This works basically the same as in English, where, for example, beaut would be the word root. The root alone is usually a noun. Adding –ify makes beautify, the verb. Adding –iful makes beautiful, the adjective, and adding –ifully makes beautifully, the adverb. The Japanese use kanji for the root beaut and use kana for the grammatical endings –ify, –iful, and –ifully.
Some Japanese words were formed with only one kanji, plus the grammatical ending where needed, and some with two kanji. Words of one kanji usually represent a more elementary thought than words of two kanji. Some words may contain three or even four kanji, but this is comparatively rare. One example is the English word democracy, which translates in Japanese to a four-kanji word 民主主義 MINSHUSHUGI.
Any of the kanji, with a few exceptions, can be used either as a word by itself or together with other kanji to form compound words. A kanji can theoretically form a compound with any other kanji, although of course not all the possible compounds are actually in use. As the Japanese need new words, they can coin them by combining two appropriate kanji into a new compound.
The pronunciation of a kanji when it is used as a word by itself is usually different from its pronunciation in compounds. A kanji will generally keep the same pronunciation in any compound in which it appears, although there are many exceptions. One reason for the different pronunciations is that sometimes the same kanji was borrowed from different regions of China at different times.
For example, the kanji 京, meaning capital, is pronounced MIYAKO when it is used by itself. In the compound word 東京 TOKYO, the capital city of Japan, it is pronounced KYŌ. In the compound word 京阪 KEIHAN, the abbreviation for the Kyoto-Osaka region, it is pronounced KEI.
It is quite easy to distinguish the kanji from the kana. The kana are written with at most four separate lines, or strokes, and usually with only two or three. The kanji, on the other hand, except for the word one, which is just one horizontal line 一, and one other exception, have a minimum of two strokes and often many more.
| Examples of katakana: | ア イ ウ エ オ カ キ ク ケ コ |
| Examples of hiragana: | あ い う え お か き く け こ |
| Examples of kanji: | 漢 雨 運 罪 競 線 歯 聞 街 |
Kana will appear at the end of many words to give them grammatical context. A typical written Japanese sentence will have a mix of kanji and kana, and look like this:
私の友達は金曜日に東京を発ちます。
The difference in written form between the kanji and the kana should be easily recognizable. Japanese does not leave spaces between separate words. The grammatical endings in kana usually show where each word ends.
Japanese books and newspapers, being in sentence form, are written with both kanji and kana. The language a visitor to Japan will see in the streets—shop names, advertisements, prices, street names, traffic signs, tickets, bills, receipts, train station names, family names—not generally in sentence form, are most often written with kanji only.
The kana are not difficult and both sets can be learned in a few days. It is just a matter of memorizing them as you memorized the alphabet as a child and will not take much more effort. For those readers interested in learning the kana, a chart and additional description are included as Appendix A.
The stories of the origin and development of each pictorial element in each kanji character were taken mainly from the compendium SHUO WEN CHIE TSU, published in China about 1,800 years ago.
For many of the kanji, the SHUO WEN lists more than one theory of their origin. This is understandable since more than 2,000 years passed between the first invention of the kanji and their compilation in the SHUO WEN lexicon. During that time, there were many changes in the form of the characters and their pronunciation, and many new interpretations of the history of each kanji. After the SHUO WEN, etymologists, including scholars from Japan, have discovered what they believe to be still other interpretations of the origin of some of the characters.
Whether the explanations of the origins given in the SHUO WEN CHIE TSU or by later scholars are correct is not important here since this book is not a text in etymology but rather a simplified method for learning the kanji. Where there is a difference of opinion between scholars, READ JAPANESE TODAY uses the interpretation which, I hope, is best mnemonically for English-speaking readers.
Japanese Pronunciation
Japanese pronunciation is comparatively straightforward. The vowels are pronounced as in Italian—the A as in car, the E as in bed, the I as in medium, the O as in go, and the U as in Luke—and the consonants as in English. Sometimes in Japanese the vowels are long and sometimes they are short. Long vowels when written in roman letters will have a line drawn over the top of the letter. In Japanese, long vowels are handled by the kana.
When speaking in Japanese, just drag the long vowels out for twice the time as the short. This is often a difficult thing to do, but it is a very important distinction to make—a SHOKI 書記 is a secretary and SHŌKI 笑気 is laughing gas; a SHŌJO 少女 is a young girl and a SHŌJŌ 猩猩 is an orangutan. For practical purposes, there is no difference in the pronunciation of these sets of words except that some vowels are long and some are short.
In certain cases consonants are doubled, that is a single K becomes KK or a single P becomes PP. The double consonant is pronounced by holding it slightly longer than a single consonant. Like the long and short vowels, this is an important distinction to make but one quite easy to effect, and the reader will master it with just a little practice.
Another important note in pronouncing Japanese words is that the syllables are about equally stressed, whereas in English multi-syllabic words usually have one syllable stressed heavily. The Japanese say YO – KO – HA – MA, giving each syllable equal weight and length, since there are no long vowels in this word. Some English-speakers say YO – ko – HA – ma, accenting the first and third syllable, and some say yo – ko – HA – ma, heavily accenting the third syllable.
When foreigners pronounce Japanese with this heavy extra stress on certain syllables, some of the other syllables are drowned out for Japanese listeners. The first Americans to come to Japan told the Japanese they were a – ME – ri –cans. The Japanese couldn’t hear the A sound and thought the visitors said they were Merikens. This is why the Japanese named the wheat flour the Americans brought with them merikenko, the Japanese word for flour being ko.
How To Write The Kanji
Japanese school-children spend untold hours each year in practice kanji-writing. They do this to reinforce the kanji in their memory, to drill the correct order in which each kanji stroke is drawn, and to develop the proper style of penmanship.
For English-speaking visitors who will not be in Japan that long, the reason to practice writing the kanji is only to reinforce the meaning of the kanji in their memory. Each kanji is a work of calligraphic art, but it would take years of practice before a non-native could write the kanji at that level. Very few will ever be able to write Japanese in the cursive style. If a non-native can write each kanji so it can be clearly read by native Japanese, then what can be expected in a reasonable length of time will have been achieved.
In writing kanji, the order of each stroke and the direction of the pen during the stroke follow specific, rigid rules. The rules were developed by the Chinese to produce a uniform, idealized, artistically balanced script, particularly in cursive writing or writing with a brush. The rules follow logical precepts that make it easy to write the characters in printed-script, and also in the cursive script where each stroke blends into the next without lifting pen or brush from paper. When