Leslie and the Big, Bad Kanji

One of the biggest hurdles to my being literate here isn't a lack of vocabulary, but instead an inability to read kanji. Kanji are characters stolen from the Chinese system of writing way back when the Japanese were absorbing everything Chinese (much as they were later to absorb everything Western). Kids study kanji up through 9th grade, and it's understandable as to why: you have to know some 3,000 just to be able to read a newspaper.

In some ways, kanji are evil. For example, each kanji is likely to have anywhere from 2 to 5 readings (sometimes more, hurray!). The "On" readings are the Chinese pronunciations, while the "Kun" readings are Japanese. Thus, the character for 3 can be pronounced "san" (Chinese) or "mi" (Japanese). The word for "3 people" is "sannin," while the word for "3 (of something)" is "mitsu."

In other ways, though, kanji are awesome. These ways tend to be the things that have me forever labeled as a consummate nerd.

1. Kanji are the ultimate Latin roots.
If I know the meaning of a kanji, I can usually puzzle out the meaning of the word. For example, the word for "train" in Japanese is "densha," which is made from the kanji for "electricity" and "car." In short, figuring out what a word means is like a really awesome puzzle.

On top of this, kanji build on themselves. For example, if you combine the kanji for "sun" and "moon" into one character, you get the kanji for "light" - makes perfect sense, as the sun and moon are the big sources of natural light. Stick that kanji next to the kanji for "sun" again (which also means "day") and you get the word "ashita" ... which means "tomorrow" (because it's a day that is a cycle of the moon and sun away from today).
It's not always that simple, and it doesn't always make that much sense, but when it does, it's pretty awesome.

2. Kanji are the ultimate shortcut.
Think of a word. Let's say "big." Now, think of some synonyms: "large," "enormous." Now, in Japanese, these would all be written with the same character for "big," as well as anything that had the meaning of "big" - "college," for instance, which is the biggest of the schools, or "adult," the big person, or "flood," the big water.
Now, Japanese doesn't have fewer words for "big" than we do in English - they just have fewer ways to write it. Thus, while it's frustrating to know that there are several ways that the kanji "big" can be pronounced, it's awesome to know that the number of ways to write these things is easier.

3. Kanji are their own spaces.
Japanese has three "alphabets" - two phonetic (one is for Japanese words and the other for foreign ones) and Kanji. Japanese does not, however, have spaces or other indications of separation between words. Now,whileit'snotimpossibletofigureoutwhatImeanwhenIdon'tusespaces,it'sstillsomewhathardtoread,evenfornativespeakers. To make things even harder, Japanese has particles, or characters from the phonetic alphabet used to mark words for their grammatical meaning in the sentence. Add to that the fact that these particles are not always pronounced the same way the characters are when used in a word, and you have a right troublesome time.
For example: "I spoke" is "watashi wa hanashida." If it's all written in the phonetical alphabet, the "wa" character is the same as the "ha" character for "hanashita" ... and "haha" means "mother." Confusing, right?
But it's not written that way. Instead, the kanji for "me, I" is used, plus the "ha" particle, plus the kanji for "to talk," ("hanashi"), plus the phonetic character for "ta" (which can in this sense be thought of as a past-tense particle). So it doesn't matter that you don't have any spaces, because the changing between kanji and the phonetic alphabet clearly shows the break between words.


So, while I'm frustrated at how little I can read on a regular basis, and how few kanji I know (about 100), I actually like studying them on the whole. They may be needlessly complicated to pronounce and impossible to master, but the driving principle behind them is something I can appreciate and support. I'm sure the Japanese language, on the whole, is glad for this gaikokujin's ("foreign," "country," "person") support.