Why am I writing so much about writing systems and so little about speaking and listening? Because I’m frustrated with my lousy progress at speaking and listening and would rather write about something I’m good at.
Kanji is the barbed wired that keeps civilians from getting too close to Japanese. Or as Maciej Cegłowski put it:
And don’t fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper.
Kanji are the complex characters, originally from China, used for writing most Japanese words. Think of the Chinese side of a Chinese restaurant menu. That’s kanji. (In China they’re called hanzi, but the characters are generally the same. Sort of. That’s another story.)
As my Japanese professor puts it: hiragana conveys pronunciation; kanji conveys meaning. Japanese has many homophones (words that sound the same) but few homonyms (words that sound the same and are also spelled the same), because words with different meanings are spelled with different kanji.
Japan is stereotyped as a nation where individuals happily leave the big decisions to elites for the good of society. There’s some truth to this, I’m sure, but get this: after WWII, a vocal faction called, charmingly enough, the Phoneticists, argued for the abolition of kanji and nearly won. Meanwhile, can we get the metric system over here, please?
The Phoneticists must be the folk heroes of every Japanese schoolkid and every foreign student of the language. Learning kanji brings all of your insecurities to the surface, because Maciej wasn’t really exaggerating: the official list of kanji that all Japanese kids have to learn is over 2,100 characters long, and each of them has at least two pronunciations and often more. Here’s how I visualize Japan now: to get to the good stuff inside, I have to get past these guys:
This is the hackiest of hack, I know, but kanji learning treats you to the five stages of grief. Denial: I can learn Japanese without having to learn kanji. Anger: Why didn’t they abolish this shit and get a normal alphabet when they had the chance? Bargaining: Maybe I could learn just enough kanji to read a menu. And so on.
Here’s the problem with not learning kanji: it makes you illiterate. Imagine coming to the United States for a month, armed with a tourist map in your native language and feeling confident because they have photos on the menu at McDonald’s and Denny’s. Yes, the parallel is overblown because of the long arm of English. Directional signs in Tokyo are written in romaji for the benefit of foreigners, and many restaurants have English menus and plastic food. Iris and I spent a week there last year and were never particularly troubled by the fact that we couldn’t read a single Japanese character.
But as I start to pick up a kanji here and there, parts of the world that were a meaningless smudge have become, if not clear, at least an out-of-focus blur. This is true even in Seattle, where there are thousands of kanji to be devoured in the Chinese and Vietnamese parts of town. I walked Iris to Japanese school this morning and recognized a kanji on the side of a Chinese food distributor. It was this one:
å“
I don’t know how it’s pronounced, but I know it means “goods.” And that’s one of the weirdest things about kanji. Because kanji convey meaning but not necessarily pronunciation, it’s possible to recognize a word in kanji and know approximately what it means in English without knowing how to pronounce the word.
Although, given how often English serves up heinous irregular pronunciations, I guess the average ESL student knows exactly how that feels.
“Learning kanji brings all of your insecurities to the surface, because Maciej wasn’t really exaggerating: the official list of kanji that all Japanese kids have to learn is over 2,100 characters long, and each of them has at least two pronunciations and often more.”
But they’re just words! I’ve seen things expressed along these lines elsewhere, and maybe it is terribly daunting and horrific, but I think we readers could use a little more insight into why.
I mean, is it really more daunting than having to have to learn 2000-5000 words of some other language? Epecially English where the written and spoken forms don’t match precisely either?
I mean, yes, it’s different, but is it really that bad?
The Japanese pronunciation is “shina,” the Chinese “hin.” “Shinamono” (with “mono” being the generic word for tangible things) is the word for goods. Good for you for spotting it.
I used to work with a native Japanese and he told me he could read Chinese just fine, but couldn’t speak or understand it when spoken because Kanji originally came from China. I think that is kinda cool, actually. It’s like you can learn kanji and get two languages for the price of one. At least, from a reading point of view.
Sean, it is different and it is that bad. In elementary school, Japanese kids learn about half of the kanji in common use, which is still not really enough to read a newspaper. Meanwhile, every kid in Iris’s second-grade class could more or less read the Seattle Times. If they don’t know a word, they can try to infer the meaning from context.
You can do that when reading kanji too, of course, partly by looking at the elements that make up the characters and partly just from the surrounding words and other lexical guides.
But look, I’m about 75 kanji in. I can read a children’s book written in hiragana and understand quite a bit. Last night, curious about what my progress might buy me, I flipped open a Japanese-language edition of my favorite manga, Oishinbo. Yes, I was able to recognize a number of kanji. But they were outnumbered by and usually paired up with some of the 2000+ kanji I haven’t learned yet.
Even if I were already fluent in spoken Japanese, I would still be over a thousand kanji away from being able to read it. Learning a thousand kanji is not the hardest thing in the world, but if I devote an hour or two a day to it, it’s still going to take months. No alphabetic language throws up that kind of defense. And learning kanji is not tantamount to learning words, because after you learn all the kanji, you still have to learn the words made up of multiple kanji or of kanji plus hiragana.
Let me give this one more go-round to make sure I’m explaining it clearly. Let’s say you and I decide we’re going to learn Spanish. We start hanging out with Spanish speakers and become fluent in spoken Spanish, but we never read or write a word of it. Assuming we’re literate in English, how much additional effort will be required to read books in Spanish? Very little. Substitute Japanese for Spanish, and the answer is “months of concerted effort.” English is somewhere in between, but much closer to the Spanish end of the spectrum.
Not sure if that answers the question. Please let me know.
nomitai, I noticed today in class that one of the authors of my textbook is named Shinagawa, written å“å·. Cool! Ms. Goodsriver?
You are learning kanji at a good clip. It’s cool that you’re recognizing so many of them.
I looked up å“ in my kanji dictionary, and it can mean “article, goods, thing; quality; brand; kind, type; ways, conditions; character.” “Goods river” kind of makes sense – maybe it describes a place like the Erie Canal that was used to transport goods for sale. I like “quality river,” but that seems odd.
One good word to know: 食å“, read “shokuhin,” which means foodstuffs or edibles.
nomitai, how is é£Ÿå“ different from 食ã¹ç‰©?
To everyone else: “食ã¹ç‰©” is pronounced “tabemono” and means “food.”
Oh, incidentally, kanji just got a lot harder right around #75. I got to the point where one goes in and another goes out. I’ll make Iris give me more flashcard quizzes.
食ã¹ç‰© is used in everyday speech and means food. é£Ÿå“ also means food, but I think it’s a slightly more formal word – not quite as formal or fancy as “comestible,” but you get the idea. Also, é£Ÿå“ is more likely to appear in combination with other words like “食å“科妔 (shokuhinkagaku) or “food science.”
Just what I wanted to know. Thanks!
Thanks mamster, that makes it clear enough. Now I’m a believer.