The argument to get rid of kanji exists in Japan too, but it is not very popular. Japan and China are the last two countries who rely on kanji for literacy. While Chinese characters are still taught in schools in Korea, their use is highly debated as many think they should be abandoned altogether. Since one must be educated in order to learn how to pronounce Han characters (汉字), many people thought it was a way to keep the poorer classes from becoming literate and rising up. In Japanese, of course, they are called kanji (漢字, かんじ)! Both Korea and Vietnam have stopped using them in daily life, instead moving to completely phonetic alphabets. In Korean, kanji are known as hanja (한자, 漢字) and in Vietnamese, chữ Hán (?漢). ![]() In Chinese, it is 汉字, the literal meaning is "han characters" and will be pronounced like something close to hàn-jī depending on where you are. Kanji have been used by the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, but they aren't called kanji in every language. And so, katakana and hiragana were born! Are Kanji the Same in All Asian Languages? By the 8th century AD, the Japanese began to annotate the Chinese characters in order to mark pronunciation and to change them to make sense with existing Japanese grammar. Everything was written and read in Chinese. At the time kanji came to Japan, the Japanese had no written language of their own. Here are a few examples of the evolution of kanji: While kanji existed in China for many centuries, it didn't reach Japan until 57 AD and still wasn't adopted by the Japanese until the early 5th century AD. In many kanji you can still see the original picture quite easily, others, not so much. Over time, those representations evolved into the characters written today. The original kanji are meant to be pictograms, that is, they express an idea through a picture. Some believe the first writings appeared in 4500 BC, and the oldest known modern kanji is dated to 1600 BC. Kanji are believed to have originated in China, though it is not certain exactly when they were first written. A kanji can be a word all by itself, like 木 (which means tree) or a kanji can be part of another word like 木造 (which means 'wooden, or made of wood'). Kanji is a system of symbols that represent words or ideas, and that can have different meanings and pronunciations depending on their context. ![]() Both hiragana and katakana are phonetic, meaning that each character represents a single syllable, and that character will never be pronounced any other way. Kanji is one of three Japanese writing systems along with hiragana and katakana. But what IS kanji exactly? Is it Chinese? Is it Japanese? How do I pronounce kanji? How do I remember kanji? How many kanji ARE there? How many kanji do I have to learn? Why are there so many strokes? These are all excellent questions, and ones we are about to answer for you! What IS Kanji, exactly? If you're just starting to learn Japanese, congratulations! You may have already learned hiragana and katakana, and if you're reading this it means you've probably come across your first kanji.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |