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In my welcome article at the very beginning of this blog, I said I wouldn't teach kanji, because it would be very hard to do so in a blog, since you have to take into consideration the stroke order, the radicals and of course, the writing, because we do not write kanji like the computer writes them.
So, if I was to show you a kanji right now, it wouldn't be exactly how we write it, because the computer has a way of writing them as if the lines were very straight and rigid.
But that won't hold me back from explaining to you what kanji are, how and when to use them, and all their cool aspects.
Long time ago, there was a time in Japan where we didn't use hiragana or katakana, so we would use kanji. Yes, even for the particles! Kanji were imported from China, from the Chinese hanzi (even Korea at one point was using kanji and not their hangul system, which came later). Hiragana and katakana came much later, first invented by the women of the court to help children in their education and to facilitate reading and writing. Learning all these kanji, matching them with the Chinese pronunciation was starting to get daunting... because of course, Chinese and Japanese are very different in their pronunciation, so the kanji back in the day had to be used to give a meaning to a word, but at the same time, they had to represent the Chinese equivalent sound. For instance, they would use a kanji for the particle は that would make the same sound in Chinese, 'wa'. At the same time, however, the same kanji could have a Japanese pronunciation.
This is why today kanji have two readings: the on-yomi, which is the Chinese reading, and the kun-yomi, which is the Japanese reading.
Take this kanji for instance 人, which is the kanji for 'person'. It has three pronunciations: じん and にん, which are on-yomi readings and sound a little bit like the Chinese word 'rén' which also mean 'person' and is the same kanji in Chinese; and ひと, which is the kun-yomi reading and is how you would pronounce it in Japanese.
Normally, you will see that on-yomi readings do not stand on their own. To say 'person' as a word in Japanese is ひと. But you will see じん and にん as parts of words like for instance 日本人 (にほんじん - Japanese person) or 人間 (にんげん - human). If you see the kanji 人 on its own, it most likely will be pronounced ひと and will mean 'person'.
What is very difficult for foreigners (and Japanese people too) when studying kanji (notwithstanding the fact that there are many of them) is how one single kanji can have multiple pronunciations. The kanji 生 has up to nine or ten different pronunciations! Not only do you have to learn at least 2000 kanji to be able to manage in Japan, but you also need to learn all of these pronunciation possibilities.
Now, I will be very honest with you, if you do not live in Japan, learning all 2000 kanji is downright impossible. (There are also more than 2000 kanji, there are tens of thousands of them.) But if you do not live in Japan and you still want to be able to read manga and books, I will say that you do not need to learn all 2000 kanji. Many manga and books, especially those for children, have what we call furigana, which are hiragana written on the side of kanji so that kids can read them.
Kanji are really there only to give a meaning to a word. You can easily read and write entirely in hiragana. But in Japanese, there are many words written and pronounced the same, so kanji will help us figure out which word we are talking about.
The word しろ, for example, can mean two different things: either the colour white or a castle. In hiragana, we will not know exactly which of the two words it means, unless we put it into context. But if we write it in kanji, we will know.
しろ written with this kanji 白 means 'white'. しろ written with this kanji 城 means 'castle'.
Kanji will also help us read, believe it or not. As a person learning Japanese for the first time, you might have had trouble distinguishing words in a sentence, due to the fact that we do not separate words in Japanese. Mind you, a sentence written completely in hiragana can also confuse me. But with kanji, it will be easier to recognise words as most of them will be separated by particles, and particles cannot be written in kanji.
イギリスには、色々な城を見ました。
(イギリスには、いろいろなしろをみました。)
I saw many castles in England.
You see how much clearer it is? Even though kanji are hard to learn, they make reading sentences easier, and for someone who learns Japanese for the first time, you can now see that いろいろな is a word (adjective for 'various), that しろ is a word (castle) and that みました is another word (saw). So, you will see that kanji will form words, or parts of words, like in the example 見ました. The verb endings are generally not written in kanji.
It is highly possible that you will be able to recognise many more kanji than how many you can write down. Do not worry, it happens to people in Japan too. So, you will have an easier time reading than writing. With technology and the fact that we barely write down things anymore since we use computers, it is obvious that our ability to memorise how a kanji is written will fade overtime. Unfortunately, this is the reality. But if you text someone using your phone, you will be able to recognise kanji, so you will still be able to write to people. Just writing things down by hand might be more difficult.
For instance, I am able to recognise this kanji 曜; this is よう as in げつようび, かようび, etc (the days of the week). But do not ask me to write it down, I wouldn't be able to...
But Panda-sensei, is there any trick or easy ways you can give us to study kanji?
Unfortunately, there are no better ways or worse ways to learn kanji. I am afraid that a big chunk of kanji study relies on memory alone. So, drills will be your friend.
There are still many tricks and ways you can identify and learn kanji in an easier way. Kanji are made up of radicals, which are the parts that make a kanji, and more often than not, they can give you a hint as to what a kanji could possibly mean.
猫 - This kanji is ねこ (cat).
The radical to the left actually means 'animal'. So, you know from this radical that it can potentially be an animal of some sort. I say 'potentially' because this is not always the case.
The radical on the right side is なえ which means 'sapling' which has little to do with cats. But another way to pronounce it is みょう, coming from the Chinese onomatopoeia of 'meow'. It doesn't quite work in Japanese, but you get the idea. So, altogether, this kanji means 'the meow animal', which is a cat.
This kanji makes sense, but others might not make as much sense. Take the kanji for fish for instance:
魚 (さかな)
The strokes underneath the main radical means 'fire', which, I mean, fish live in water... but you can grill a fish... so maybe this kanji does make sense after all...
If we put the kanji 人 (human) with 魚 (fish), it becomes 'mermaid' (にんぎょ).
In some cases, grouping kanji will give you another meaning.
This is the case for 木 (き) which means 'tree'.
If we add two more we get this kanji 森 (もり) which means 'forest'.
火 (ひ) means 'fire'.
炎 (ほのう) means 'flame' or 'fire' as in 'a fire broke out'.
Knowing the radicals and what they mean can actually help you in recognising and comprehend kanji. Kanji is the most difficult part when it comes to learning Japanese. In fact, Japanese has been deemed the most difficult language to learn for English people, because of the nuances the language can bring but also because of kanji. It is even harder than Chinese, because Chinese hanzi are simplified and have up to two pronunciations per hanzi, which make them easier to learn. Japanese kanji are not simplified. We kept the original writing.
But if you buy the book Kanji Look and Learn, they give you really good mnemonic tricks in order to remember kanji. I remember one in particular, the kanji for ぶた, which means 'pig' 豚. The radical to the left is 'moon' and the radical to the right kind of looks like a pig. So, a pig looking at the moon. This is the mnemonic trick for this kanji.
Also, you can buy plenty of manga in Japanese on Ebay, this is where I get mine (I hate manga in English, they never get the translation right... the French translation of manga is actually better...) I would say to start with manga that are more geared towards children, as maybe manga that are more for adults won't have furigana on the side of kanji.
Manga may also be harder to read because of all the slang. I might actually write an article about how they speak in manga since in a lot of them the writing is quite special...
One manga, however, that I recommend that is easy to read is Cardcaptor Sakura. It is short and sweet, not too many slang, and you will have both the polite form and the casual form of the language. I feel that Sakura is one anime that is the closest at representing how people speak in everyday life, because (I hate to break it to you) people in real life do not speak like in anime. Anime and manga are entertainment, so people take a lot of liberties and play a lot with the language. This is why Japanese people can tell that you have been learning Japanese with anime. Your Japanese won't sound as natural or 'real'.
Also, one anime I recommend to practise your listening skills is Chi's Sweet Home. It is for toddlers, but for people who are starting to learn Japanese, I think it is a good way to practise if you watch it without subtitles and try to figure some words out.
This is basically what I do when I am learning another language. I watch children shows without subtitles and I read super easy children books. The real big problem is the speaking, because most people do not have a person with whom to practise.
To go back to kanji though, one thing we did as kids to learn them is drills. You can actually search online to acquire some books that will allow you to do these drills. I am sure there are some books that will also teach you the kanji we learned in first grade, second grade, third grade, and so on. I believe in first grade, we learn about 82 kanji, and then around 100 or more each year, until the end of high school.
As I mentioned, drills are probably the number one method people take to learn kanji as it is all memory retention. Like a language, you need good memory to remember words and grammar structures. There is no magical way that will make you learn and retain every kanji in a matter of seconds. Keep in mind that it takes people 12 years in total to learn the 2000 kanji. And also keep in mind that a 15 year-old in Japan still cannot read a newspaper comfortably when you probably were able to when you were 12 in English.
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If you have any question about kanji, it will be my pleasure to answer!
If you are determined to learn kanji, I will wish you good luck in your studies!
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