So, I thought that I would give a brief lesson on kanji – you know, those crazy symbols that everyone in the Western world thinks looks like chicken scratches. So, I’ll give you a basic look at them. I promise it will be very short.
So the Japanese use 3 different writing systems.
★ Hiragana
★ Katakana
★ Kanji
The first two are a lot like our alphabet except with sounds not letters. However, kanji is a different monster. I guess…the best way to go about this is purely by example, so we’ll take the English word “university” and examine the Japanese equivalents.
English: university
Hiragana: (daigaku) だいがく
Now, daigaku can be written in either hiragana or kanji – not katakana because daigaku is not a foreign word. To make it easier to read, the Hiragana is forgotten and changed to Kanji. So, we get this character:
大学
Those two characters each have a sound.
大: dai – big
学: gaku – school
Now, sometimes when the Kanji is MUCH more complicated then a third type of writing is brought into play. Because not everyone in Japan knows EVERY Kanji, Furigana is added. Furigana is the tiny Hiragana/Katakana characters placed above Kanji characters.
For example….
Well, I hope that kind of cleared some things up. Just like all other languages, it just takes practice and a certain mindset. It’s not really as complicated as it looks.
Sincerely,
夢の目
yumenome
