One of the hardest things about learning Japanese for English speakers is that it is so radically different from European languages. And I don’t just mean grammar. Outside of loan words, words in both languages don’t share any common roots. That means, when we start learning Japanese, the building blocks we typically use in English to aid in memorization – things like Greek and Latin suffixes and prefixes, e.g. – are absent.
Fortunately, once you get a little bit of the language under your belt, there’s a trick you can use to make learning certain Japanese words easier.
Kanji: The Ultimate Language Building Block
Ask any new Japanese learner what element of the language they hate the most and kanji is likely to top their list. And no wonder: there are so many of them!
Originally imported from China, the ideographic kanji, along with the kanji-derived syllabaries hiragana and katakana. constitute Japan’s writing system. Starting in 1923, Japan took on the task of simplifying the number of kanji used in newspapers and official documents. The result was the joyo kanji (常用漢字; jouyou kanji), or kanji for regular use. The list has been updated several times since, most recently in 2010. It currently consists of 2,136 kanji.
The joyo kanji are usually considered the minimum required to be able to read Japanese fluently. However, even that might be too low. Some estimates state that around 2,457 kanji account for 99% of the kanji used in daily life. By some estimates, the average educated Japanese adult knows around 3,500 kanji (!).
Tackling this mountain of kanji is a daunting task for every new Japanese learner. Most kanji have two sets of pronunciations – onyomi (音読み), or pronunciations derived from Chinese, and kunyomi (訓読み), those native to Japanese. And most kanji have multiple pronunciations in each category. Just take a gander at Jisho’s entry for the character 生, which has 20 distinct readings!
To make things worse, kanji also have multiple meanings! If you’ve used a system like James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji to learn kanji, you’ve likely learned one meaning of a character. There are usually multiple others. I remember that, when the era name Reiwa (令和) was announced, some folks were freaking out because 令 meant “command”. They thought the new name was Abe’s way of signaling the dawn of a hard-line right-wing government. But it also means “good” – which is the sense it’s being used in the new era name.
So when it comes to kanji, there’s a lot to learn. And there isn’t necessarily a shortcut for all of this memorization. (There are some for remembering kanji based on their components – but that’s a topic for another day.)
But the good news is that, as you learn kanji, learning certain words – in particular, two-character compounds – becomes a lot easier. Let’s see how.
[ppp_patron_only level=”1″]
Word Construction (熟語構成; jukugo kousei)
Jukugo kousei, or word construction, is a topic covered in middle school language classes in Japan. It’s also part of the Kanji Kentei, a test that measures one’s kanji knowledge. (For those who are interested, I talk a little more about the Kanji Kentei in the YouTube video below.)
Basically, in a word consisting of two kanji, the kanji bear one of five specific relationships to each other:
- The kanji have the same meaning. Example: 岩石 (rock), in which both characters have the meaning of “rock” or “stone”.
- The kanji have opposite meanings. A classic example: 上下 (jouge) – “up and down” or “high and low”.
- The first kanji adorns the second, acting as an adjective. E.g., in 花束 (hanataba), or “bunch of flowers”, the 花 (flowers) is telling you what kind of a bunch (束) it is.
- The first kanji takes action on the second, acting as a verb. E.g.: 登山 (tozan), or “mountain climbing”.
- The first kanji is the subject to the second kanji’s predicate. E.g., in 腹痛 (fukutsuu), “stomach pain”, the stomach (腹) is the subject experiencing pain (痛).
- The first kanji negates the second. E.g., 不毛 (fumou), “barren”, which literally means “no hair”.
The site Benesse (which I linked above) gives a few other examples of these principles in action:
南北 (なんぼく; nanboku) – South and North (opposites)
身体 (しんたい; shintai) – Body (synonyms)
海底 (かいてい; kaitei) – Ocean (海) floor (底) (adorns)
記名 (きめい; kimei) – Writing one’s names – 名を記す (subject-object)
市営 (しえい; shiei) – city operated – 市が営む (subject-predicate)
Learning Kanji Meanings
There isn’t a dictionary that flatly describes these relationships. However, they’re pretty obvious once you know the meanings of the constituent kanji. In particular, negation relationships are easy to spot as they will always begin with a negative kanji like 不 (fu), 無 (mu), 非 (hi), or 未 (mi).
As I noted above, the online dictionary Jisho is a great way to look up kanji meanings. If you look up the kanji for 生, for example, you can see at the bottom a list of all of the compounds it’s used in – and all their various meanings.
At my current level, however, I prefer to stay within the Japanese language as much as possible. So now I generally use the Kanji Jiten, the Kanji dictionary sponsored by the folks who run the Kanji Kentei. The Kanji Jiten gives an exhaustive list of meanings and pronunciations for each kanji, as you can see in their own list for 生。
Useful for Listening as Well
I was pretty clueless about word construction when I first started studying Japanese. I only learned about it when I started preparing for the Kanji Kentei. But I’ve found it extremely beneficial for my Japanese.
Indeed, I’ve found it does more than help me pick up new vocabulary: it makes listening easier as well. Learning the kanji meanings in-depth has enabled me to hear unknown words and conjecture what the kanji for those words must be – and thus what the meaning of the word is – based on the word’s onyomi and the word construction types. I’ve gotten much better at picking up new words from TV programs or from one-on-one conversations.
So next time you encounter a word you don’t know well and it’s a two-character compound, ask yourself: Do I know what the kanji mean? And do I know what relationship they have to one another? I guarantee that asking these simple questions will make it much easier to remember the word’s meaning the next time you encounter it in the wild.
[/ppp_patron_only]
