Japanese Kanji

Kanji

Japanese Kanji

Between 5,000 and 10,000 characters, or kanji, are used
in written Japanese. In 1981 in an effort to make it easier to read and
write Japanese, the Japanese government introduced the 常用漢字表 (jōyō
kanji hyō) or the “List of Chinese Characters for General Use”,
which includes 1,945 regular characters, plus additional characters
used for people’s names (人名用漢字 – jinmeiyô-kanji). This
is based on the list of 1,850 regular use kanji (当用漢字 tôyô kanji)
published in 1946. In 2010 an additional 196 commonly-used kanji were added to
the jōyō kanji taking the total to 2,136.

Newpapers and other media and publications use mainly jōyō
kanji
and provide furigana (reading in kana) for non-jōyō
kanji
. Japanese children are expected to know all of the jōyō
kanji
by the end of high school but to read specialist publications
and ordinary literature, they need to know another two or three thousand
kanji.

The word kanji is the Japanese version of the Chinese word
hànzì, which means “Han characters”. Han
refers to the Han Dynasty (206BC – 220AD) and is the name used by the
Chinese for themselves.

When the Japanese adopted Chinese characters to write the Japanese
language they also borrowed many Chinese words. Today about half the
vocabulary of Japanese comes from Chinese and Japanese kanji are use to
represent both Sino-Japanese words and native Japanese words with the same
meaning.

For example, the native Japanese word for water is mizu while the
Sino-Japanese word is sui. Both are written with the same character.
The former is known as the kun yomi (Japanese reading) of the character
while the latter is known as the on yomi (Chinese reading) of the
character.

Examples of how the Japanese character for water is used

Another example: the native Japanese word for horse is uma while the
Sino-Japanese words are ba and ma.

Japanese character for horse and how it's used

The characters in the word baka, which mean "horse deer", are used for
their phonetic values alone. The word comes from the Sanskrit moha – ignorance,
via the Chinese măhū. Click here
to see how the character for horse is used in Chinese.

The general rule is that when a kanji appears on its own, it is given the
kun yomi, but when two or more kanji appear together, they are given the
on yomi. There are, of course, many exceptions to this rule. For example
it is sometimes difficult to work out how to pronounce people’s names because
some of the kanji used for names have non-standard pronunciations.

Some kanji have multiple on yomi and kun yomi
(the first three readings are on yomi, the last three are kun
yomi
):

An example of a kanji with multiple readings

In Mandarin Chinese this character is pronounced ‘xíng’ or ‘háng’.

Multiple on yomi are often a result of borrowing words over a period of many
centuries, during which Chinese pronunciation changed, and also borrowing words from
different varieties of Chinese.

Some of the kanji have been simplified, although not always
in the same way as characters have been simplified in China:

A comparison of some traditional and simplified characters used in Chinese and Japanese

There are also a number of characters, kokuji (national characters)
which were invented in Japan.

kokuji (kanji invented in Japan)

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