But you know what? That's far from actually understanding kanji. If Japanese language is entirely new to you, you can't get the proper impression by reading definitions of things about it. Imagine a kid asking his dad what is light, and him replying "It's electromagnetic radiation visible to the human eye". Not the father of the year, definitely.
So, in this article, I will try my best to explain kanji characters in an entirely new way. I will introduce the concept of pictographs having different readings and meanings depending on their position in the word by using analogy something you're already very familiar with, and that's basic maths.
Disclaimer (Be Careful)
Please keep in mind that this article is by no means substitution for actually studying kanji characters. Don't try to find any historical significance here, since it's obvious that kanji characters weren't made remotely similar to what you're about to read (that's a story for another time).This article is for those who have just started getting grasp of kanji, but are confused about the actual concept behind it.This article should persuade you that kanji aren't all that hard (or weird) as they seem. You just can't expect to learn them overnight.
Introducing Pictographs
In this article, I will refer to Arabic numbers and other math symbols as pictographs so you could easily draw analogy with kanji characters.
So, imagine yourself being an elementary school kid learning addition and your notebook looking like the picture below, after your teacher returns it.
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| This is equivalent to using only hiragana and katakana. |
Alright, so this is a drag to write, right? Since you're a lazy but smart kid, you decide to cut some shortcuts, so instead of writing "plus" and "equals" all the time, you decide to create something shorter. Let's take a peek at your notebook now, shall we?
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| Notice how one character replaces a few others? |
Well, you saved a lot of ink but your teachers seems troubled. She has absolutely no idea what your strange crosses and lines mean, so she can't really tell you if that's correct. Looks like we'll have some explaining to do.
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| This is just like writing furigana. |
Alright, now that you added small characters above your newly invented symbols, your teacher knows what they mean. Also, note how you don't have to add them everywhere; your teacher's not stupid and she realizes that the same characters repeat in the exact same way below, so she gets that she should read them the same.
But this is still boring, right? "Eight" repeats five times there, so why do you have to write it out each time?
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| Introducing more kanji characters... |
Let's not make this any longer than we have to now, since you probably see where this is going. Also, we're going to assume that teacher has already seen a bunch of your homeworks, so she knows what your symbols mean. So, after a while, your notebook looks pretty neat.
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| By analogy, this are all kanjis. That's not really how things work. |
Oh, by the way, seems like your creativity (actually, it's probably just her laziness) inspired your teacher to think of her own symbols, so she won't have to write long words for each line!
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| The cross is especially a great example of "kanji" since you read it differently in many other contexts, i.e. "times". |
Remember how it looked in the beginning? By the way, did you notice that line "1+1=2" repeats twice? Here it's rewriting only 5 pictographs, but what if you had to rewrite whole lines of text? Let's introduce the way we're gonna do it anyway.
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| There's a special character which denotes repetition 々. Don't confuse with katakana マ (ma). |
Thank god you've got a psychic teacher who can read your mind at this point. By the way, looks like you're regretting that mistake a lot, so let's try to fix it with just one line when teacher's not looking.
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| Example of creating a new character by combining two other characters. |
Well, looks like your teacher's not ready yet. By the way, did you notice how she developed a pictograph for "I don't understand this"? Did you also notice how you actually understood it immediately?
Creating Compounds
But a few week later you start learning addition for larger numbers, as well. You can still use some of the pictographs you've created, but there are new words that you don't know how to express other than in words.
On the other hand, teacher didn't evolve at all because all she had to do was to mark them as correct or incorrect (she dropped the "I don't understand this" and marked them with "Incorrect" anyway, because she was embarrassed that she had a student smarter than her), so I won't show how she marked your stuff anymore.
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| Notice how hyphen can mean bunch of things? |
You know it's going to get even wilder once you start learning even higher numbers, so you know you have to come up with something quickly. But before that, you notice certain numbers contain the ones that you have already transformed into pictographs, so you try to simply fit them in.
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| This might actually be close to ratio of kanji and kana in casual text. |
But you see a lot of flaws here. You also notice that although some things are similar, they are read differently, so you realize you'll have to accept that pictographs are read differently depending on their position in a word.
After a lot of work, your notebook looks like this.
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| You gotta be really smart if you came up with this. |
You're satisfied with your result and you've gotten hang of it, so you're using your writing system everywhere. This could be a happy ending, but there's a friend of yours who's very bad with maths, so he asks you for help. But you're busy since NASA employed you after they heard that you came up with awesome system which saves time, nerves, paper and ink, so you can't bother to explain.
So you give him your notebook where you've written everything, including the explanation of your pictograph-based system and some examples. Imagine the look in his face when he sees it.
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| Notice the 18: you'll have to drop the latter "t" from "teen". This is similar to adding dakuten in words consisting of more kanji. For example, （はな）＋（ち）→（はなぢ）「鼻血」 |
You heard that your friend never really made it past the first page. Your examples didn't help learn that 33 is not threethree, that 18 is not oneeight and that 30 is not thirtyzero.
Similar Hiragana
This is a slight digression, but I wanted to mention something else. Ever cursed kana characters for being so similar? Maybe you're good with these now, but let's face it: ン / ソ / シ / ツ was annoying the hell out of you. Well, what about p/q/d/b? Aren't those similar as well?
How about ね / れ / わ? Now take a look at 1/l/I. Even the slash between them is technically just italic version of... all of them.
What Was Not Covered
A huge thing which wasn't covered in any way in this article is combining different pictographs into a new pictograph. Both "1" and "3" from "13" are separate digits. With kanji characters, a lot of times two of them combine into one, new kanji character, like 「日」＋「十」→「早」, for example.
Well, that's about it. You didn't learn anything specific here, but you should have the better idea of what kanji actually are, after you've seen that you're actually using something very similar every day.
Please leave your opinion in the comments section below. I'd like to hear your opinion on this approach of mine in explaining kanji characters!
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