This is the kind of sentiment I had when people ask me about 日本語 regarding: “do Japanese people memorize all 50000+ Kanji?” I’m like “NO” since they don’t know all characters as only a small percentage of that is taught & used, around 2136. Although, some people learn jargon catered to specific fields (science, medicine) leading to them knowing 3000+ Kanji.
The estimated count for the “number of words” in English is 1,000,000 but that’s not an exact answer. The thing is, how many words is a native English speaker expected to know & understand? How much vocab do they teach students at school (from spelling to grammar)? After learning the alphabet, what types of words are taught across schools in the Anglosphere to kids?
For perspective, kids in Japan only learn 80 Kanji in their first year (mainly common & easy ones: 犬、校、九、女、男、名、森、右 to list a few) but the number expands through their years. I mean, something “similar” exists in English with spelling being taught at schools (teachers give a list of words to memorize spelling followed by a spelling test later).
The vocab lists expand from elementary to high school with difficult words (there’s a difference in difficulty with trying to spell a word like “animal” to “conscientious”). It’s like how a Japanese kid knows how to handwrite 海外 but has a hard time on trying to understand 傭兵 (ようへい) since 傭 is a harder Kanji to write in comparison to 海.
No, we don’t know every single word.
But I think that isn’t really what most people are actually shocked about with regards to kanji…
The thing that is shocking about kanji is “how do you even pronounce words you don’t know? How do you even try to tell someone ‘i saw this word I didn’t know.’ when it’s a bespoke character for just that word?”
They don’t realize that most kanji are built by combining different characters. So if you know the base characters that a kanji is built from. you can make a reasonable guess at pronunciation (and sometimes meaning) even if you’ve never seen the word before.
In English, we learn from a young age to “sound it out”. At first glance, kanji makes no sense in that context. We can’t understand how you would “sound out” a new kanji
So there are “root” kanji kind of like english root words?
If you go to jisho.org which is a Japanese to English dictionary, down at the bottom right there’s a button labeled “radicals”. This allows you to search for kanji you don’t know based on the “parts” of the kanji:
And if you look at a particular one like 族 it lists the parts that make it up
Oh cool! Thank you!
Yes, they’re typically called “radicals” in Japanese learning circles, and other kanji can also be radicals. The whole system is fairly similar to root words and compound words, except that it scales much further up than English does.
For instance: two of “木” (tree, read as “ki”) gets you “林” (woods, “hayashi”), adding a third is “森” (forest, “mori”)
For another example: “三” (3, read as “san”, it’s also just 3 “1” kanji) with “口” (mouth, “guchi”) as well as an extra dash at the top gives you “言” (say, “ii”) whereas “千” (thousand, “sen”) with “口” (see prior example) gives you “舌” (tongue, “shita”), and print both of those complete kanji together gets you “話” (speak/story, “hanashi”)
The radicals and kanji used in both of these examples also have more meanings based on certain contexts and different readings, but these are useful ones for these examples.
Some of kanji and radicals combine in different ways, some of them change when they’re used as radicals for other kanji, and sometimes certain kanji are used as radicals based on either their meaning or their pronunciation. There’s plenty more examples of the very fractal/recursive nature of using radicals and kanji to build other kanji, but these were two that immediately came to mind.
Edit: I should also clarify that “radicals” as a Japanese linguistics term refers to the components of kanji, which 90-99% of the time refers to other kanji but sometimes includes symbols that on their own may not have any specific meanings or be otherwise usable on their own.
Oh hell yeah. This rules
Oh interesting! I wonder if the nature of emoji combinations is intentionally like that.
Considering its a language with thousands of years of history dating back to ancient Chinese I think at best it’s difficult to say with certainty any sort of intentionality about how kanji as a system developed, but I believe that it makes sense from an almost evolutionary standpoint that kanji simplified into groupings of radicals (which often tell a sort of story that can help to memorize that kanji) would be better remembered and passed down through generations of use. Harder kanji or ones with more unique symbols are more likely to be misremembered or simplified for ease of memorization.
But this is all speculation on my part as I’m still learning the language as it currently exists, not so much the history of written Japanese.
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I’m more than content to use kana for readings of kanji, but I used romaji specifically because this was meant as an explanation for people who don’t know much about Japanese as a language and so I would assume cannot read kana.