What do you know about kanji? How many kanji are there in Japan? Do Japanese know all of kanji?? I’m Japanese and Japanese is my mother tongue so actually I don’t know much about it( because I can use kanji without thinking deeply). But today, I’ll tell you some important things I recommend you to know to get familiar with Japanese culture or history!
History of Kanji
Kanji is used in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China but the kanji in Japan originally came from China. There are some opinions when kanji was carried to Japan but maybe it was around 3~5 B.C.
Before the arrival of kanji, there weren’t any letters in Japan so people in Japan told the stories or communicated with each other just orally.
2 types to pronounce kanji
Each kanji has its meaning(s). In Japan, we read kanji in some ways. Let’s take a look at a kanji, ‘山’. It is pronounced ‘やま( yama )’, ‘さん( san )’ or ‘ざん( zan )’. Japanese has 2 types to pronounce kanji. One is called ‘on- yomi’, which originally came from Chinese pronunciation, and the other is called ‘kun- yomi’, which is created by Japanese to link the word that had already existed in Japan to kanji imported from China. In this case, ‘さん( san )’ and ‘ざん( zan )’ are ‘kun- yomi’.
How many kanji does Japanese have?
It’s almost impossible to count the exact number of kanji but there are about 50,000 kanji in Japanese language. But what makes it difficult to count the number of kanji? The answer is like this. There are a lot of kanji which has the same meaning but only some parts of it is different. Maybe you don’t understand what I explained so I’ll show you some examples.
Thinking about ‘高( kou/ taka-i )’, meaning ‘high’. There are some ways to write this kanji, like 高、髙 and actually some more. Can you find the differences? Both kanji have the same meaning but sometimes people differentiate these two kanji for the names of people. For example, 高橋( takahashi ) is a common Japanese family name, but some people write their names 髙橋. Both look similar to each other but slightly different. And there are a lot more kanji like these, so that’s why it’s almost impossible to count the exact number of kanji.
How many kanji do Japanese people learn ?
In 2010, the ministry of education,culture, sports, science and technology of Japan reformed joyo-kanji ,and now there are 2,136 joyo-kanji in Japan. Joyo-kanji are the kanji commonly used in daily life. In elementary school, students learn 1,026 kanji and in junior high school, they are taught 1,110 kanji. Here’s the link to the list of joyo-kanji.
Japanese learn these kanji for 9 years of their compulsory education, but it’s still difficult to master all of these kanji, writing and reading perfectly.
