One of the hardest things about learning Japanese for English speakers is that it is so radically different from European languages. And I don’t just mean grammar. Outside of loan words, words in both languages don’t share any common roots. That means, when we start learning Japanese, the building blocks we typically use in English to aid in memorization – things like Greek and Latin suffixes and prefixes, e.g. – are absent.
Fortunately, once you get a little bit of the language under your belt, there’s a trick you can use to make learning certain Japanese words easier.
Kanji: The Ultimate Language Building Block
Ask any new Japanese learner what element of the language they hate the most and kanji is likely to top their list. And no wonder: there are so many of them!
Originally imported from China, the ideographic kanji, along with the kanji-derived syllabaries hiragana and katakana. constitute Japan’s writing system. Starting in 1923, Japan took on the task of simplifying the number of kanji used in newspapers and official documents. The result was the joyo kanji (常用漢字; jouyou kanji), or kanji for regular use. The list has been updated several times since, most recently in 2010. It currently consists of 2,136 kanji.
The joyo kanji are usually considered the minimum required to be able to read Japanese fluently. However, even that might be too low. Some estimates state that around 2,457 kanji account for 99% of the kanji used in daily life. By some estimates, the average educated Japanese adult knows around 3,500 kanji (!).
Tackling this mountain of kanji is a daunting task for every new Japanese learner. Most kanji have two sets of pronunciations – onyomi (音読み), or pronunciations derived from Chinese, and kunyomi (訓読み), those native to Japanese. And most kanji have multiple pronunciations in each category. Just take a gander at Jisho’s entry for the character 生, which has 20 distinct readings!
To make things worse, kanji also have multiple meanings! If you’ve used a system like James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji to learn kanji, you’ve likely learned one meaning of a character. There are usually multiple others. I remember that, when the era name Reiwa (令和) was announced, some folks were freaking out because 令 meant “command”. They thought the new name was Abe’s way of signaling the dawn of a hard-line right-wing government. But it also means “good” – which is the sense it’s being used in the new era name.
So when it comes to kanji, there’s a lot to learn. And there isn’t necessarily a shortcut for all of this memorization. (There are some for remembering kanji based on their components – but that’s a topic for another day.)
But the good news is that, as you learn kanji, learning certain words – in particular, two-character compounds – becomes a lot easier. Let’s see how.
