Think you have a knack for foreign languages? Try picking up Japanese – all 2,000 characters of it!
In place of an alphabet, Japanese has an extensive set of pictograms called kanji. The Koujiten, an ancient dictionary, compiled between 1644-1912 during the Ching dynasty, lists a mind-boggling 47,000 kanji! Aspiring learners need not baulk – Japan’s Ministry of Education prescribes a mere 1,945 kanji for learning basic Japanese, enough to peruse a newspaper or book.
Japanese belongs to the Ural-Altaic group of languages that include Korean, Mongolian, Turkish and Manchu. An indigenous Japanese language existed around the 3rd century AD, but it was only much later that Japanese adopted a script from China, in the form of kanji. Unlike Chinese, the Japanese language is polysyllabic; consequently, two further sets of symbols developed in Japan, hiragana and katakana to adapt the original Chinese to local language characteristics.
A kanji is a symbol representing the root meaning of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Hiragana, added to kanji, act as modifiers (for example, adding hiragana to the kanji for “eat” changes the verb to “to eat”, “ate” or “is eating”.) Hiragana are also used as particles or link words, showing the relationship between words in a sentence. Katakana is for writing foreign language words such as names of places and people. They were invented in Japan by 9th century Buddhist students as shorthand for taking down lecture notes, a simpler alternative to the elaborate Chinese kanji. Katakana is also employed for commonly used foreign words, though their pronunciation may change (for example, “television” in Japanese is “terebi”). Both hiragana and katakana are simpler than kanji, with 46 characters each. You can identify hiragana symbols by their rounded shape, while katakana is angular.
Apart from linguists, the elegant, aesthetically pleasing kanji is popular with tattoo aficionados and calligraphy enthusiasts!