Why reading in Japan is hard: About the curious world of Kanji and Kana

Can you remember how long it took you to manage to read a newspaper article? I mean read, not understand. Was it grade 1 or 2, maybe 3 or 4? Most languages in the world right now use the Latin alphabet, including English. Which means, for most people: A like Apple, B like Banana and so on. And then you put them together and you have words! Yay! Now, obviously, you still need to learn the meaning of the words. But technically you were able to read a newspaper article pretty early on.

This is not the case in Japan. Japanese is especially hard because of its writing system, or systems. (Yes, there is more than one.) And as someone who studies Japanese and struggles with reading it on a daily basis, I want to share my pain.

You might be thinking, but on Duolingo the Japanese writing system really isn’t that hard. Oh, boy. You’re in for a ride.

Speaking Japanese

Actually, before you digress, I think speaking Japanese is not as hard as it seems. It works in a way that is actually quite beneficial to learners. Let me give you an example. When I was in my 4th month of learning Japanese I went to a concert in Japan. When I arrived, there was a bag on my seat, I checked my ticket a thousand times and it was my seat, so I knew someone must have made a mistake. But I wasn’t too sure how to say that, once again, I was just getting started. After some time the people came back and I, very nervously, approached them. What I said was: あの、すみません、この席は… Which can be translated to: Eh, sorry, this seat… The guy sitting on my seat immediately knew what i wanted to say. He stood up, said sorry and he and his partner found their seats one row behind us. So, all the stress was for nothing. Not only did he know immediately what I was getting at, I didn’t even have to say a full sentence to make him aware of the situation. I saw this on Instagram one time, where a guy described Japanese like building Lego. English is like building a full Lego house by yourself and then you present it to your conversation partner. The other person does the same. In Japanese however, it’s like each person brings individual blocks and you ‘build’ your conversation together. This is probably also related to Japan being a high context culture and the concept of tatemae, but that is another story.

You don’t actually have to know all the words and all the complicated sentences. I find that makes speaking Japanese easier, but obviously there are enough aspects to make it difficult. One of the major ones is the writing system.

Writing in Japanese: The Kana

So, let me present to you the bane of our existence: ひらがな (Hiragana)、カタカナ (Katakana), the kana, and 漢字(Kanji).

Japanese does not have one, or two writing systems, no, it has three. And it uses all of them together. Why? Because they can. Obviously there is a historical reason, but I like to believe it is mainly to annoy learners. (This is a joke obviously and Kanji is actually quite helpful, more on that later.) Arguably, the easiest one of the three is hiragana. You can tell it apart because it looks kind of soft and round. Hiragana works like any other phonetic alphabet, which means a letter corresponds to a sound. There are also non-phonetic alphabets like the Chinese one.

Like あいうえお (a,i,u,e,o)、かきくけこ(ka,ki,ku,ke,ko)、さしすせそ (sa,shi,su,se,so) and so on. The only main difference is that there is sometimes not one letter connected to a sign, but rather two, like in the examples above. It is mostly used for writing things like verb forms, particles and to write how words are spelled. 

The same goes for Katakana. It has the same sounds as Hiragana, but looks more edgy. So, it is also phonetic. These days, it is used primarily for writing names (of people, animals etc.) or foreign words like marathon or jazz. There was a time when it was used in official documents as well, because it was considered more masculine. Yep, I know how that sounds, but it is a real story. Katakana was developed by monks through leaving out certain aspects of Chinese calligraphy (男手 otokode), whereas Hiragana was developed by court ladies from a slightly different, cursive form of Chinese calligraphy (女手 onnade).

Writing in Japanese: The Kanji

Those two systems come from Kanji. Kanji literally means Chinese letters. Which is exactly what they are. Letters from China. Both Hiragana and Katakana are used to show how Kanji are spelled. Because, as I will explain below, spelling of these symbols is not a straight-forward thing.

But first: A little example of how Hiragana and Katakana come from Kanji (this is an example btw, I’m not an expert on these things). We take a Chinese character like this one: 加. In Japanese it is read as ka from the get-go. So now you want to simplify, to make writing easier and make up a phonetic system, because you need a way to write down how to spell those Kanji. As this Kanji is already read as ka, you just take off a bit and declare, that this is the new way to read ka, independent of the aforementioned Kanji. In Katakana カ, in Hirgana か. See the similarity?

So, why would Japan adopt Chinese letters? Well. China was kind of the richest, most advanced and most important country in East Asia (and arguably the world) for a hot minute. (Thousand years or so, before the British came and fought them for tea, but that’s a different story.) It is safe to say that China, Chinese customs and philosophies, astrology etc. was an incredibly important for Japan, you can feel this to this day. A bunch of Japanese nobles back in the day (meaning like 6th, 7th century) came from China and Korea, these people helped shape the Japanese government, law, philosophy and writing.

Also everyone wanted to be like China. It was so amazingly cool and had a sleek writing system. And because scholars were also send there, they learned the Chinese way of writing and scholars also came from China to Korea and Japan, it was kind of an obvious step to also adapt the same writing system, especially if you don’t have your own. (Obviously, this is a simplification and it took place over a prolonged period of time.)

So how does the Chinese writing system work?

Little disclaimer: I don’t speak Chinese. My explanation of the writing is based on Japanese Chinese letters. The Chinese writing system uses pictograms. For example this 人 means person. Of course it gets more complicated than that, but we want the basics. The basic idea is you draw something, it means something. 狗 means dog (allegedly). 日 means day or sun. You just need to remember that, plus the pronunciation of the word. Same thing for Japanese Kanji, which are usually used for the most important part in a sentence, like the subject, object and verb-stem. (And yep, if you don’t know one you might have trouble understanding the sentence correctly. It’s like: I want to go to the %—#&⁉︎¿. The important part is missing.)

For a longer, more historical explanation of Kanji and their origins/ development, there’s an article on Tofugu about it.

Here’s a little problem though: Chinese and Japanese have historically not a lot to do with each other. They are very different. Native Japanese words are not at all like Chinese. (Not like, for example in English and German, two Germanic languages: Sonne (German) and sun (English)).

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So, here’s how I imagine this went down: A Chinese scholar comes to Japan, he draws the sign for one 一 and says yī (pronounced something like ee in English). The Japanese nod and say well that’s nice okay, we’ll do the same and they say something like ichi ? Perfect. Everybody claps. (Also, the same thing happens in Korea, but they say il.)

But then someone raises their hand and is like: Guys? We have a word for one though…its hitotsu. Very different from ichi. Everyone turns around in shock. Poor guy. He stares awkwardly into the void, trying to avoid eye contact at all costs. After a prolonged silence someone says: Well, let’s just take both pronunciations. Everyone exhales, conflict has been avoided. Whatever, so there’s two ways to say one now, not that big of a deal.

Now, this is why you usually have at least two readings of Kanji. An on- and a kun-reading (on being the Chinese one, kun being the old Japanese one). Sometimes they also just mix the two together. Some words were also fully adapted from Chinese, like jikan, or sigan in Korean, both coming from Chinese shíjiān.

An example

And this is why one kanji can have a felt 2000 readings. A Japanese teachers’ favourite example: 生.

There’s this lovely sentence:

生け花を生きがいにした生え抜きの生娘。 

生絹を生業に生計をたてた。 

生い立ちは生半可ではなかった。 

生憎生前は生まれてこの方、生涯通して生粋の生だった。

いけばなを いきがい にした はえぬき の きむすめ。

すずし を なりわい に せいけい を たてた。

おいたち は なまはんか では なかった。

あいにく せいぜん は うまれて このかた、しょうがい とおして きっすい の なま だった。

Ikebana o ikigai ni shita haenuki no kimusume.

Suzushi o nariwai ni seikei o tateta.

Oitachi wa namahanka de wa nakatta.

Ainiku seizen wa umarete kono kata, shōgai tōshite kissui no nama datta.

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So, one Kanji can be read: i, ha, ki, suzu, nari, sei, o, ai, u, shō and nama.

Fun.

No, really. Knowing Kanji can be incredibly helpful. Japanese sentences don’t do gaps, so if there is no Kanji it gets very difficult to distinguish words from each other. Also, some words have the same pronunciation, but different Kanji, so they help understand context better.

An example: はし (hashi)

It can be written with different Kanji:

端 — 端 (hashi): edge, end

橋 — 橋 (hashi): bridge

箸 — 箸 (hashi): chopsticks

There are also cases when the same Kanji are read as different things.

Sometimes, you might not know a word, but knowing the Kanji, you get at least some sort of hint. Back to the newspaper. When can Japanese people read a newspaper article? Technically, in grade 12. When they finish high school. I’m being dramatic here.

Obviously, they can read before that, as they learn Katakana and Hiragana and new Kanji each year, but before grade 12 they have not learned all the about 2000 Kanji that are necessary to understand most or all of written Japanese, including newspapers. These 2000 Kanji are called 常用漢字 (Jōyō Kanji). Side note: There are way more Kanji than that, but they are either basically never used or written in Hiragana/Katakana. They might look like this: 鬱 (うつ、utsu) or 籤 (くじ、kuji) and I really don’t think anyone is going to be mad if you don’t know them.

A lot of things, like station names or food etc. tend to be spelt out in either Katakana, Hiragana or both to make sure that small children can read them as well.

Fun fact: Most of my Japanese friends can read Kanji, but can’t write all of them, because they use their phones and laptops to write. Writing is also a fun story, there is a certain order you need to follow and as soon as there are more than 5 steps it gets a bit trickier to remember.

Ateji 当て字

There’s also a thing called 当て字 Ateji, a way of writing things only with Chinese characters, but unrelated to the actual meaning of the pictograms.

新宿(区) Shinjuku for example a district in Tokyo is translated as 新 meaning new, and 宿 meaning inn or lodging. In this case we don’t have Ateji, the meaning of the pictograms is directly related to the name of the place: new lodging.

北海道 (Hokkaido) or 富士 (Fuji), as Ainu (meaning indigenous) words don’t have Kanji that make sense, because they existed long before the Chinese writing system was introduced. So, Chinese characters relating to the sound were taken to write them, this was before Hiragana and Katakana were used to write phonetics.

北海道 has the Kanji of to North, Sea and Road; and 富士 has the kanji of wealth or abundant and gentleman, scholar or samurai.

This is also done for countries and city names. For example: 英吉利 (igirisu, meaning England, Kanji for England, good luck, profit) or 独逸 (doitsu, meaning Germany, Kanji for single and leisure) , or 倫敦 (London; Kanji for ethics and industry).

The study of Kanji can be a lot of fun, really. In the long run, it makes your life learning Japanese easier. But sometimes we all just wish Japan had done it like Korea. Because at some point the Korean king said: Guys, there needs to be an easier way to write and read. (Maybe he was struggling remembering all the Kanji as well?) And so he went and made up one of the arguably easiest writing systems in the world: Hangul.

So, if you ever plan on travelling to Korea, learn how to read it, there’s a saying (that I might misremember): Even a fool can learn Hangul in a week. Of course you’re not a fool. And it might give you a sense of accomplishment, after you tried and failed to get these Kanji into your brain, and I’m obviously not talking from experience ;).