A character in Chinese writing, as used in Japan. Schoolchildren learn the Ministry of Education's basic 1850 Chinese characters; 46 hiragana (originally simplified phonetic characters, since the 9th-c used as convenient signs for Japanese syllables); 46 katakana (further syllable symbols, often used for foreign words); and romaji (the Roman alphabet). Many kanji are simpler than the Chinese originals, and are pronounced differently.
This article is about the Japanese kanji form of writing. For other uses, see Kanji (disambiguation). Japanese writingKanji 漢字
Kana 仮名
Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Hentaigana 変体仮名 Man'yōgana 万葉仮名Uses
Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Rōmaji ローマ字Kanji (Japanese: 漢字 (help·info)) are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (平仮名), katakana (片仮名), and the Hindu-Arabic numerals.
History
Chinese characters came to Japan with kunji articles on which they are written.
When first introduced, texts were written in the Chinese language and would have been read as such. Over time, however, a system known as kanbun (漢文) emerged, essentially using Chinese text with diacritical marks to allow Japanese speakers to read the characters in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar.
The Japanese language itself had no written form at the time. A writing system called man'yōgana (used in the ancient poetry anthology Man'yōshū) evolved that used a limited set of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning.
Man'yōgana written in cursive style became hiragana, a writing system that was accessible to women (who were denied higher education). Thus the two other writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are actually descended from kanji.
In modern Japanese, kanji is used to write parts of the language such as nouns, adjective stems and verb stems, while hiragana is used to write inflected verb and adjective endings (okurigana), particles, native Japanese words, and words where the kanji is too difficult to read or remember.
Local developments
While kanji are essentially Chinese hanzi used to write Japanese, there are now significant differences between kanji and hanzi, including the use of characters created in Japan, characters that have been given different meanings in Japanese, and post World War II simplifications of the kanji.
Kokuji
Kokuji (国字; These include:
峠 tōge (mountain pass) 榊 sakaki (sakaki tree, genus Camellia) 畑 hatake (field of crops) 辻 tsuji (crossroads, street) 働 dō, hatara(ku) (work)Kokkun
In addition to kokuji, there are kanji that have been given meanings in Japanese different from their original Chinese meanings. These kanji are not considered kokuji but are instead called kokkun (国訓) and include characters such as:
沖 oki (offing, offshore; chūn Ailantus)Old characters and new characters
The same kanji character can sometimes be written in two different ways, 旧字体 (Kyūjitai; The following are some examples of Kyūjitai followed by the corresponding Shinjitai:
國 国 kuni, koku (country) 號 号 gō (number) 變 変 hen, ka(waru) (change)Kyūjitai were used before the end of World War II, and are mostly, if not completely, the same as the Traditional Chinese characters. After the war the government introduced the simplified Shinjitai in the "Tōyō Kanji Character Form List" (Tōyō Kanji Jitai Hyō, 当用漢字字体表). Some of the new characters are similar to simplified characters used in the People's Republic of China.
Many Chinese characters are not used in Japanese at all. Theoretically, however, any Chinese character can also be a Japanese character—the Daikanwa Jiten, one of the largest dictionaries of kanji ever compiled, has about 50,000 entries, even though most of the entries have never been used in Japanese.
Readings
Because of the way they have been adopted into Japanese, a single kanji may be used to write one or more different words (or, in most cases, morphemes). From the point of view of the reader, kanji are said to have one or more different "readings". Some common kanji have ten or more possible readings. (Discuss)
The on'yomi (音読み), the Sino-Japanese reading, is a Japanese approximation of the Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was introduced. Some kanji were introduced from different parts of China at different times, and so have multiple on'yomi, and often multiple meanings. Tō-on (唐音；literally Tang sound) readings, from the pronunciations of later dynasties, such as the Song and Ming, covers all readings adopted from the Heian era to the Edo period Kan'yō-on (慣用音) readings, which are mistaken or changed readings of the kanji that have become accepted into the language.
Examples (rare readings in parentheses)
| Kanji | Meaning | Go-on | Kan-on | Tō-on | Kan'yō-on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 明 | bright | myō | mei | (min) | - |
| 行 | go | gyō | kō | (an) | - |
| 極 | extreme | goku | kyoku | - | - |
| 珠 | pearl | shu | shu | ju | (zu) |
| 度 | degree | do | (to) | - | - |
| 輸 | transport | (shu) | (shu) | - | yu |
The most common form of readings is the kan-on one.
In Chinese, most characters are associated with a single Chinese syllable.
On'yomi primarily occur in multi-kanji compound words (熟語 jukugo), many of which are the result of the adoption (along with the kanji themselves) of Chinese words for concepts that either didn't exist in Japanese or could not be articulated as elegantly using native words. (Discuss)
The kun'yomi (訓読み), Japanese reading, or native reading, is a reading based on the pronunciation of a native Japanese word, or yamatokotoba, that closely approximated the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. As with on'yomi, there can be multiple kun readings for the same kanji, and some kanji have no kun'yomi at all.
For instance, the kanji for east, 東, has the on reading tō. Thus the kanji character 東 had the latter pronunciations added as kun'yomi. However, the kanji 寸, denoting a Chinese unit of measurement (slightly over an inch), had no native Japanese equivalent;
In a number of cases, multiple kanji were assigned to cover a single Japanese word. Typically when this occurs, the different kanji refer to specific shades of meaning. Because of this confusion, Japanese people may have trouble knowing which kanji to use. One workaround is simply to write the word in hiragana, a method frequently employed with more complex cases such as もと moto, which has at least five different kanji, 元, 基, 本, 下, 素, three of which have only very subtle differences.
Other readings
There are many kanji compounds that use a mixture of on'yomi and kun'yomi, known as jūbako (重箱) or yutō (湯桶) words.
Some kanji also have lesser-known readings called nanori, which are mostly used for people's names (often given names), and are generally closely related to the kun'yomi.
Gikun (義訓) or Jukujikun (熟字訓) are readings of kanji combinations that have no direct correspondence to the characters' individual on'yomi or kun'yomi. For example, 今朝 ("this morning") is read neither as "ima'asa", the kun'yomi of the characters, nor "konchō", the on'yomi of the characters.
Many ateji (kanji used only for their phonetic value) have meanings derived from their usage: for example, the now-archaic 亜細亜 ajia was formerly used to write "Asia" in kanji;
When to use which reading
Words for similar concepts, such as "east" (東), "north" (北) and "northeast" (東北), can have completely different pronunciations: the kun readings higashi and kita are used for the first two, while the on reading tōhoku is used for the third.
The rule of thumb for determining the pronunciation of a particular kanji in a given context is that kanji occurring in compounds are generally read using on'yomi.
Kanji occurring in isolation -- that is, written adjacent only to kana, not to other kanji -- are typically read using their kun'yomi.
On the other hand, some on'yomi characters can also be used as words in isolation: 愛 ai "love", 禅 Zen, 点 ten "mark, dot". Most of these cases involve kanji that have no kun'yomi, so there can be no confusion.
The situation with on'yomi is further complicated by the fact that many kanji have more than one on'yomi: witness 先生 sensei "teacher" versus 一生 isshō "one's whole life".
There are also some words that can be read multiple ways, similar to English words such as "live" or "read" -- in some cases having different meanings depending on how they are read.
Some famous place names, including those of Tokyo (東京 Tōkyō) and Japan itself (日本 Nihon or sometimes Nippon) are read with on'yomi;
Pronunciation assistance
Because of the ambiguities involved, kanji sometimes have their pronunciation for the given context spelled out in ruby characters known as furigana (small kana written above or to the right of the character) or kumimoji (small kana written in-line after the character). It is also used in newspapers for rare or unusual readings and for characters not included in the officially recognized set of essential kanji (see below).
Total number of kanji characters
The number of possible characters is disputed. The "Daikanwa Jiten" contains about 50,000 characters, and this was thought to be comprehensive, but more recent mainland Chinese dictionaries contain 80,000 or more characters, many consisting of obscure variants.
Orthographic reform and lists of kanji
In 1946, following World War II, the Japanese government instituted a series of orthographic reforms.
Kyōiku kanji
The Kyōiku kanji 教育漢字 ("education kanji") are 1006 characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school. The grade-level breakdown of the education kanji is known as the Gakunen-betsu kanji haitōhyō 学年別漢字配当表), or the gakushū kanji.
Jōyō kanji
The Jōyō kanji 常用漢字 are 1,945 characters consisting of all the kyōiku kanji, plus an additional 939 kanji taught in junior high and high school.
Jinmeiyō kanji
The Jinmeiyō kanji 人名用漢字 are 2,928 characters consisting of the Jōyō kanji, plus an additional 983 kanji found in people's names.
Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji
The Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji and kana define character code-points for each kanji and kana, as well as other forms of writing such as Hindu-Arabic numerals, for use in information processing. JIS X 0212:1990, a supplementary standard containing a further 5,801 kanji. JIS X 0213:2000, a further revision which extended the JIS X 0208 set with 3,625 additional kanji, of which 2,741 were in JIS X 0212.
Gaiji
Gaiji (外字), literally meaning "external characters", are kanji that are not represented in existing Japanese encoding systems. These include variant forms of common kanji that need to be represented alongside the more conventional glyph in reference works, and can include non-kanji symbols as well.
Gaiji can be either user-defined characters or system-specific characters.
Gaiji were nominally prohibited in JIS X 0208-1997, and JIS X 0213-2000 used the range of code-points previously allocated to gaiji, making them completely unusable.
Types of Kanji: by Category
A Chinese scholar Xu Shen (許慎), in the Shuōwén Jiězì (說文解字) ca.
(For a table of all the kyōiku kanji (教育漢字) broken down by category see this page, from which the above description has been extracted.)
Shōkei-moji (象形文字)
These characters are sketches of the object they represent.
Shiji-moji (指事文字)
Shiji-moji are called "logograms", "simple ideographs", "simple indicatives", and sometimes just "symbols" in English.
Kaii-moji (会意文字)
Often called "compound indicatives", "associative compounds", "compound ideographs", or just "ideographs".
Keisei-moji (形声文字)
These are called "phono-semantic", "semantic-phonetic", "semasio-phonetic" or "phonetic-ideographic" characters in English. (The pronunciation really relates to the original Chinese, and may now only be distantly detectable in the modern Japanese on'yomi of the kanji. As a result, it is a common error in folk etymology to fail to recognize a phono-semantic compound, typically instead inventing a compound-indicative explanation.)
As examples of this, consider the kanji with the 言 shape: 語, 記, 訳, 説, etc. Kanji with the 寺 (temple) shape on the right (詩, 持, 時, 侍, etc.) usually have an on'yomi of "shi" or "ji".
Tenchū-moji (転注文字)
This group have variously been called "derivative characters", or "mutually explanatory" or "mutually synonymous" characters;
Kasha-moji (仮借文字)
These are called "phonetic loan characters."
Related symbols
The ideographic iteration mark (々) is used to indicate that the preceding kanji is to be repeated, functioning similarly to a ditto mark in English. It is pronounced as though the kanji were written twice in a row, for example 色々 (iroiro "various") and 時々 (tokidoki "sometimes").
Another frequently used symbol is ヶ (a small katakana "ke"), pronounced "ka" when used to indicate quantity (such as 六ヶ月, rokkagetsu "six months") or "ga" in place names like Kasumigaseki (霞ヶ関).
Radical-and-stroke sorting (Alphabetization)
Kanji, whose thousands of symbols defy ordering by convention such as is used with the Roman Alphabet, uses radical-and-stroke sorting to order a list of Kanji words. these are called radicals in Chinese and logographic systems derived from Chinese, such as Kanji.
Characters are then grouped by their primary radical, then ordered by number of pen strokes within radicals.
Kanji Kentei
The Japanese government provides the Kanji kentei (日本漢字能力検定試験 Nihon kanji nōryoku kentei shiken; "Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude") which tests the ability to read and write kanji.
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