Educational tours to Japan: Japanese language, studying in Japan, Japanese language courses in Japan.

日本の文語 Japanese writing

Modern Japanese writing consists of three main components: kanji - hieroglyphs of Chinese origin, and two syllabaries formed on the basis of the same hieroglyphs in Japan - hiragana and katakana. For example, the word “Aikido” in Japanese can be written in three different ways. Using Kanji characters - 合気道. Or using the hiragana syllabary ー あいきど. Another option is possible - using the “katakana” alphabet - アイキド. In addition, the Japanese often use Arabic numerals when writing numerals. Latin letters may also appear in texts when writing well-known international abbreviations (km - kilometers, TV - television). Less common in texts is the so-called “romaji” - transliteration of Japanese in Latin letters.

Kanji - ( Japanese:漢字) - literally - characters of the Han Dynasty. Mainly used in writing when writing nouns, adjectives, verb stems and proper names of Japanese origin. Often one kanji has two or more readings. For example, the kanji for sword (刀) is katana, in the word "tanto" (短刀) - short sword is read - "to", and in the word "shinai" (竹刀) - bamboo sword - "nai". The choice of kanji reading depends largely on the combination with other kanji. Because of this, choosing the correct reading of hieroglyphs at the initial stage of learning is not an easy task.

The written language of modern Japan uses approximately 3,000 characters. Currently, 2150 kanji is the required minimum that is taught in schools.

For example, let’s write “Daseikan dojo” using kanji characters:

Learn Hiragana!

Hiragana is the phonetic alphabet used in the Japanese language. Because it covers all the sounds used in the language, anything can be written in hiragana. This alphabet is a mandatory part of the curriculum at a language school in Japan.

• Hiragana has 46 characters, each representing a vowel sound or a combination of a vowel and a consonant.
• Use hiragana to write gerunds and expressions or words that are rare and may be unknown to the reader.
• Make flashcards for each hiragana character and write the sound it represents on the back. Practice by walking past them once or twice a day and saying the sounds. Then try looking at the audio recording and writing the corresponding hiragana character.

Free online resource

School textbooks are provided free of charge to children and are not sold, but bookstores have many other materials for studying kanji, such as textbooks for preparing for the Kanji Kentei exam. There are also many websites where you can find simple exercises for learning kanji for the first time.

The best of these sites is Chibimusu Doriru, which even a person who has recently started learning Japanese can understand. To open notebooks for learning kanji, see the links on the left side of the web page in the kokugo (国語) section. If you're feeling adventurous, you can also try the riddles section for younger students, or check out the idioms, sayings, and four-kanji words linked below.

Banner photo: Repeated rewriting of hieroglyphs remains the main and very effective way to memorize them.
(Article in English published June 13, 2021)

Learn katakana!

Katakana consists of 46 characters that represent the same sounds as hiragana, but they are used to write words of foreign origin.

• Since Japanese does not have long vowels, all long vowels in katakana are indicated by an em dash after the character. For example, "ケーキ" is how you say "cake" in English. The dash indicates a long "a" sound.
• Hiragana and katakana can be learned in a few weeks if you practice them for a few hours every day.

Potential benefits of learning to write kanji by hand

Given the choice, not all foreigners learning Japanese will learn to write kanji by hand. This decision is understandable - we live in the era of computers and smartphones, and we rarely use paper and pen to communicate. It is quite reasonable for someone to prefer other aspects of the language, especially at the initial stage of learning. Still, the ability to write by hand can be fun for some, and it also has a number of potential benefits.

Firstly, repeated rewriting helps to consolidate knowledge better than reading, and also forces the student to pay attention to the shape of the hieroglyph, helping to perceive the difference between similar hieroglyphs that are easily confused - for example, 千 (1000) and 干 (“dried”), or 微 (“tiny”) and 徴 (“sign”). These two factors help you better recognize kanji when they appear in text.

Copying the example sentences can also be useful as a way to learn to read. It's easy to miss something when just reading, but writing it down requires more concentration and takes more time, helping to better understand the meaning. Thanks to this, knowledge of the natural Japanese language is instilled and the understanding of ways to connect words with each other is expanded.

Learn Handwritten Fonts

Just as our letter "a" looks different on a computer than in handwriting, many computer fonts in Japanese look different from handwritten ones.

• Remember. A good way to learn is to spend half an hour to an hour a day memorizing and writing characters.
• Test yourself. To check if you remember hiragana and katakana, try writing a specific group of sounds from memory. Make a list of all the sounds, then try to match them with the hiragana and katakana characters. Practice daily until you can remember 46 symbols for each alphabet.

Japanese characters. History and reading.

Good afternoon, dear craftsmen and buyers of the Fair! Towards the end of Japan Week, I would like to introduce you to the history of the origin of Japanese characters, the types of their reading and classification. Enjoy reading!

Japanese characters were borrowed by the Japanese in China in the 5th-6th centuries. AD To the borrowed characters were added hieroglyphs developed by the Japanese themselves (kokuji). In addition to hieroglyphs, two components of the alphabet are also used for writing in Japan: hiragana and katakana, Arabic numerals and the Latin Romaji alphabet.

Story

The Japanese term kanji translates to "signs of the (Han) Dynasty." Kanji is a hieroglyphic letter, an integral part of Japanese writing.

It is not known exactly how Chinese characters came to Japan, but today the generally accepted version is that the first Chinese texts were brought in at the beginning of the 5th century. These texts were written in Chinese, and in order for the Japanese to be able to read them using diacritics while observing the rules of Japanese grammar, the kanbun , which originally meant “classical Chinese composition.”

The Japanese language at that time did not have a written form. The Manyoshu writing system was created to record native Japanese words . The words in it were written in Chinese characters according to their sound, not their content.

Manyoshu, written in hieroglyphic cursive, evolved into hiragana , a writing system for women for whom higher education was almost inaccessible. Most of the literary works of the Heian era with female authorship were written in hiragana. katakana arose : students from monasteries simplified Manyōshū to a single meaningful element. These writing systems, katakana and hiragana, were derived from Chinese characters and subsequently developed into syllabic alphabets, which are collectively called Kana or Japanese syllabary.

Hieroglyphs in modern Japanese are mostly used to write the stems of words in nouns, adjectives and verbs. On the other hand, hiragana is used to write inflections and endings of verbs and adjectives, particles and words in which the characters are difficult to remember. Katakana is used to write onomatopoeia (onomatopoeia) and gairago (loan words).

Japanese innovation

At first, Chinese and Japanese characters were practically no different from each other: the latter were traditionally used to write Japanese text. However, nowadays there is a big difference between Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji: some characters were created by the Japanese themselves, and some received different meanings. In addition, after the Second World War, many Japanese characters were simplified in writing.

Kokuji are characters of Japanese origin. Kokuji is sometimes called Wasei kanji ("Chinese characters created in Japan"). In total, there are several hundred kokuji. Most of them are rarely used, but some have become important additions to the written Japanese language.

In addition to kokuji, there are characters that have different meanings in Japanese than in Chinese. Such hieroglyphs are called kokkun - “signs of national reading”).

Old and new hieroglyphs

The same character can sometimes be written in different styles: old (kyujitai) and new (shinjitai). Old style Japanese characters were used until after World War II and are mostly the same as traditional Chinese characters. In 1946, the Japanese government legislated the new style of simplified characters into the Toyo Kanji Jitai Hyo list.

Theoretically, any Chinese character can be used in Japanese text, but in practice, many of them are not used in Japanese. Daikanwa Jiten, one of the largest dictionaries of hieroglyphs, contains about 50 thousand characters, but most of them are rarely found in Japanese texts.

Reading hieroglyphs

Depending on how the hieroglyph entered the Japanese language, it can be used to write one or different words, and even more often morphemes. From the reader's point of view, this means that hieroglyphs have one or more readings. The choice of reading a hieroglyph depends on the context, content and communication with other characters, and sometimes on the position in the sentence. Readings are divided into two: “Chinese-Japanese” and “Japanese”.

Onyomi (phonetic reading) is a Sino-Japanese reading or Japanese interpretation of the Chinese pronunciation of a character. Some characters have multiple onyomi because they were borrowed from China several times, at different times and from different areas.

Kunyomi is a Japanese reading, which is based on the pronunciation of native Japanese words, to which Chinese characters were selected according to their meaning. In other words, kunyomi is the Japanese translation of the Chinese character.

Some kanji have a little-known reading - nanori (name name), which is usually used when pronouncing personal names. As a rule, they are close in sound to kunyomi.

Gikun - reading messages of hieroglyphs that are not directly related to the kunyomi or onyomi of individual characters, but related to the content of the entire hieroglyphic combination. Gikun is often found in Japanese surnames.

Number of hieroglyphs

The total number of existing hieroglyphs is difficult to determine. The Japanese dictionary Daikanwa jiten contains about 50 thousand characters, while more complete modern Chinese dictionaries contain more than 80 thousand characters. Most of these characters are not used either in modern Japan or in modern China. To understand most Japanese texts, it is enough to know about 3 thousand characters.

Spelling reforms

After World War II, beginning in early 1946, the Japanese government began developing spelling reforms. Some hieroglyphs received simplified spellings called "Shinjitai". The number of characters used was reduced, and lists of hieroglyphs required for study at school were approved. Variant forms and rare characters were officially declared undesirable for use. The main goal of the reforms was to unify the school curriculum for the study of hieroglyphs and reduce the number of hieroglyphic signs that were used in literature and the media. These reforms were advisory in nature. Many hieroglyphs that were not included in the lists are still known and often used.

Kyoiku Kanji ("educational characters") - a list of 1006 characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school (6 years of schooling). This list is divided by year of study. Its full name is “Gakunenbetsu Kanji” (“Table of hieroglyphs by year of study”).

Jyoyo Kanji ("characters of constant use") - the list consists of 1945 characters, which includes the "Kyoiku Kanji" for primary school and 939 characters for secondary school (3 years of study).

Jinmeyo kanji (“hieroglyphs for human names”) - the list consists of 2928 hieroglyphs, 1945 characters which completely copy the list of “jyoyo kanji”, and 983 hieroglyphs are used to write names and place names.

In Japan, most parents try to give their children rare names that include very rare characters. To facilitate the work of registration and other services that do not have the necessary technical means for typing rare characters, in 1981 the “Jinmeyo Kanji” list was approved, according to which names of newborns could only be given with characters from the list, or hirigana or katakana characters. This list is regularly updated with new hieroglyphs, and the widespread introduction of computers that support Unicode has led to the fact that the Japanese government is preparing to add from 500 to 1000 new hieroglyphs to this list in the near future.

Gaiji ("external characters") are characters that are not represented in existing Japanese character sets. These include variant or obsolete forms of hieroglyphs that are needed for reference books and references, as well as non-hieroglyphic symbols.

Dictionaries

To find the desired hieroglyph in the dictionary, you need to know its key and the number of risks. A hieroglyph can be broken down into simple components called keys (less commonly “radicals”). If there are many keys in a hieroglyph, one main one is taken (it is determined according to special rules), after which the desired hieroglyph is searched in the key section by the number of risks.

Modern Japanese uses 214 classical keys. In electronic dictionaries you can search not only by main keys, but by all possible components of the hieroglyph, the number of strokes or reading.

Thank you for your attention! I hope it was useful!

Kanji in the lexicon

Modern Japanese uses a little over 2 thousand characters, and memorizing each one individually does not work as well as with hiragana.

An effective strategy for mastering kanji is to study with new words with more context. So, to consolidate in memory, we associate a symbol with contextual information. Kanji is used to represent real words, so focus on the words and vocabulary rather than the characters themselves.

You'll see how kanji works by learning a few common kanji and words in this paragraph.

Structure of the Japanese language

There are three main elements in modern Japanese language:

• Kanji are characters borrowed from Chinese;
• Hiragana is a syllabary of words and names for which there are no hieroglyphs;
• Katakana is a syllabary used to write words borrowed from other languages.

Kanji and its readings

After Chinese writing entered Japan, it was greatly modified and adapted to the peculiarities of local speech. The Japanese began to create new kanji or give Chinese ones different meanings, which led to significant differences between the readings of the same kanji. There are two main types of reading:

• Onyomi (Chinese reading);
• Kun'yomi (Japanese reading).

Onyomi is also called onyomi reading. It consists of adapting hieroglyphs borrowed from the Chinese language. One kanji can have more than one onyomi.

Kun'yomi or kun reading is used to reproduce native Japanese words.

The same symbol can have one type of reading, or several at once. There are a number of kanji that, depending on the type of reading, completely change their meaning.

Stroke order

From the very beginning of studying, pay attention to the correct order and direction of the lines to avoid bad habits. Often students don't see the point in stroke order if the result is the same. But what they miss is that there are thousands of characters and they are not always written as carefully as they appear on print. The correct stroke order helps you recognize hieroglyphs, even if you write quickly or by hand.

The simplest symbols called radicals

, are often used as components of complex symbols. Once you learn the stroke order of the radicals and get used to the principle, you will find that it is not difficult to guess the correct order for most kanji.

Most often, strokes are applied from the upper left corner to the lower right. This means that horizontal strokes are usually drawn from left to right, and vertical strokes are usually drawn from top to bottom. In any case, when you are in doubt about the stroke order, consult a Kanji dictionary.

Japanese alphabet Hotsuma-tsutae (unknown authenticity)