KANJI
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KANJI
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Kanji are Chinese characters which came to Japan in the 5th century via Korea.
Kanji are ideograms, i.e. practically every single character corresponds to a word. In combining characters, more words can be built (e.g. "Electricity" in combination with "Car" means "Train"). There are about 50,000 characters of which 2,000 to 3,000 are needed for the understanding of newspapers. The government declared a set of 1945 characters as the "Kanji for everyday use". Before the adaptation of the Chinese writing, the Japanese had not had an own writing system. When adapting them, they gave a character the pronunciation of a native Japanese word, or they took over the Chinese word and pronunciation of the character as well. The consequences of this action today is that many kanji have more than one way of pronunciation which makes the task of learning them even more difficult. In the Japanese language, kanji are used for verbs, adjectives and nouns; but unlike the Chinese language, Japanese can't be written in ideograms only. For grammatical endings and all the other words that cannot be written in kanji, two other writing systems are in use: Hiragana and Katakana: they each consist of 46 syllables and together are called Kana. Calligraphy is the art of writing Kanji beautifully. It is a popular, traditional hobby in Japan. Most of the Japanese learn it during their school career and practice it as adults as well. |
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