What is Kanji


KANJI | What is Kanji


A typical Japanese sentence looks like this- 

私はタヒルです。

Which means "My name is Tahir". (No space between the words).


Japanese language has three writing writing systems. This sentence is using all three of them. '私' is Kanji 'は' and 'です' are Hiragana and 'タヒル' is Katakana.

  

Kanji is based on meaning of letters. It is the most vast and difficult writing system in Japanese language. It is also the coolest of them, you may have seen people having Kanji tattoos or wearing T-shirts with Kanji prints, even though they don't know what it means.


Significance of Kanji

Japanese writing system does not have spaces. If everything is written in Hiragana or Katakana like
そのくるまはあかいです。
As you can see it very difficult to identify individual words in this sentence. So using Kanji solves this problem. 
その車は赤いです。
(That car is red)

Now you can recognise each word very easily.

Japanese language contains many words have the exactly same meaning. Hiragana is based on how a letter is pronounced. So if everything is written in Hiragana, it will be very difficult to know the meaning of any word in a sentence.
Since Kanji is based on meanings and every Kanji looks different. It becomes easy to tell the meaning of a word by seeing the Kanji.

Kanji is used also for writing Japanese names of people, places etc. Like Tokyo is written in kanji as '東京' not in Hiragana as 'ときょう'. Similarly Tanaka (a Japanese name) is written in kanji as '田中' not in Hiragana as 'たなか'.
For non native or foreign names Katakana is used. If your name is not from Japan, it will be written in Katakana not Kanji.

Strokes

In ancient times, when Japanese writing system was introduced. People did not have pens or keyboards. They used brushes to write.
Kanjis are also divided depending on how many strokes it needed to write a that character. For example: 
  • Single stroke kanji: '一' it means 'One' in Japanese.
  • Two stroke kanji: '二' meaning 'Two', '人' meaning 'Person'.
  • Three stroke kanji: '三' meaning 'Three', '口' meaning 'Mouth'.
And so on.

Stroke order

There is a specific order of strokes for writing a kanji, which determines which strokes are made before and which are made after. It is better to write according to stroke order, but you can write in any order you want.