Learning Japanese - Day 3

nekonicku
Jun 9, 2016
3 min read

日本語の三日！

Today has mostly been about remembering the Kanji and how to pronounce them. One of the things my tutor wants me to do is be able to know the kanji to use from the sounds and be able to write them, for example, he might want me to write the kanji for "Kuruma" So I would usually joke and say "I can write it in Hiragana!" but next week I want to be able to surprise him and write the Kaji for it instead...

It's a lot easier to remember if you break them down into sections of other Kanji. For example, Neko - 猫 has the Kanji for Rice Field inside it 田 and the kanji around the outside of it, so I imagine a cat running around in a rice field.

Some of them are easier to remember by looking at the symbol and just simply picturing the meaning. Kuruma / くるま (Cart / Car) is a good example of that, Look at the Kanji, you can see two wheels either side of a box in the middle, 車 Just image it as a top down view of a wooden cart with the wheels coming out either side.

Middle / Centre is an easy one, it's simply the line going through the "Middle" of the square. 中

As Kanji is a pictorial writing system, it's quite interesting to look at the history of kanji. You can see some of their origins have more of a direct link to the image they are supposed to be representing. Take for example, Horse. You can clearly see the image on the left and see how it evolved over thousands of years to become what it is today. These images weren't originally drawn at all, rather they were the result of burning turtle shells until they cracked to form images!