Here are two kanji… 漢字. In Chinese this reads ‘hanzi’; in Japanese ‘kanji’. It literally means ‘Han Letters’… or, ‘Han People Letters’… or, simply, Chinese characters. China and Japan both use them today though they originated in China long, long ago, somewhere between 3000-5000 years ago. Kanji is not an alphabet, but pictographs, or logograms, where the chicken scratches represent not sounds, but actual pictures of things, actions or ideas. 人 means ‘person’—see the legs? 大 means ‘big’: or a person holding his arms out.
Makes sense, yes? Now, take a crack at 䬙…
My wife speaks Japanese but struggles with kanji. I read kanji but speak very little Japanese. We joke that together we function as one useful person… nearly. I can read where the taxi stand is located; but struggle to speak to the driver. I can tell you that building over there houses the Ministry of Finance or tell you what form of Buddhism this temple represents… but I can’t order the right kind of tempura unless my wife intervenes.
I can’t tell you how weird it is to be able to read large parts of a language but have no idea how to say the flippin’ words out loud.
If you come to Japanese from Chinese, the learning of Kanji is both frustrating and familiar. Because, while in Chinese, a character is (almost always) pronounced the same way, in Japanese a Kanji can be pronounced a number of different ways. 日 (sun) is hi, bi, ni, ka, nichi, and jitsu in Japanese, depending on whether you’re talking about the sun in the sky, a day, a day of the week, or a day of the month—all sun related, yes. In Chinese, it is always ‘ri’.
生is always ‘sheng’ in Chinese. In Japanese you will see it as 生活: sei katsu (life, living)… 生じる：shyo ji ru (to produce, to yield)… 生ビール: nama biiri (draft beer)… 生まれる：u ma re ru (to give birth)… 生きる：i ke ru (living)…生える: ha e ru (to grow, to sprout).
Yikes-o-rama! Notice the hiragana endings which are verb modifiers. (Beer is foreign, therefore katagana.)
Interestingly, the Chinese ‘sheng’ is also used in those same contexts. 生活 (sheng huo) means life or living. 生啤酒 (sheng pi jiu) means draft beer. 出生 (chu sheng) means to give birth. 生長 (sheng zhang) means to grow. You have the same meanings flowing out of these kanji, but in Japanese they are pronounced a number of different ways, in Chinese always the same way.
Generally, all kanji have at least two pronunciations, the inherited Chinese pronunciation (onyomi), and the native Japanese pronunciation (kunyomi). Another thing I have noticed is that the simpler the concept of the kanji (sun, life, up, down) the more likely there will be a multiplicity of pronunciations, reflecting that they represent very tangible things, which in turn can be stand-ins for many complex concepts. The more unique, obscure or specific the concept of the kanji, the more likely it will only have one or two pronunciations. An example of the later is 儀 (ceremony) which only has the onyomi “ki” (yi in Chinese). I am of course way over-simplifying it.
The interesting thing is that very early forms of Chinese may have been like Japanese today in that the characters may have once been pronounced a number of different ways and not necessarily in a monosyllabic way. Characters are pictures after all, and some very graphic. 䬙 from above, yao in Chinese, yo in Japanese, means to be ‘tossed and whirled about in the wind’; it contains the radical for ‘wind’, and the radical for ‘vase’, which gives a clue as to how to pronounce it. But it also connotes a vase shaped wind tunnel in the sky, or the artistic movement that wind imposes on the passerby. I’m sorry, but that should be a phrase not a grunt. In Chinese poetry that one character, which would convey so much visual and implied meaning, but spoken with only one sound, would require about a sentence of English to properly translate.
Chinese is unique in that the written language is so very, very old, such that all Chinese dialects have evolved to “fit” the characters, which means one sound per symbol, differentiated by tones and inflection. My arm-chair thesis is that the sheer ancientness of characters—one idea in a picture–have forced its Chinese speakers into monosyllabic speech over the millennia. That hasn’t happened to Japanese speech, as they’ve only had kanji for a 1000 some years.
In a weird way, modern young people are learning to read in this way again with the widescale use of emojis. An emoji is very much like a character or kanji: it is a graphic representation of an idea or action. And the way people use them today, is almost exactly how the Japanese use “Han script” today.
I need $$; that’s too $$sive; you’re looking $$.
Are you ☺? I love your ☺.
Interesting, for sure. Only, LOL, there are over 10,000 ‘Han people emojis’ in Japanese and Chinese.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Good luck.