What is Kanji?

Kanji, one of the three scripts used in the Japanese language. They are Chinese characters (called Hanzi in Chinese) which were imported into Japanese around the 5th century.

The two other scripts are hiragana and katakana (together called kana) with each consisting of 46 syllables. Kana is a phonetic syllabary system, while kanji are ideograms.

The charm of Kanji

Each kanji has its own meaning and is related to each other. They can combine to create more words to present more meanings. Like 花 (🌺, flower) is related to 艸(艹) (grass). 花 (🌺, flower) combines with 火 (🔥, fire) to form 花火 which means fireworks (🎇).

In modern Chinese language, there are only 3000-5000 commonly used characters, and they form more than 50,000 common words. In Japanese, adults generally know closer to 3,000 kanji to be able to read properly, and only 2,136 kanji are considered Jōyō kanji (常用漢字, commonly used kanji) and taught at school.

Starting from recognizing kanji can be an easy way to learn new words

Once you recognize a kanji and its meaning (even if you don't know how to read or write it), you are close to get the ideas of words with it.

Here you can build your Japanese vocabulary by linking words with kanji.