Is each Kanji a noun? Or an idea?
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An idea. Some kanji can also function as nouns on their own too, but typically nouns are formed from multiple kanji working together.
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Idea is definitely the closer of the two, but the other important way to look at kanji is just “a way to write part of a word”. In the end the language is the words, not the way they’re written.
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It seems pretty rare to have a single kanji on its own as a word.
I’m actually not completely sure why this is, so if anyone has any insight, I’d love to hear it. I think a possible explanation for at least one facet of this is that many words written as compounds of two characters are Chinese in origin (that’s why using the on’yomi readings is so common). In Chinese languages, monosyllabic words are uncommon.
I don’t know that I’d use the word “HATE” here—it seems a bit sensational—but I think the point at 2:56 is relevant:
One character by itself can have too many different meanings and uses that often leads to ambiguity in the intended function or definition of that character.
Japanese seems to inherit this feature for Chinese-derived vocabulary, and there are also other aspects to consider, like kana at the end of adjectives and verbs.
This might seem a bit underwhelming to a beginner in Japanese, but I think it’s probably the best answer. The only real purpose is writing words. It happens that the meaning of kanji is often relevant to the meaning of the word, but that’s not always true.
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Well, there are about 2000 kanji, but a native speaker probably knows 20,000 to 40,000 words. There’s no way for single kanji words to be more than 5 to 10% of the total…
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Well, that was easy.
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食堂＞noun
食べる＞verb
綺麗な＞adjective
美味しい＞adjective
大切に＞adverb
静かに＞adverb
静かな＞adjective
僕＞pronoun
I don’t think of kanji as words, but as pictorial representation for sounds.
食 replaces the ta is taberu, and the shoku in shokudou. alone it is neither word. Comparatively few kanji can represent an entire word alone. But there are some. 畑 is hatake in the word hatake, replacing the whole word, but only hata in hatachi only replacing the first half.
So I like to think of it as just a replacement for hiragana that makes it easier for Japanese to read quickly. The word is one thing, the kanji is another. (yes I know kanji came first, but it wasn’t necessary to get into it in this conversation.)
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Yes, but they’re also ideas in that 畑 is the “farm” in 畑地 rather than the “twenty” in 二十歳.
That entirely depends on the word. The kanji came first in 食堂, but the reading came first in 食べる.
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Another way to look at it is that kanji are shortcuts to spelling words. Their advantage over writing everything in kana is that they speed up reading and resolve ambiguity.
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Are you talking about Chinese specifically? Because in Japanese that’s actually very common, no? Or do you also mean no okurigana?
I suspect that a very important factor here is that Japanese doesn’t hesitate to apply kanji purely for semantic purposes on any word, while Chinese, as I understand it, will almost always have one syllable per character. Basically Japanese has no phonetic constraints when it comes to kunyomi kanji usage, so they can just go wild with it. That’s how you end up with 志…
Obviously even with tones you won’t go very far if you only use one syllable words.
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In English there are bits and pieces that mean things and repeat in many words - affixes and roots like these: Vocabulary: Building
It’s as if in Japanese there are many more, and much of the language is made of them (except old Japanese words read through kun-yomi and ones imported from English and other languages).
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To me it’s just simpler to think about “words” as a set of sounds. So poor and pour are the same, in speech but distinct in writing. Sometimes the sounds spoken and the spelling are only loosely connected anyway.
So, はたち and はたち are the same in speech (forgot pitch for a second but still) and the same in hiragana, but when “spelled” with kanji they are distinct. 二十歳 and 畑地.
So the “word” is the sounds 食べる makes when you say it aloud. And the kanji 食 doesn’t have meaning except that it is often used with eating words and has a “meaning” only by proxy of the words it spells. Does E or A or T have meaning? not until you put them together.
Does 包 or 丁 mean kitchen knife? No, and most other words they’re used in have nothing to do with kitchens or knives. ほうちょう, the sounds mean knife. 包丁 is just a way to “spell” ほうちょう using kanji.
I’m not saying it’s the “right” way to think about it, but I think it’s useful to let people stop worrying so much about it what is a kanji. Japanese don’t learn Kanji first. They almost exclusively learn the words as sounds first, and years later learn how to write it using Kanji to replace the Hiragana. We make it more complicated by pretending kanji’s have meaning. They are just more abstract arbitrary visual replacements for sounds. 2300 extra “letters”.
I don’t think it’s an “idea”, I think it’s a pictorial writing system. 食 is た and しょく, neither of those are words or ideas.
This is a problem I have with WaniKani testing kanji “meaning” because sometimes you remember the “meaning” of a word it’s used in, but you don’t remember the exact “meaning” they arbitrarily selected from the mass of meanings. This is why I don’t really think Kanjis should be tested past guru. You need to start separating Kanji from an english understanding anyway. Only vocab have “meaning” better to remember the vocab and it’s usage then the “kanji meaning”.
Didn’t realize I had so many thoughts about this lol.
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Meaning sometimes; sound sometimes; plus sometimes a Kanji is replaced with another Kanji along the evolution of words.
For basic cases, thinking of vocabularies having the meaning first, with Kanji bearing the sound. But later on, Kanji can have a function in neologism (though sometimes it’s sound components taking function).
志 can be thought of 心 + 差し with replacement into one Kanji.
I would think of 引 in 引く as ひく, but with limited Kanji replacement, so as to make conjugation possible. This way, it can be easily seen why 取引 or 手引 makes sense. Because even without Okurigana, people can still make sense of it and read it.
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