Kanji writing

The Japanese writings are divided into three alphabets: kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. However, this article will specify in kanjis.

Its origins began in China and were created by a man known as Cangjie. He attributed the qualities of nature to symbols and that’s they wat the kanji system started.

China began to influence Japan in the Ist century a.C. By that time, the Japanese didn’t communicate by written papers as there wasn’t a defined system that existed. Instead, just after this, the Kanjis began to appear in letters, stamps, swords, furniture, and more, all coming from China.

At the beginning of the IV century a.C, Japanese monks began to travel to China in order to learn about their culture and studies. This led to the increase of influence in Japan by China. The writing was then introduced in Japan, but only those who pertained to the nobility and royalty could learn.

When 100 years later the Japanese population began to have access to education, they began to learn to write and read these, at first, Chinese kanjis.

Little by little, the Chinese symbols and characters based on nature began to arrive at all Japanese houses, where children and parents learned this new writing.

One of its characteristics is that at the beginning of the century it was being introduced in Japan, the men in charge of making people learn how to write kanjis expressed the dialect in different forms. This resulted in one only character having more than 50 different pronunciations. This is the case of the word life (生), which has up to 200 different pronunciations nowadays.

Later on, the Japanese developed their own words and characters for determining names of objects and weapons, but also for the parts of the human body. Therefore, now one same kanji had its own Chinese lecture and at the same time a Japanese one.

Currently, there are more than 2000 kanjis, and the ones that are more complicated to write and memorize tend to have more than one form of writing.

Kanjis are frequently used to express words and concepts. Generally, nouns are written in kanji, and verbs and adjectives tend to be written with a combination between kanji and hiragana.