Kanji

Japan had no writing of its own until it met Chinese. Characters arrived from the mainland, often by way of Korea, from around the 5th century. Monks and officials learned to read Chinese texts. Soon they began to use the same characters for Japanese words. That is why most kanji have two kinds of reading. The on'yomi is the "sound reading," an old Japanese version of the Chinese pronunciation. The kun'yomi is the "meaning reading," a native Japanese word. The character 山, "mountain," is read san in 富士山, Fujisan. On its own it is read yama.

Kanji alone did not fit Japanese grammar well. So from the 9th century, scribes simplified some characters into two phonetic scripts. Hiragana is round and soft. It writes grammar endings and small words. Katakana is angular. Today it writes foreign words, such as konbini, "convenience store." A normal sentence mixes all three. Kanji carry the main ideas, hiragana holds them together, and katakana marks what came from abroad. The official list of "common-use" kanji, the jōyō kanji, has 2,136 characters. Children learn just over a thousand of them in primary school.

Most kanji are built from smaller parts. One part often hints at the meaning. Characters with 氵, three drops of water, usually have to do with liquid: 海 "sea," 池 "pond," 酒 "sake." Another part often hints at the sound. Once you learn to spot these pieces, a new kanji stops looking like a random tangle of lines.