🈁 Japanese II: Kana to Kanji

What you’ll learn

1. A Language Nobody Could WriteSee the original problem: a fully-formed spoken language meeting a writing system built for a completely different one.Japanese was spoken for a very long time before anyone wrote it. When Chinese characters arrived — Japan is unlikely to have been literate in Chinese writing before the 4th century AD — they came attached to the Chinese language, which is unrelated to Japanese in family, word order and structure. You cannot simply 'write Japanese in Chinese characters', and every strange feature of modern Japanese script is a fossil of somebody solving that problem.
2. The Trick That Started EverythingUnderstand man'yōgana — using a character purely for its sound — as the hinge the whole system turns on.The breakthrough was to throw away half of what a character is. Take 安, which means 'peace' and was read something like an; ignore the meaning entirely and use the shape to write the Japanese syllable a. That is man'yōgana, in use since at least the mid-7th century and the medium of the Man'yōshū, compiled after 759. It works, and it is exhausting: every syllable costs a full multi-stroke character.
3. Kana Are Kanji, Worn DownSee both kana syllabaries as erosion products of man'yōgana — and understand why there are two of them.Two groups wore man'yōgana down in two different ways. Court writers writing fast and cursive rounded whole characters into hiragana around 800; Buddhist monks in Nara clipped a fragment off a character as marginal shorthand, producing katakana in the 9th century. Each syllabary now has 46 basic characters (48 in the full traditional katakana set), covering the same sounds twice — which is not redundancy but register.
4. What Katakana Is ForLearn katakana as a job rather than a chart — and stop reading katakana words as English.Katakana marks a word as foreign, loud, technical, or emphatic — closest in function to italics in English. Its jobs are loanwords and foreign names, onomatopoeia, scientific names of plants and animals, company names, and emphasis. The trap is treating katakana as a decoding key back into English: a katakana loanword is a Japanese word now, with a Japanese meaning that may have drifted a long way from its source.
5. Why Kanji Didn't DieUnderstand that kanji survive because they do work that kana cannot: disambiguation and word segmentation.Japan has had a complete phonetic script for over a thousand years and kept 2,136 characters anyway. Two reasons. Sino-Japanese borrowing squeezed a large, tonal Chinese sound inventory into a small Japanese one, mass-producing homophones that only the written character separates. And Japanese does not use spaces — the change in visual texture between kanji and kana is what tells your eye where words begin and end. Kanji aren't decoration; they're the parser.
6. A Kanji Is Not a PictureReplace the pictograph myth with the real structure: most kanji are a meaning part bolted to a sound part.Classical scholarship sorts characters into six categories (the rikusho): pictographic, indicative, compound-ideographic, phono-semantic, derivative and phonetic-loan. Pictographs are the famous minority. The workhorse category is phono-semantic (keisei moji): one component tells you roughly what the character is about, the other tells you roughly how it sounds. Once you see it, whole families of characters collapse into a pattern.
7. Radicals Are a Filing SystemUnderstand the radical as an index invented to solve a lookup problem, not as a theory of meaning.An alphabet gives you alphabetical order for free; a character set gives you nothing, so lookup had to be invented. The radical (bushu) is that invention: every character is assigned to one component, and the dictionary files it there. The Kangxi Dictionary of 1716 standardised the 214 radicals still in use. The radical is often the meaning component, which makes it useful for guessing — but it is an index first, and the two jobs come apart more often than beginners expect.
8. Two Readings, One CharacterExplain on'yomi and kun'yomi as fossilised borrowing — the single idea that makes the reading system make sense.生 has eight basic readings, twelve if related verbs are counted separately. This is not chaos. When a character was imported it arrived with a Chinese pronunciation attached (on'yomi), but Japan already had its own word for that meaning, and glued it on too (kun'yomi). Nothing was ever thrown away. English does exactly the same thing with '1', '&' and 'lb' — imported symbol, native sound.
9. Why One Character Has Three Chinese ReadingsSee multiple on'yomi as date stamps — three separate waves of borrowing, centuries and dialects apart.明 is read myō and also mei. Both are 'the Chinese reading' — because Japan borrowed from China more than once. Go-on came in the 5th–6th centuries from the prestigious eastern Jiankang (Nanjing) dialect, largely with Buddhism, and still clusters in Buddhist and legal vocabulary. Kan-on arrived later as a second wave and became the prestige standard. Tō-on is a thin third wave from the Tang–Song period. The reading you use tells you which century the word entered.
10. The Machinery: Okurigana and FuriganaMeet the two devices that make an ambiguous script actually readable in practice.If a character has eight readings, how does anyone read? Okurigana — the hiragana tail after a kanji — both selects the reading and carries the inflection that Chinese characters cannot express. Furigana — small kana printed alongside a kanji — simply tells you the reading outright. Japanese is a writing system that ships with its own annotation layer, and uses it constantly.
11. The Century of ReformTrace the 20th-century attempt to cut the system down — and the technology that quietly reversed it.In 1946 the tōyō list capped everyday use at 1,850 characters, and many were simplified into new shinjitai forms (國→国). In 1981 the jōyō list recast the cap as a guide with 1,945 characters. Then in 2010 it grew to 2,136 — 196 added, 5 removed. It grew because word processors had made hard characters free to produce: you no longer write 憂鬱, you type it. Technology reversed a century of pressure toward simplification.
12. Reading Is Reading StratigraphyRead one ordinary modern sentence as what it is: four layers of history, each with a date.An ordinary sentence off a Tokyo shop window contains Chinese characters imported by the 5th century, hiragana worn cursive around 800, katakana clipped by monks in the 9th century, and a loanword from 20th-century English — all in one line, with no seams. Nothing in this system was ever thrown away, which is exactly why it looks difficult and exactly why it makes sense.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Wikipedia, 'Japanese writing system' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system (adoption of Chinese characters, man'yōgana, kana counts, katakana roles, on'yomi/kun'yomi, furigana and okurigana)
• Wikipedia, 'Kanji' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji (the eight basic readings of 生; the six rikusho categories; ~50,000 characters in the Dai Kan-Wa Jiten; tōyō and jōyō counts)
• Wikipedia, 'Jōyō kanji' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji (1,850 tōyō kanji in 1946; 1,945 jōyō in 1981; 2,136 after the 30 November 2010 revision, +196 −5; 1,026 kyōiku kanji)
• Wikipedia, 'Go-on' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-on (go-on from the Jiankang/Nanjing dialect, 5th–6th centuries, arriving with Buddhism; kan-on and tō-on as later waves; go-on/kan-on readings of 明, 京, 上)
• Wikipedia, 'Man'yōgana' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana (man'yōgana from at least the mid-7th century; the Man'yōshū compiled after 759 AD; the tables of hiragana and katakana derivations)
• Wikipedia, 'Hiragana' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana (hiragana c. 800 as cursive simplification, あ from 安; onnade / otokode)
• Wikipedia, 'Katakana' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana (developed 9th century by Buddhist monks in Nara from parts of man'yōgana; 48 characters; modern uses)

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

Related History courses