to such auxiliary words as had been, will be, could, and would), whereas in Japanese there were.
At first, the Japanese tried to use the Chinese characters to write both the word root and the grammatical ending. But after a few hundred years they concluded that this did not work too well, so they decided to abbreviate some of the Chinese characters into a phonetic system, similar to what some early Western cultures had done to form an alphabet from their pictographs.
The Japanese then used Chinese characters to write the roots of the words and wrote the grammatical endings, where grammar was needed, in the phonetic system they had just developed. They called the phonetic letters kana.
The Japanese actually have two separate sets of kana, one called katakana and one called hiragana. The pronunciation of each set is identical to the other. The function of each set is also identical to the other, although each set of kana is used in different situations.
The Japanese written language is now composed, therefore, of word roots (the kanji) and grammatical endings (the kana.) The word root remains the same no matter what part of speech the word is. The same kanji is used as the word root whether the word is a noun, adjective, or verb, and some words, particularly nouns, just need the root. Then, where grammatical endings are needed, different kana are added to show the grammar or the part of speech.
This works basically the same as in English, where, for example, beaut would be the word root. The root alone is usually a noun. Adding –ify makes beautify, the verb. Adding –iful makes beautiful, the adjective, and adding –ifully makes beautifully, the adverb. The Japanese use kanji for the root beaut and use kana for the grammatical endings –ify, –iful, and –ifully.
Some Japanese words were formed with only one kanji, plus the grammatical ending where needed, and some with two kanji. Words of one kanji usually represent a more elementary thought than words of two kanji. Some words may contain three or even four kanji, but this is comparatively rare. One example is the English word democracy, which translates in Japanese to a four-kanji word 民主主義 MINSHUSHUGI.
Any of the kanji, with a few exceptions, can be used either as a word by itself or together with other kanji to form compound words. A kanji can theoretically form a compound with any other kanji, although of course not all the possible compounds are actually in use. As the Japanese need new words, they can coin them by combining two appropriate kanji into a new compound.
The pronunciation of a kanji when it is used as a word by itself is usually different from its pronunciation in compounds. A kanji will generally keep the same pronunciation in any compound in which it appears, although there are many exceptions. One reason for the different pronunciations is that sometimes the same kanji was borrowed from different regions of China at different times.
For example, the kanji 京, meaning capital, is pronounced MIYAKO when it is used by itself. In the compound word 東京 TOKYO, the capital city of Japan, it is pronounced KYŌ. In the compound word 京阪 KEIHAN, the abbreviation for the Kyoto-Osaka region, it is pronounced KEI.
It is quite easy to distinguish the kanji from the kana. The kana are written with at most four separate lines, or strokes, and usually with only two or three. The kanji, on the other hand, except for the word one, which is just one horizontal line 一, and one other exception, have a minimum of two strokes and often many more.
| Examples of katakana: | ア イ ウ エ オ カ キ ク ケ コ |
| Examples of hiragana: | あ い う え お か き く け こ |
| Examples of kanji: | 漢 雨 運 罪 競 線 歯 聞 街 |
Kana will appear at the end of many words to give them grammatical context. A typical written Japanese sentence will have a mix of kanji and kana, and look like this:
私の友達は金曜日に東京を発ちます。
The difference in written form between the kanji and the kana should be easily recognizable. Japanese does not leave spaces between separate words. The grammatical endings in kana usually show where each word ends.
Japanese books and newspapers, being in sentence form, are written with both kanji and kana. The language a visitor to Japan will see in the streets—shop names, advertisements, prices, street names, traffic signs, tickets, bills, receipts, train station names, family names—not generally in sentence form, are most often written with kanji only.
The kana are not difficult and both sets can be learned in a few days. It is just a matter of memorizing them as you memorized the alphabet as a child and will not take much more effort. For those readers interested in learning the kana, a chart and additional description are included as Appendix A.
The stories of the origin and development of each pictorial element in each kanji character were taken mainly from the compendium SHUO WEN CHIE TSU, published in China about 1,800 years ago.
For many of the kanji, the SHUO WEN lists more than one theory of their origin. This is understandable since more than 2,000 years passed between the first invention of the kanji and their compilation in the SHUO WEN lexicon. During that time, there were many changes in the form of the characters and their pronunciation, and many new interpretations of the history of each kanji. After the SHUO WEN, etymologists, including scholars from Japan, have discovered what they believe to be still other interpretations of the origin of some of the characters.
Whether the explanations of the origins given in the SHUO WEN CHIE TSU or by later scholars are correct is not important here since this book is not a text in etymology but rather a simplified method for learning the kanji. Where there is a difference of opinion between scholars, READ JAPANESE TODAY uses the interpretation which, I hope, is best mnemonically for English-speaking readers.
Japanese Pronunciation
Japanese pronunciation is comparatively straightforward. The vowels are pronounced as in Italian—the A as in car, the E as in bed, the I as in medium, the O as in go, and the U as in Luke—and the consonants as in English. Sometimes in Japanese the vowels are long and sometimes they are short. Long vowels when written in roman letters will have a line drawn over the top of the letter. In Japanese, long vowels are handled by the kana.
When speaking in Japanese, just drag the long vowels out for twice the time as the short. This is often a difficult thing to do, but it is a very important distinction to make—a SHOKI 書記 is a secretary and
