LESSON NOTES

Introduction to Japanese Kanji

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Introduction to Kanji Script

CONTENTS
2 Grammar

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GRAMMAR

Introduction to Kanji

In this lesson, you'll learn exactly what kanji is and why you need it, the best method of
learning kanji, and about the building blocks that make up a kanji character.

What is kanji?

It's quite simple actually.

Kanji is the use of Chinese characters, in Japanese writing.
So, Japanese actually uses Chinese characters in part of its writing.
That's because Japanese writing actually originated from China.
A long time ago Japan only used Chinese characters.

Today, there are three different scripts together to write Japanese.

Those three scripts are: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
So for comparison English only uses one script, the 'English alphabet', but Japanese uses
three different ones.
Kanji is the interpretation of Chinese characters into Japanese.
And hiragana and katakana are scripts created after by Japanese people; you can kind of
think of the latter two as the "Japanese alphabet." We refer to them as kana, かな.

Learning kana is easy, it's just like learning the alphabet.

You learn a limited number of letters and using those letters, you can put them together to
form words.
On their own though, they don't really hold any meaning.

Kanji however, is different.

There are thousands of them.
And hidden beneath each one lies a secret message.
One kanji character can say more than a hundred of these letters because it represents an
idea.
A wealth of meaning can be uncovered from this single character.

The concept and meaning however, will only reveal itself if you know where to look.
And this is the true power of kanji.

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How to learn kanji?

There are many ways to start learning kanji.

The most obvious way, although not the most effective, is to simply memorize them.
Like learning the alphabet, or learning new words, you can start learning kanji by
memorizing a few each day, every day, until you've memorized them all.

Unlike learning the alphabet however, which consists of only a small set of letters, there
are thousands and thousands of kanji characters, each with their own unique concept and
meaning.

Memorizing each individual kanji one by one just isn't practical.

There's simply too many of them.

Thankfully, there's a more effective way to learn kanji.

And that's by learning the "radicals."

What are radicals?

A kanji character can be broken down into smaller components.

These smaller components are called radicals.
You can think of radicals simply as "the building blocks of kanji."

Every kanji character has at least one radical.

Sometimes, the radical itself can be a kanji on its own.
And several radicals put together could be another kanji.

By learning radicals, the building blocks of kanji, you can understand the general meaning
of kanji characters you've yet to learn.
Instead of learning individual kanji characters one at a time, we essentially learn the
building blocks instead. You only have to learn a few radicals to be able to read some of the
most common kanji characters out there.
In this series, we'll teach you 10 useful radicals that'll get you started learning kanji quickly
and easily.

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