1.3. KANJI 21
the turn of the 20th century, wriĴen Japanese was as complicated as writ-
ten Chinese in terms of kanji use, and even more complicated as a writ-
ten language on its own, because kana did not reflect pronunciation. In
this classical Japanese, a word wriĴen as ’sau’ would be pronounced as
a long ’so’, and something like ’kefu’ would instead be pronounced as a
long ’kyo’. When, after the second world war, the Japanese ministry of ed-
ucation reformed the wriĴen language, they didn’t just get rid of this dis-
crepancy between wriĴen and spoken Japanese, they also got rid of some
7000 kanji, restricting the number of kanji to be used in daily life to around
3500, and designating a set of less than 2000 kanji as part of general edu-
cation (known as the
, ’jouyou’, kanji). This still sounds like a lot, but
given that the average English speaker knows around 12,000 words, with
academics knowing on average anywhere up to 17,000 words, having to
know 2000 kanji in order to understand the vast majority of your wriĴen
language isn’t actually that much.
1.3.1 Writing kanji.
One of the things that one notices after having looked at kanji for a while
is that a great number of kanji use a great number of simpler kanji as their
building blocks. Similar to how kana syllables can be combined to form
words, kanji have throughout history been combined to form more com-
plex kanji, and complicated kanji have been reduced to combinations of
simple kanji for the sake of remembering them, as well as organising them.
Traditionally, kanji are organised in six classes, a system introduced
in the first comprehensive character dictionary, at the beginning of what
in the western calendar corresponds to the second century. Of these, four
classes relate to the composition of the characters; they comprise:
- Pictographs (
, shoukeimoji) – Hieroglyphic characters that
look like what they mean (numbers , , , or for ’mountain’) - Ideographs (
, emoji) – Characters that abstractly express some
kind of idea, divided into two subclasses:
(a) Simple ideographs (
, shijimoji), such as and (for
’above’ and ’below’ respectively), and(b)Compound ideographs (
, kaiimoji), such as (for ’rest’,
consisting of the compounds ’person’, , next to ’tree’, )