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Japanese characters

 

Japanese characters

 

Glad to see that you are interested in learning more about the Japanese characters

The japanese language is made of two major ways of writing.

  • Kanji
  • Kana

 

Kanji Kana romaji
Katakana Hiragana
薔薇 バラ ばら BARA (Rose)

The following is a short description of the two:

Kana

Kana is the general definition of two character systems in japanese. These two are call Hiragana and Katakana.

Hiragana and Katakana can be seen as the Japanese alphabet since they only contains around 50 characters each.These characters contains either a vowel ( a, i,u, e, o) or a consonant followed by a vowel e.g. ka, ki, ku, ke, ko.

If you are new the japanese language, you should try to master all the Kana before you start to tackle the heavy stuff.

Hiragana  (ひらがな)

 

Hiragana was originally call “Onna no te” (女の手)  which means woman’s hand. This way of writing was created mainly because Japanese women wasn’t believed to learn all the chinese characters in the older days, so a simple and more easy way of writing was created.

Hiragana was until second World War used for foreign words and for describing sounds.  After the war Hiragana and katakana switched place, so now hiragana is most used in following cases:

  •  For describing Japanese words that can’t be written in kanji.
  • Written above the Chinese charatcers (kanji) like a sort of subtitle so everyone can read even difficult characters. This is very common in Manga since it’s main target is for a younger public.
  • In verb and Adjective conjugations
  • In particles such as から(from).

 


Katakana (カタカナ)

Katakana most seen in transcriptions of  foreign words.  It is also quite common that slang and other words describing sounds actions use Katakana.   Katakana is sometimes also called “Otoko no te” (男の手)， mans hand.

 

Kanji (漢字)

 

Kanji is the Chinese characters and look quite complicated to the untrained eye.
薔薇 (rose)、　学校 (school)、　回復 (recovery)、魔法 (magic)　are examples of Kanji.
There are several thousands of Kanji in the Japanese language and not even native japanese know all the the characters.
The kanji has one meaning but could have different pronunciations depending on where in the sentence its written.
There are two different ways of reading the Kanji.   The japanese “Kunyomi” (訓読み) and the Chinese version called “Onyomi(音読み).” 
The Chinese Onyomi is not always so different from the way the chinese people pronounce the character and could therefore be the same for both languages.  A few of the characters can only be pronounced with the Onyomi reading. This is quite common for charcters that arrived from china after the japanese writing system was created. One example of this is the kanji for sugar 糖 (tou).
However, a few Kanji has been specially created for the japanese language is can only be read by the Kunyomi way of reading.
Does this sound hard?
Don’t worry.  Most of the times it’s quite easy to understand when to use Kunyomi or Onyomi.
Rule:
If its written separately its usually kunyomi:  火 “hi” (fire),   山 “yama” (mountain).
If there are two (or more) kanji written together, they tend to use the onyomi:     火山 “kazan” (vulcano),
So as you can see, the character for “fire”火 can have more than one way of reading.   onyomi = “ka”,   kunyomi = “hi”.

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