Adventures in Kanji

Ask any student of Japanese what the most daunting aspect of the language is, and the response is likely to be, 'kanji!' This element of the Japanese language often elicits visceral responses from nearly everyone, even the most staid students. The Japanese people themselves, with a literacy rate approaching 100%, are nevertheless challenged by the task of learning and retaining pronunciations and meanings for thousands of individual characters in addition to the various combinations that these individual characters can form. If it takes Japanese students through high school to learn the 2,000 or so kanji required to read a newspaper, then "Why do we even bother?" ask students of nearly all levels.
 
What is kanji? 'Kan' is the Japanese pronunciation of the character 漢 (pronounced han in Mandarin Chinese), which refers to the Han Chinese people who developed this writing system nearly four thousand years ago. 'Ji' is the Japanese pronun-ciation of the character 字, which simply means character or symbol. Thus, 'kanji' means symbol or character of the Han. Japanese was originally only a spoken language and only became a written language with the introduction of Han characters. Japan's other two writing systems, hiragana and katakana, are descendents from Han characters, or kanji.
 
After two years of memorizing kanji, learning stroke orders, multiple pronunciations, and combinations with other characters, Cate's third-year Japanese students learn a bit more about the different kinds of kanji, as well as the elements that make up more complex characters. They also get a chance to voice their opinions on kanji both in class discussions and in a formal oral presentation. It is an opportunity for reflection on this daunting element of Japanese study. Each student comes to his or her own conclusion on the merits and drawbacks of kanji. Many rue the time and effort required to memorize this information, but also point out that, once memorized, a sentence written in kanji is easier to read than one written in hiragana. Not only is the absence of spaces between words in Japanese confusing when reading hiragana, but, as students are quick to point out, many words have the same pronunciation but different meanings. With kanji there is no confusion about meaning, as long as you have mastered that particular character.
 
By studying kanji as a unit of meaning, students also come to understand and, usually, appreciate the elements that make up a kanji. For example, the kanji for tree is 木, and when combined with another (林) means woods, and with a third (森) means forest. Not all kanji work this way, but students begin to figure out the various roles that elements of a kanji play in its pronunciation and meaning. They also begin to realize that it is a very different affair to look up an unknown kanji in a dictionary than to look up an English word in a dictionary. They need to identify the classifying element, count the strokes in that element (for example, 木 has four strokes), turn to that section in the dictionary, count the remaining strokes (again, 森 has 8 remaining strokes), and find the character based on its listing according to numerical order.
 
This focused study of kanji can be time consuming, but also enlightening. It was revealing to me that on the chapter test for this unit, every single student was able to match a possible meaning to a kanji that they had never seen before by identifying an element of that kanji. Even for those students who are consistently challenged and frustrated by the demands of this writing system, it was a revealing exercise.

- David Wood, Foreign Language Chair, Japanese Teacher