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Together with the hiragana and katakana
phonetic alphabets, kanji, pictographic characters originally imported from China, form
the basis for written Japanese. Kanji can be exotic and beautiful
when used in calligraphy or design but they are also intimidating
to the student of Japanese. One of the main reasons that Japanese
is considered a difficult language is its use of kanji - but what
exactly makes them so difficult? Well, two things: the fact that
there are different ways to pronounce the same kanji and the sheer
number of individual characters.
Since kanji can be used to write original Chinese words or native
Japanese words, there are two types of pronunciation used. The
former is called on yomi (on readings) and the latter
kun yomi (kun readings). Some kanji can have dozens of different readings
but most have two or three. As for the number of characters -
a comprehensive set of dictionaries can have up to 50,000 kanji
listed but only a fraction are actually used today. In 1981, the
government created the joyo kanji, a list of 1,945 kanji for general use. That's a lot to learn
- and necessary if you want to attend a Japanese university -
but not impossible. Plus, the number of kanji you need to recognize
to get by in daily life in Japan is far fewer and there's little
need to actually write them. There are many good books on the
subject but below is a small sample of the most commonly seen
kanji.
See also these related pages:
Learning Japanese | Kana/alphabets | Useful Expressions | "New" Japanese
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