Parts of Kanji

Parts of Kanji

There are two parts of a Kanji. That is
Lets check them out

  • Meanings
As kanji is based on meanings, every kanji has a meaning associated with it. A Kanji can have one or more than one meaning associated with it.

Like this kanji '人' means 'Person'. So it can be used alone in a sentence as 'Person' and also used to make words which are related to the word 'Person'.
For example-
あの人は田中さんです。
(That 'Person' is Mr. Tanaka)

The other use of Kanji meanings is in making words or Compound Kanjis (such as 人魚 read as NiNGyo which means 'human fish' or 'Mermaid'), which is explained later in this article.

Here at TKanjiPractice you can practice compound kanjis too. 


  • Readings

Every Kanji has one or more readings and meanings. The readings can be of two types: Kunyomi (also known as Japanese reading) and Onyomi (also known as Chinese reading).

If you are wondering "What is Chinese doing here?", in short Japanese didn't had a writing system, some Chinese came along and they gave this Kanji system. Thats why chinese and Japanese seems similar to many people. (The difference is that Chinese sentences don't have Hiragana).


Compound Kanjis

There are compound Kanjis too, called 熟語 or JuKuGo. Take two Kanjis, put them together and you get a new word which has nearly the same meaning which you can get by combining those two words.

Like '千' (Chi) which means thousand + '鳥' (ToRi) which means bird = '千鳥' (ChiDoRi) which means 'Thousand birds', just like the 'PPAP (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen)' video. The 'tori' became 'dori' because some Kanjis do that. You will learn about their rules later.

There are compound Kanjis having more than two Kanjis also. For example '新婚旅行' in which '行こ' (iKu) means to go, '旅行する' (RyoKoU SuRu) means 'To travel', '新' means 'new', '婚' means marriage, '新婚' means Newly married. So '新婚旅行' means 'Travel of newly married' or in easy words 'HONEYMOON'.

Here at TKanjiPractice you can practice  compound kanjis too.