Because it’s a Saturday, and because I just know you need the inspiration, I’ve put together twelve images that will surely inspire you to jump on the kanji train. Choo choo. Kanji train coming in for a landing (yeah, the kanji train flies). Using the absolutely awesome online voluntary sweatshop-wage labor tool Mechanical Turk, I’ve been able to procure some inspiration for you. What I did was simple: I put a job up, asking people to write something that was both inspirational and kanji-related, and then take a picture of themselves. Of course, that got all sorts of interesting, and very uninspiring results, but at the very least it should give you a case of the chuckles.

This guy obviously hearts kanji. You can tell by the way he’s smiling so… wait a second…

Yes! Yes! Yes! What else is there to say about this one? Oh man.

What a frickin’ sweet beard this guy has. If that beard isn’t inspiring, I don’t know what is.

Yes you can.

This dude is reading dictionaries for fun on a Friday night. Sweet!

This person totally went all out.

It’s funny because… well, just read it.

Props for the haiku. Unprops for the talking about Papt. Not cool man, not cool.

Nice face, miss!

This isn’t ChatRoulette, is it?

Do his thumbs up makes you inspired?

This guy believes in you. His stare says “I believe in you… and I may murder you in your sleep if you don’t study.”

So, if clown-wig guy, hard for kanji guy, or devil mask man didn’t totally inspire you to dive head first into kanji study now, I don’t know what will. Then again, maybe it isn’t only about inspiration? Maybe part of it is working hard and motivating yourself? Nah. It’s definitely clowns that got me to learn kanji. Happy Saturday, everyone.

Oh Mechanical Turk, I love you.

P.S. If you need some proper inspiration, you should subscribe to Tofugu’s newsletter.

P.P.S. If you can’t handle all the inspiration already, you should follow Tofugu on Twitter.

After telling you the Japanese learning industry was a failure when it comes to kanji learning, it’s only fair to come up with some solutions to this mess and help you out. Learning kanji is no laughing matter (it’s more of a crying matter, really), and there are a number of ways to go about it. Sure, I could give you my opinion (and I will), but I thought it would be even more valuable for you, the kanji learner, to hear it from 10 other J-blogger kanji experts as well. These are people who have studied kanji, made mistakes, overcome obstacles, found success, and can point you in the right direction. Everybody learns differently, and by hearing from various expert opinions, hopefully you’ll figure out how you should learn kanji too (and find some sweet new J-bloggers to follow!).

Julie from Julie In Japan

The best Kanji book I’ve been given is called ストーリーで覚える漢字300 (Story de Oboeru Kanji 300) by Fusako Beuckmann. Not only does it associate each Kanji part with an interesting story, but it helps with writing and piecing together common Kanji pairings. This book helped me a lot when I first started learning. The book is in English, Portugese, Korean and Spanish. ReadTheKanji is a fun and simple website that quizzes you and checks your progress. I recommend doing it for a short time every day. I also recommend joining Lang-8 and starting a journal for Japanese people to correct and comment on. I actually learned about both sites from Tofugu.

Also, I don’t know if you’d call it studying, but I learned a lot of Kanji from text messaging with friends. When I first learned the kana, my friends started sending me text messages in Japanese. First, the messages were all in Hiragana, but soon I began to recognize the most common Kanji characters. Now, I think I know about 600-700 Kanji, which is decent since I’ve never formally studied it. I’m going to try the JLPT test this year for the first time, so that is the biggest study motivation right now. [JulieInJapan]

Matt from AltJapan

Being a translator, I have reached a level of proficiency where I don’t need to study kanji on a daily basis like I once did. Back when I was a student I used a combo of flashcards and rote repetition (writing kanji, particularly those I had a hard time remembering, over and over again.) Mnemonic devices (associating them with little rhymes or whatever) can be a big help on that front too.

But rote study is not enough to make anything stick. You have to put yourself into a place where you are reading (and also hopefully writing) a certain amount of Japanese every day. Whether this means plowing through a newspaper, novel, magazine, manga, or favorite website doesn’t matter. It’s the act of actually using the information on a daily basis that locks it in. [AltJapan]

Thomas from NihonHacks

I don’t study kanji at all. I read books/magazines and play video games.

I did speed through Heisig a while back which gave me a nice foundation to guess word-meanings from, but I didn’t maintain it (boring).

Now I just read and learn kanji through exposure. Get books with a high picture/text ratio (ex, non-fiction books targeted at elementary school kids, on a topic you are interested in). Buy a Nintendo DS and get games that have a lot of text (Dragon Quest series, Sloane to MacHale no Nazo no Story). Read manga.

If you like science, I recommend Newton magazine. Crazy amount of colorful pictures, everything on every page is explained at least twice (text and picture captions), and not that many words on a page. [NihonHacks]

Jamaipanese from Jamaipanese

1. Start with the easy stuff and work your way up:
Too often persons studying kanji for various reasons try to skip the basic easy characters. Whether it is to impress friends, teachers or just to make it harder on yourself I can never really understand why. I am no kanji pro but characters like mountain, fire, four and book should be among the first kanji you learn.

2. Focus more on reading than writing:
Maybe my reasoning is flawed and it all depends on your reason for studying Japanese but I like to think that being able to recognize and read kanji is more important that writing them. Focus more and reading kanji and when it comes to writing it will only be a matter of remembering stroke order as the character will be stuck in your mind ready to be reproduced by your hands.

3. Practice and revise often:
What’s the reason for learning something in the first place if you don’t practice it and take steps to remember? Top class athletes work hard to keep themselves in top shape so why should be any different with Kanji? There is a crap load of revision tools available online and through various video games and phone applications.

Bonus tip

4: Stay inspired
Everyone has their reasons why they are studying Japanese, whether it be wanting to live and/or work in Japan, play imported video games, land a Japanese girlfriend/boyfriend. Focus on your inspiration and go for it! [Jamaipanese]

David from JapanDave

Best way to study the kanji is Heisig’s Remember the Kanji. At first glance, the book and method may seem a little crazy — but hear it out. The method divides kanji learning into two distinctive parts:

1) Learn how to draw the kanji from an English key word. That is, if you see the word “cat” you draw the kanji for cat. (猫)

2) Learn the pronunciations for the kanji. That is, when you see the kanji for cat (猫), you can immediately say Ah hah, that’s neko.

The idea here is that it’s far easier to learn when you are only doing one thing at a time.

That’s the theory. The actual way of learning is to simply make a story for each character that tells you how to draw it. That’s it.

Seems crazy, but it works amazingly well. The first chapter or so is available to download for free, so go give it a try. [JapanDave]

Brett from Rainbowhill Language Lab

You really have to grab kanji by both horns and pummel it into submission. There are as many ways to learn kanji as there are, well, kanji. You don’t have to try everything but definitely try enough to find out what works for you. Go for natural methods over contrived every time. Break it down into component parts, and build it back up again. Associate multiple meanings, and guess at new combinations. Above all, commit it to memory by learning to write. [Rainbowhill Language Lab]

Mike from Japan Is Doomed

I used ‘Basic Kanji Book I + II’ to get a basic grounding (500 kanji with all readings and useful compounds).

Since then, I’ve been adding them to my growing ‘pool’ of Kanji and vocab as I see them in the world, plus ones from school. It’s not the most thorough system but you do end up with mostly very useful knowledge. (No archaic readings or whatever). [Japan Is Doomed]

Michael from Michael John Grist

I tried all the ways I could think of to learn Kanji: brute force memorization with flash cards, kanji games like slime forest where you kill slimes by correctly naming kanji, trying to make up stories involving kanji particles and memorize them mnemonically, listing signs and place names around Tokyo and trying to memorize them (because they’d be useful and I see them a lot), but I think all of these efforts fell down for one main reason- I’m not so interested in Japanese culture. I think key to learning a language is learning what that language communicates- which is its unique culture. So I could bash my head against kanji all day, but I’m left with the demotivating fact after it all- what do I even want these kanji for? And I never have a good answer. [Michael John Grist]

Michael from Gakuranman

Kanji. They still remain the biggest stumbling block for me, alongside advanced vocabulary. Working as a translator of Japanese in Japan I am reading blocks of Japanese text everyday, and while it has been a fantastic way to improve my understanding of the language, it’s also highlighted some of my shortcomings. I’ve realized that in order to be able to write kanji, you really need to be using them, pen to paper style.

Many of the kanji I was comfortable with before now seem to shift around in that not-quite-there space of my mind. I know it, for sure, but I just couldn’t write it if pushed to. While this isn’t a great burden on me right now (I use a computer most days), it is embarrassing come letter writing time.

So my nugget of advice is to go back to school and use a pen and paper to learn your kanji. Forget Smart.fm for a moment (but use it for vocabulary!) – when you really want to internalize those characters, you need to be writing them. Verbalizing the meanings and readings as you practice those strokes is another good way to cement them into your mind. And remember – do it a little everyday! Nothing beats repetition. Good luck! [Gakuranman]

Mari from Mari’s Diary

I guess it would be fun to find a same kanji on different words, so that you may understand the meaning of kanji slowly. 運, 運用, 運行, 運転 etc,. so you will know 運 is related to something to do with carrying or handling. You don’t need to fight with thick books or text books, a peice of map is fine. You will know river, city, mountain, gulf etc with shape or graphic. After map, you can challenge to another piece of paper like super market ad. [Mari's Diary]

Koichi from Tofugu

Ha ha! I get the last spot because I was the last person to write something. Now, you already know the mistakes I think a lot of kanji learners make, so that should give you some idea, but let me give you a quick summary on how I think you should be learning your kanji.

Tip 1: Learn the radicals and use them to your advantage. By learning radicals you can avoid the whole “having to learn every single stroke” problem that only gets worse and worse the more you learn. Radicals cut down on the number of steps you have to take to memorize a particular kanji, and fewer steps will make your brain a happy brain.

Tip 2: Start with the simplest kanji in terms of complexity (and not the simplest kanji meaning) and work your way up. If you start with kanji of simpler build (i.e. learn 1-stroke kanji first, then 2-stroke, and so on), kanji will build on each other and you’ll be able to use simpler kanji to put together more complicated kanji, like the foundation to a building.

Tip 3: Consistency is key. Learning 5 kanji a day is way more effective than learning 50 kanji all at once, once a week. Take it a little bit at a time and you’ll know a lot of kanji in a relatively short period of time. 5 kanji per day will get you to 2000 kanji in 400 days (that’s just over a year… 2000 kanji takes most people 5, 6, 7+ years to get a grip on, because they aren’t consistent). If you have more time, up it to 10 a day, but I would definitely not go beyond that. The main thing is that you are consistent and create a schedule. Make it a habit, and don’t overdo it or you’ll end up burning out.

Tip 4: Find a resource / “way of learning” that works for you. What works for me, or for any of the people above me might not be a fit for you (but then again, it may be, and that’s great!). The more you know about yourself, and how you learn, the more effectively you’ll be able to learn kanji in the long run. Be careful not to let this become a crutch or an excuse, though. If you spend all your time thinking, “no, this won’t work for me, I better research more and more on how to learn” you’ll never make it. Take action and do. Make mistakes, and figure out through experience what works for you. If something doesn’t work, move on, but you’ll never know until you actually try. As (I think) Einstein said, “A good plan today is always better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” [Tofugu]

All that being said, I hope you find something that works for you.There are some fabulous ideas up above, and you’re sure to get something out of it. But heck, what am I thinking? There must be some kanji-learning gurus reading this as too (or at least people who have attempted at some point in their life to learn kanji). What has worked well for you? What hasn’t? Share them here and help your fellow kanji-learning-humans out. We all know that every kanji-learner could use whatever they can get.

Oh, and definitely take a look at the bloggers that contributed above. They have great j-blogs, and you’ll surely enjoy what they have to say if you’re reading the monkey-loving articles I do here.

P.S. If you know fewer than 12,000 kanji, you should subscribe to the Tofugu newsletter (or, if you’re already subscribed, you should check out Rainbowhill’s newsletter too, it’s good for Japanese-learners).

P.P.S. If you don’t have a silly kanji tattoo, you should follow Tofugu on Twitter as well.

The Japanese learning industry, on a whole, has failed us when it comes to kanji learning. But, you can learn from their mistakes, and in doing so, learn how to fix the way you learn kanji.

FAILURE #1: You Learn Kanji Stroke By Stroke By Stroke…

Sure, there’s something to be said about learning correct stroke order. I’m all for that, but the problem is that it ends up putting emphasis on learning kanji stroke by stroke by stroke. When kanji is simple, it’s easy to learn this way. Three strokes? Only three things to learn. Huzzah! But, when you start out learning kanji like this (i.e. when you think of kanji as a bunch of strokes), you keep learning kanji like this. That’s why in most Japanese classes, when the kanji homework goes out, people automatically see how many strokes a kanji has. “I know a 20-stroke kanji, I’m impressive!” people think. No. You’re stupid. Thinking of kanji as a bunch of strokes just forces you to try and remember more. A 20-stroke kanji = 20+ different things you have to remember. If you think of a kanji as individual strokes making up the whole, then you’ve already failed. So how should you think of kanji, then?

FAILURE #2: You Don’t Learn Your Kanji Radicals

Oh sure, you might learn a few radicals here and there, like the water radical (just a few little strokes next to a kanji). “If you see this,” the kanji resource says, “you’ll know that this kanji probably has something to do with water.” For the most part, though, radicals are a distant afterthought in the kanji-learning world, and this is an absolutely huge mistake. Most people teach radicals (if they teach them at all) as pieces of a kanji that help you figure out the meaning of the kanji if you don’t know it. Although this works sometimes, why not just learn the meaning of the kanji in the first place?

Instead, learning radicals should be treated like building blocks. Remember how I said kanji should not be learned stroke-by-stroke? More complicated kanji should be put together radical-by-radical. If you take the time to learn the 200-250 kanji radicals (it may seem like a lot, but it’s really a pretty quick process), you can put a fairly complicated kanji together in 3, maybe 4 steps. Think of radicals like the ABCs of English. You can’t put together the word FAILURE if you don’t know the letters F-A-I-L-U-R-E, right? By learning radicals first you’re setting yourself up for kanji success. You cut down on the memorization required for every single kanji by 300-800%. Here’s an example:

Now, this kanji isn’t particularly difficult, but you get the drift. Learning this kanji stroke-by-stroke would set you back eight steps (because there are eight strokes). Instead, let’s take a look at the radicals that make this kanji up. If you learn all the kanji radicals (or, at least the ones I recommend), putting this particular kanji together can be done in a mere 3 steps, depending on which radicals you would use. That’s a 260% less to learn which means you’re saving valuable time and brain-space.

As you can see, these three “radicals” can be put together (like letters in a word) to create the kanji above. The first one (止) makes up the top portion, the second one (小) takes up the bottom, and the third (ノ) rounds it out. The best part is that you associate these radicals with names and concepts, which means you can come up with some kind of mnemonic device to help you remember what goes where (more on mnemonics below).

In summary, everyone should learn their radicals before even thinking about learning kanji. If you don’t, it’s like building a highrise with no foundation.

Failure #3: You Memorize Instead of Learn

Good things can be said about repetition and “memorization.” I think they’re a necessary part of kanji learning, but everything has it’s limits (and you can use all the help you can get when it comes to kanji). One of the problems I have with the “normal” way people have you learn kanji is that they give you 10-20 kanji, sit you down with a kanji worksheet, and have you write the kanji over and over again (and of course, the focus is on the number of strokes, right?). The problem, though, is with our brains. First of all, there’s only so much information (or so many steps) we can fit in our short term memory. That means as soon as you move on to the next kanji, there’s a good chance you’re already forgetting the one before it. Another problem is that with too much repetition, our brains switch to autopilot. At that point you aren’t learning any more, you’re just going through the motions. To solve this, there are a couple of solutions.

SOLUTION A) First of all, don’t think of the kanji as strokes, think of them as particles. This will help you learn more effectively (and get the information in your long term memory more quickly). When you’re practicing, think of the individual radicals that you’re writing, and how they go together to form the whole kanji. The more you do this, the faster you’ll be able to learn kanji.

SOLUTION B) Don’t write a single kanji more than three times in a row. If you have multiple kanji to practice, switch back and forth and go back to previous ones. Come up with some kind of pattern. I would recommend something like this. Each letter represents a kanji, and each time it shows up it should be written for practice: A, A, A, B, B, B, A, B, C, C, C, A, B, C, D, D, D, A, B, C, D, E, E, E… etc. When you run out of space for “A” kanji, you would just start at “B” the next time around. This way you are forcing your brain to actually think and process the information, instead of hitting autopilot the moment you’ve written a kanji for the 4th or 5th time.

SOLUTION C) Apply some kind of mnemonic strategy to your kanji. Mnemonics help you remember things. They basically leave hints in your brain that when seen trigger another memory, which really helps you to remember things more effectively. One way to do this is to come up with “stories” for your kanji. If you’ve learned the kanji radicals, it is pretty easy to do. If you take the example above (歩), we can use the three radicals to come up with a story to help us remember whatever it is we want to remember. The radical examples below are ones I’ve given meaning to. You can come up with your own meanings if you want to, or use a set that someone else has developed.

• 止 is a radical that means STOP
• 小 is a radical that means SMALL
• ノ is a radical that means SLIDE

So, we can use these three concepts / words and put them together in a way that helps us remember that the kanji 歩 means “walk.” Here’s one: “Stop! It’s a small slide. We will walk from here” (you know, because zombies hang around slides). As long as you know the radicals already, the hints to trigger this little “story” will be right in the kanji, every time you see it. Of course, we could get even more in depth with it and start associating emotion as well as our senses. This gets into the concept of creating “flashbulb memories” for yourself (these are memories your brain produces during traumatic or incredible events, that’s why you remember where you were, say, when you learned about 9/11). By imagining the emotion you felt when you saw the small slide, or the smell of the aluminum, or perhaps even the shock you felt when you saw how small it was, you can make this memory a lot stronger by tricking your brain into thinking it was really important. The more senses or emotions you associate with it (you really have to imagine they’re happening, though!), the more likely you are to remember. This may seem like a lot of work at first, but it actually gets quite quick and easy as you practice.

You can even take this a step further and learn the pronunciation of the kanji like this as well. Once you know the meaning of the kanji, you can learn the pronunciation using a similar strategy. For the kanji 歩, the most common on-yomi for this kanji is ほ (ho). When you know this, you can come up with another story that uses “ho” in it. Maybe something like: “When you walk around, be careful about stepping on a hoe (ほ). Since we know the meaning of the kanji from the previous story, we can use that as our hint to figure out what the pronunciation of it is as well. Beyond that, though, I’d recommend also learning the common words that use that kanji, since there are often plenty of different ways to pronounce the same kanji, and learning through example is the best way, I think.

FAILURE #4: You Learn Kanji Like Japanese School Children (i.e. In The Wrong Order)

When Japanese school children learn kanji, they go from simpler kanji meanings to more complicated kanji meanings. Sometimes, a simple kanji will have a simple meaning, but sometimes it won’t. Take a look at these kanji, for example. These are learned in secondary school (i.e. they are “higher level” kanji), but if you look at them, you’ll notice they’re really, really simple to write. Two or three strokes each.

乙　了　丈　勺

Even though these kanji are simple to write, the meanings aren’t as simple, which is why Japanese school children don’t learn them until  later in their education. On the other hand, take a look at these kanji, which have very simple meanings associated with them, yet consist of many, many more strokes. These are learned by second graders in elementary school. We’re talking tiny little kids, with tiny little brains.

曜　線　鳴　算

The problem with a lot of Japanese learning resources is that they emulate this Japanese school children method of learning kanji. The thing they seem to have totally forgotten is that you, as someone who is learning Japanese as a second (or third, or fourth) language, probably are not a child (not to mention a Japanese child, in Japan), which means it really doesn’t matter if you learn kanji with difficult meanings earlier. You already understand the meanings behind the words, because you’ve learned them all in English. The difficult part is the actual kanji itself (and how to write / read them), not the meaning associated with that kanji. Because many resources forget this, you are introduced to more difficult kanji early on just because the meaning of the kanji is easier.

Instead, everyone should learn kanji based on the simplicity of the kanji itself. Who cares about the meaning. Start with 1-stroke kanji and work your way up. There are approximately 2,000 kanji you have to learn no matter what, so you might as well put them in an order that makes a lot more sense. By starting simply and moving your way up, you are able to build one kanji upon another. You’ll find that more complicated kanji are really just made up of less complicated kanji (or radicals). But, if you learn kanji the way Japanese school children learn them, it feels random, overwhelming, and just plain confusing. Learning kanji isn’t the same as learning vocabulary in Spanish, German, or whatever. It’s its own monster, and should be treated that way.

FAILURE #5: You Don’t Use The Best Tools Out There

I’m pretty sure most teachers today don’t say “okay, when you go home, I want you to go through your Smart.fm/Anki deck and practice your kanji.” No, it’s more like “okay, when you get home write this kanji a gazillion times in this kanji sheet until you feel tired and lethargic.” Now, you don’t need fancy tools to do anything. Tiger Woods could pick up a crappy golf club and still beat you every time. But, when it comes to language learning, it certainly doesn’t hurt, especially when the best tools out there are free.

Smart.fm and Anki are “intelligent” flash cards (i.e. they know when to bring back certain cards and know what’s giving you trouble so that it can help you learn more effectively). Even if you like the feeling of paper in your hands, these services will beat your handmade set almost every time (though Rainbowhill has a pretty good method if you do like using physical flash cards). These services will tell you what to study and when to study them (and in general, they’re usually right), which really helps take the pain out of flashcard learning, and will be your best friend when it comes to learning kanji.

P.S. If you just had a kanji epiphany, you should subscribe to the Tofugu Newsletter.

P.S. If you wish this article was a lot shorter, you should follow Tofugu on Twitter.

]]> http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/25/the-5-biggest-mistakes-people-make-when-learning-kanji/feed/ 181 http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/23/the-types-of-kanji-in-japanese-onyomi-vs-kunyomi/ http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/23/the-types-of-kanji-in-japanese-onyomi-vs-kunyomi/#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:50:22 +0000 http://www.tofugu.com/?p=2637 So you’re chillin’ like Bob Dylan, studying some kanji. At first it’s nice and easy. Hey, this totally looks like a tree! 木. Cha-ching! Then, you have to start learning the pronunciation of kanji, and everything gets complicated (don’t worry, I’m here to make it simple). You realize that there are multiple ways to pronounce almost every kanji out there. Sometimes there are 5, 6, 7+ different pronunciations. How can this be? It’s not like each English word has 5, 6, 7+ different ways to pronounce it (I’m looking at you, Canada. Aboot?). Sometimes you have to add hiragana to the end of a kanji, since the kanji isn’t big enough to hold the pronunciation. It becomes totally overwhelming. Don’t worry! Part of your problem is the way you’re learning kanji (we’ll talk about that a little later this week). The other part, though, is just your lack of knowledge on how kanji works (that’s what this article covers. In the last Kanji Week article, we went over the history of kanji. We’ll pretty much just pick up where that one left off.

When Kanji Came Over To Japan…

As you know from the last article, Japan didn’t have a written language at the time kanji meandered its way over from China. They did, however, have a spoken language (duh) that didn’t sound anything like Chinese. That right there is the (simple) reason on why kanji is read so many different ways in Japanese. There were word adoptions, trades, and more, which just ended up making things really complicated. This broke kanji up into two big categories, on’yomi and kun’yomi.

音読み (On’Yomi) – Chinese Reading

On’Yomi translates directly to mean “Sound reading.” This refers to the Chinese reading of the kanji, i.e. the original sounds that they make in the Chinese language. Of course, the Japanese and Chinese languages are very different, which means the sounds that Japan gave to these kanji are really just close approximations of the original Chinese pronunciation. So, even if you learn Japanese, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t be able to translate this over to learning Chinese (at least with 100% accuracy). If only it worked that way.

Now, that’s nice and all, but kanji didn’t make it’s way over to Japan in one fell swoop, nicely bound and ready to go. There are often multiple On’Yomi readings for each and every kanji because they were introduced to Japan multiple times over the course of a few hundred years, and for some reason Japan decided it would be cool to keep all of them. Pile ‘em up, Japan said. More is better. These different readings came from different provinces, dynasties, and what have you, and apparently all of them had slightly different ways to pronounce things. That’s why you’ll often see multiple on’yomi options with an individual kanji.

But when do you use it? In general, you’ll use on’yomi when a kanji is sitting there all on its own (i.e. when there is no hiragana attached to it), or when a word is made up of a multi-kanji compound (this is called jukugo). Usually when you see a multi-kanji compound word, it has originally come from China. Sometimes these words filled a gap when no such word existed, though often times it just ends up being a synonym for another word. In general, people who use a lot of jukugo are big smarty pants, like people who use big words in English all the time.

To Remember About On’Yomi:

• Chinese reading of a kanji
• Used when there is no hiragana attached to the kanji
• Often consist of multi-kanji compound words, like 空港 (see, no hiragana attached! This is kuukou)
• Can sound erudite wordy and snobby if you use these words too much.

訓読み (Kun’Yomi) – Japanese Reading

Kun’yomi, on the other hand, is the Japanese reading of kanji. This, as you can imagine, is Japan’s (pretty successful) attempt at making their language work with kanji, that way they wouldn’t have to learn Chinese to read everything. A Chinese kanji’s meaning (not to be confused with pronunciation) would be taken, and a close Japanese equivalent word to that meaning would get associated with it. Because the longer Japanese words didn’t always fit with a single kanji (Chinese usually associated one-ish syllable to each kanji), notations were created (which later turned into hiragana) to be added to the kanji and finish out the word (as well as dictate the tense and context behind a word).

Here’s a great example of this from Wikipedia:

…the kanji for east, 東, has the on[yomi] reading tō. However, Japanese already had two words for “east”: higashi and azuma. Thus the kanji 東 had the latter readings added as kun’yomi. In contrast, the kanji 寸, denoting a Chinese unit of measurement (about 30 mm or 1.2 inch), has no native Japanese equivalent; it only has an on’yomi, sun, with no native kun reading. Most kokuji, Japanese-created Chinese characters [however], only have kun readings.

So, how do you know when to use the kun reading? In general, you’ll use kun readings when a kanji has hiragana attached to it (though this isn’t always the case), or when a kanji’s sitting out there on its own. Really though, prior knowledge of the kanji and how it is used is necessary, which unfortunately means you actually have to practice since there are no really solid rules you can use to shortcut your way out of figuring out how to use what pronunciation and where.

To Remember About Kun’Yomi…

• It’s the Japanese reading (i.e. the pronunciations come from the Japanese language).
• Often has hiragana (also known as okurigana) attached to the end. Words like 食べます, 赤い, and 怖い are examples (okurigana in red).
• You won’t find kun’yomi readings when it comes to multi-kanji words as often (though people’s names can be an exception… not to mention all the other exceptions as well).
• Yeah, you gotta study if you want to know how to read kanji, especially since each kanji can be used in so many different ways.

Of course, the big question that should be asked here is “how the cuss do I learn all these different readings??” That question will be answered in time (i.e. soon!). Make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or just watch the Kanji Week tag, and you will get your answer (or perhaps it will just raise more questions?).

P.S. The Tofugu Newsletter only has one way to pronounce it.

P.P.S. The Tofugu Twitter account has 5, 6, 7+ pronunciations, if you like it better that way.

To start Shark… er… Kanji Week off, I thought it would be important to tell you a bit about kanji history (i.e. where kanji originally came from). Kanji’s history is a bit muddled and goes back a long ways, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from coming up with some pretty solid theories on how it all went down in Chinatown.

Where It All Begins (Turtles Had It Rough)

Now, this is just a theory (though people seem to like it), but way back in the day in China (we’re talking 2000BC-ish, that’s around 4000 years ago) people needed to ask questions to the heavens. How did they ask questions? Not by shouting at the sky. Instead, they’d take turtle shells or animal bones and burn them.

Now, when a turtle shell or animal bone gets burned, cracks form. From there, they’d analyze these cracks and write them down (i.e. copy them down), pulling meaning from them by comparing the cracks to real life things (i.e. if the cracks looked like something, they’d attribute some meaning to it). By killing lots of turtles, you could figure out if it was going to rain, if there’d be a disaster, or whatever you want (heck, you’re pulling meaning from burnt turtle shells here).

After a while, since the scribes kept a record of all these cracked turtle shells and animal bones, they would start to replicate these “symbols” back onto not-burnt turtle shells. My guess is they thought the burnt cracks were a message from the Gods, and by replicating them and “sending them back” they could ask for the things they want (after they figured out what the cracks meant in the first place). This is why there are a good number of turtle shells with Chinese characters written on them from around this era. Poor turtles. Here, you can take a look at tortoiseshell writing, and get an idea how it evolved over time:

I’m pretty sure they misread the “Dance” symbol for “B51 Bomber dropping fish for great China glory.”

Where It Becomes “Writing”

The above turtle-shell burnings were the base and foundation of the Chinese writing system, but it wasn’t until the Zhou Dynasty (after the previous turtle-shell burning Shang Dynasty) that things started getting interesting. The Shang Dynasty disappeared, and the Zhou Dynasty found all these turtle shells and were like “dang, this could be a kind of writing system.” From there, they started documenting events, cool people, and the like using these turtle-shell characters. However, scribes of this dynasty never really took the time to study the originals, so they started making things up. If they didn’t know a character, they’d come up with an approximation, which of course lead to a lot of kanji being born (as well as a lot of inconsistency in the writing). There were multiple kingdoms and multiple ways to write, and I imagine reading was a big confusing since nobody followed the originals 100%. Confucius even complained about this apparently, which isn’t that surprising, because Confucius was a big whiner. Somebody call the Whaambulance… Whaaa, whaaa.

It wasn’t until the Qin Dynasty (that’s like 221 BC) that China was united under one kingdom, and the writing system was united as well. LiSu (the Prime Minister) writes an index of all the required characters scholars should learn, which contains 3,300 different kanji. That means everyone finally did kanji the same way, and Kanji finally got useful (and ready to make its way to Japan). Just a quick aside: sadly, this 3,300 kanji list doesn’t last. Smart people learn 10,000+ kanji in China, and up to 8,000 kanji in Japan (where kanji is, thankfully, not used in absolutely everything). Luckily, you can get by really comfortably with around 2,000.

How Kanji Came To Japan

Of course, if you’ve been reading up until now, you can probably guess that kanji came from China to Japan, probably via the Korean Peninsula (it’s super close to Japan). At this point in history, Japan didn’t have its own writing system (which means they probably talked a lot, blah blah blah blah), and although nobody is quite sure when Japan started using the Chinese script, it was probably Chinese immigrants who first started using it and then it caught on from there. Sometime around 500 AD we know that groups called Fuhito were formed to read Classical Chinese, which probably means it started getting wider acceptance around that time.

Of course, the Chinese and Japanese languages were (and are) quite different, which means adoption of kanji couldn’t have been easy. Lots of modifications and changes to the pronunciation and way of writing had to happen in order to fit Kanji to the Japanese language, which is why you see On’Yomi, Kun’Yomi, and funny phonetic alphabets like hiragana appearing soon after. We’ll talk about these in a later article, so make sure you stick around for Kanji Week (and follow the Kanji Week Tag)!

P.S. If you think Kanji is bogus, you should join the Tofugu Newsletter.

P.P.S. If you think kanji should be 140 characters or less, you should follow Tofugu on Twitter.

Update: Thanks to @lianaleslie on Twitter, here’s another “explanation” on the origin of kanji. Not only does this dude have four eyes, but he has EIGHT pupils as well. How cool is that?

Cangjie is a very important figure in ancient China (c. 2650 BC), claimed to be an official historian of the Yellow Emperor and the inventor of Chinese characters.Legend has it that he had four eyes and eight pupils, and that when he invented the characters, the deities and ghosts cried and the sky rained millet. [Read More about this wicked sweet Chinese dude]

]]> http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/22/the-history-of-kanji/feed/ 31 http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/21/scarier-than-shark-week-its-kanji-week-on-tofugu/ http://www.tofugu.com/2010/03/21/scarier-than-shark-week-its-kanji-week-on-tofugu/#comments Mon, 22 Mar 2010 04:45:23 +0000 http://www.tofugu.com/?p=2604

I’m sure a lot of you know about Shark Week, but did you know about it’s slightly scarier and far less interesting sibling Kanji Week? Well, it’s happening, and we’ll be spending this next week covering various subjects regarding kanji, the bane of every Japanese learner’s existence. Every day this week there will be 1-2 articles that have something to do with kanji, which means you should subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to get them all (or follow the Kanji Week Tag)! Although there are plenty of articles already planned (and a few already written), feel free to leave kanji-related requests in the comments section of this post. I’d love to help answer some of the more popular questions as we go through this horrifying kanji-filled week. See you soon, Daddy-O.