Learn Japanese

Kanji 漢字

The last and most notorious aspect of the Japanese are written in Kanji even though they are still pronounced with the Japanese phoetic sounds represented by Hiragana and Katakana.

Stroke Order

When learning kanji, it is very important to learn it with the proper stroke order and direction from the beginning in order to avoid developing any bad habits. Japanese learners often think that there are thousands of characters and they are not always meticulously written the way they appear in print. Proper stroke order helps ensure the Characters look recognizable even when you write them quickly or use more cursive styles.

The simpler characters called radicals are often reused as components in larger characters. Once you learn the radical stroke order and get used to the patterns, you'll find that's it's not difficult to figure out the correct stroke order for most kanji.

One good general rule of thumb is that strokes usually start from the top-left corner toward the bottom right. This means that horizontal strokes are generally written from left to right and vertical strokes are written from top to bottom. In any case, if you're not sure about the stroke order, you should always verify by looking the character up in a Kanji dictionary.

Kanji in Vocabulary

There are roughly over 2,000 characters used in modern Japanese so you can imagine that memorizing them one-by-one as you might for syllabaries such as Hiragana does not work very well.

An effective strategy for mastering Kanji is learning them with new vocabulary within a larger context. This way we can associate contextual information with the character in order to reinforce memory. Remember the Kanji, themselves but the words and vocabulary that includes those characters.

In this section, we will learn how Kanji works by learning a few common characters and vocabulary.

Kanji Readings

The first Kanji we will learn is 「人」the character for 'person.' It is simple two-stroke character where each stroke starts at the top. You may have noticed that the character as rendered by the font is not always the same as the hand-written style below. This is another important reason to check the stroke order.

人  Definition:Person   Kun-yomi:ひと On-yomi:ジン

Kanji in Japanese can have more than one or several readings. The reading for Kanji is split into two major categories called kun-yomi and on-yomi. Kun-yomi is the Japanese reading of the character while on-yomi is based on the original Chinese pronunciation.

Generally, Kun-yomi is used for words that only use one character. The actual word for "person" is one example.

Example:人 [ひと] - person

Kun-yomi is also used for native Japanese words including most adjectives and verbs.

On-yomi, on the other hand, is mostly used for words that originate from Chinese, which often use 2 or more Kanji. For that reason, on-yomi is often is written in Katakana. We'll see more examples as we learn more characters. With 「人」, one very useful example of an on-yomi is to attach it to names of countries to describe nationality.

Example

• アメリカ人 [アメリカ•じん] - American (person)

• フランス人 [ フランス • じん] - French (Person)

While most characters will not have multiple kun-yomi or on-yomi, the more common characters such as 「人」will generally have a lot more readings. Here, I only list the ones that are applicable to the vocabulary we learned. Learning a reading without a context within vocabulary will only create unnecessary confusion