LEARN KANJI ONLINE HOW TO
However, using kanji saves a lot of space, and if you learn to understand how kanji are made, you may even be able to guess what some characters mean or how to say them, even if you’ve never seen them before! Hiragana is a convenient way to “spell out” a word if you don’t know how to write its kanji but you do know how to say it. Remember, Japanese borrowed kanji from the Chinese, so of course it makes sense to call them “Chinese characters.” That’s right, it’s kanji (かんじ), which literally means “Chinese character”! What happens when you put them together? 漢字! Sometimes, if you put two kanji together, they can make a new word based on their two individual parts.ĭid you know that 漢 ( kan, or かん) means “Chinese”?Īnd the character ji (字, or じ) means, well, “character.” It’s still pronounced mizu, but now we can represent that entire idea in one single character instead of “spelling it out” in hiragana with two separate characters. However, we can also write the same word in kanji as 水. This is actually phonetic, as hiragana sounds out the word: Kanji are borrowed from Chinese and they’re more complex than hiragana or katakana.įor example, you might know that the Japanese word for “water” is mizu.
Which is like 1500 years at least! The Benefits Of Kanji Vs. Those are kanji, and they’ve been intimidating new learners of Japanese for, well, basically as long as they’ve existed. Those are katakana, an alphabet Japanese people use to write down words that aren’t originally Japanese.īut maybe, mixed in with those characters, you spot a big, intimidating blob, like this: 漢字を読めますか You might also see other, similar characters that look a bit chunkier:
Those are hiragana, one of the ways that Japanese people write down the sounds of their language. Whenever you look at a Japanese sentence, you probably see a bunch of small, relatively simple characters, like this: Let’s take a closer looker at the three elements of written Japanese and the role of kanji among them. So if you want to read or write in Japanese, you’ll need to learn them! They are a set of written characters that have been adopted from the Chinese writing system and are used together with the native Japanese hiragana and katakana characters to write Japanese. Kanji are one of three elements used in the Japanese writing system.
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