かんじ (Kanji)
Once you've mastered your かな, there is just one small thing left to learn: かんじ. They were introduced to Japan from China, when people started writing the language of Japanese. However, because the language had already developed by the time these symbols were introduced, they are pronounced differently.
(Historical note for people that like that sort of thing: The かな were actually derived from some of the more common かんじ.)
かんじ are ideograms, that is to say they represent both sound and meaning. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are another example of ideograms. Consider the following word:
漢字
(Pronounced かんじ)
It is made up of two characters, 漢 and 字. The first represents China, and the second means "character." The word as a whole therefore means "Chinese character(s)." A rather important problem is that the pronunciation of individual かんじ can vary from word to word. So, when I said in the previous article that you always know how to pronounce things, I was lying to make you feel better. There are no hard and fast rules governing which pronunciation to use, so you unfortunately just need to learn it on a word-by-word basis. The meaning, however, is always the same - so it is quite possible to understand a sentence without knowing how it should be pronounced. This contrasts with European languages in that you can take a good guess at how to say "disembatulate" without having a clue what it means.
So, かんじ. Great for transmitting meaning, but a pain to learn. And - this is the really bad news - you need a couple of thousand to be literate. That's why we're largely ignoring them for now, and you can rely on a かんじ dictionary or lookup program whenever you need it. A few simple and important ones will slowly leak in to get you used to the idea and to save space. They really are wonderfully efficient. Consider the following sentence, which you should understand after a few more articles:
わたしはにほんにいきます。
It's quite foreboding, and you can't instantly see any grammatical structure. Use a little borrowed Chinese, though, and you get the friendlier:
私は日本に行きます。
It's the same sentence, pronounced in the same way, but the かんじ helps break it up and point out the individual pieces. This is why Japanese is normally written without spaces, as the borders between words are made obvious by the かんじ. They mean as follows:
- 私 = わたし = I
- 日 = ひ = Sun
- 本 = もと = origin
- 日本 = にほん = origin of the Sun = Japan
- 行 = (start of the verb "to go")
You may take a guess that it means, I go to Japan,
or at least some form of that phrase. If you did, then you were correct.
Note how the combination 日本 is pronounced differently to the individual components 日、 本. In fact, you can even pronounce it にっぽん if you want to. Stacking up かんじ is where the real fun lies. Now that we have "Japan," we could make:
- 日本語 = にほんご = Japanese language
- 日本人 = にほんじん = Japanese person
- 日本車 = にほんしゃ = Japanese car
And so on.
