It’s said that all modern writing systems descend from either Ancient Sumerian, or Ancient Chinese. [1]
You’ll notice that Japanese is not on that list of two languages. Japanese was purely a spoken language when Japanese people first visited China, and learned to read and write kanji – Chinese characters.
Writing is, of course, extremely useful [2], so sooner or later, Japanese people started learning Chinese so they could read and write.
Imagine this: You know some Chinese, but you’re not great at it, because you are not Chinese.
You see 三 in front of you. It’s the kanji for “three”.
Now, you could say the Chinese word for three (it’s “san”, in case you forgot). Or… bear with me here… you could just say “three”. No one would know. It’s not like you’re in China.
Congratulations, you just invented kun’yomi!
Actually, why don’t we just do that with entire sentences?
Japan tried, but Chinese and Japanese sentences have different word order. If you just read a Chinese sentence, and translated each kanji into Japanese, it would be in entirely the wrong order!
Japan had a solution to that, called Kanbun.
What if you took a Chinese sentence, and just… read it in Japanese word order, and also figured out what words were missing to make it grammatically correct, and add those words back in?
Great idea! So that’s what Japan did, for a while. They called it Kanbun. Write in Chinese, read in Japanese by reading in a different order and inserting words as necessary.
It didn’t work great, though, because most Japanese people are not great at Chinese, and it’s kind of hard to just stare at a sentence and figure out how to rearrange it so it makes sense in Japanese.
I’m sure you can think of an easy solution to this problem.
Yes, that’s right! Draw arrows around the Chinese sentence, so people know what order to read the characters in!
So Japanese people started adding those little symbols on the left, meaning “go down”, “skip”, “reverse”, “go up”. The numbers on the right are the order you’re supposed to read those kanji in. Easy, right?
Eventually, Japanese people finally realized this was stupid, and started just writing sentences in the order you were supposed to read them.
And those words you had to add in to make the sentence make sense? Japanese people started just writing those out, by just writing kanji with the same Chinese pronunciation as the words you needed to add in. This was called man’yougana, which later evolved into the hiragana and katakana we use today.
Meanwhile, there are two ways to pronounce kanji.
1. On’yomi – say the Chinese word in a Japanese accent.
2. Kun’yomi – just say a Japanese translation of that Chinese word.
This is actually huge! Japanese people and Chinese people approach kanji in totally different ways.
To a Chinese person, a kanji is just a word. It has a meaning and a pronunciation.
To a Japanese person, a kanji is a concept. It has a meaning, but pronunciation? Just say any word that means roughly the same thing. Words and kanji are different things in Japanese.
On’yomi is a bit more complicated than I let on earlier. “Say the Chinese word in a Japanese accent” is correct, but – the Chinese word from when?
You see, it’s been over a thousand years since Japanese started using kanji from China, and Chinese pronunciation has changed drastically in the meantime.
So when we say “say the Chinese word”, do you mean the pronunciation from six centuries ago? From twelve centuries ago?
Because this is Japan, the answer is: All of the above! It’s not like a kanji has a single pronunciation in the first place.
There are several ways a kanji can be pronounced as on’yomi:
1. Go-on – pronunciations from over 15 centuries ago
2. Kan-on – pronunciations from 12-15 centuries ago
3. Tō-on – pronunciations from less than 12 centuries ago
4. Kan’yō-on – pronunciations that Japanese people thought were Chinese, but they were wrong [3]
The most common on’yomi for any kanji (and the one people will tell you if you ask “what’s the on’yomi?”) is going to be Kan-on. [4] The others are pretty obscure.
If you’ve started learning Japanese, kun’yomi might seem simple to you. Some words are written with some kanji.
Once you’re more advanced, you might learn that sometimes multiple words are written with the same kanji. And sometimes, one word might have multiple kanji associated with it, each with slightly different connotations.
Maybe one day, you learn about jukujikun – sometimes, a word will be written with a multiple-kanji phrase that can’t be broken down. You can’t find these in a kanji dictionary because they’re not kun’yomi of a single kanji.
But it ends there, right?
Nope. I hinted at this earlier – the most important thing to understand about how Japanese people approach kanji is that kanji are not words, kanji are concepts.
And so the standard way to write certain words with certain kanji? They’re not rules, they’re really just suggestions. And you can just ignore those suggestions, and use whatever kanji with whatever word you want. This is called gikun. [5]
Maybe you’ve seen 超電磁砲 being pronounced “Railgun”.
Consider: 宇宙 (uchuu, meaning “outer space”) and 空 (sora, meaning “sky”). They mean vaguely related things! So Japanese people sometimes switch it up and pronounce 宇宙 “sora”, or 空 “uchuu”. This tends to happen in things like songs, where you want the lyrics to look fancy, but “sora” fits the rhythm better. Or in people’s names – “Sora” is a nice name, but maybe you want to spell it more creatively than other people are spelling it.
My first exposure to how crazy Gikun can get was probably the name Kazuko, written 一子. You see, kazu means “number” and 一 (one) is a number!
Another one of my favorites: 小鳥遊, which, as a surname, can be pronounced “Takanashi”.
Because the kanji in 小鳥遊 mean “little birds playing”. And “Takanashi” means “no hawks around”.
You see? Because little birds are safe and can play when there are no hawks around to eat them?
Kanji are concepts, not words
I hope I’ve made my point by now.
It’s actually really cool how any kanji can be associated with any word.
I just hope you still find it cool when you’re staring at a kanji and have no idea how to pronounce it.
[1] Writing was also independently invented in Mesoamerica, but those have all died out. Several other writing systems are debatably independently invented, but they’ve all died out. Some historians say that there’s nothing saying Ancient Chinese wasn’t inspired by Ancient Sumerian, but there’s no evidence that this actually happened so I’m going to dismiss them as just Westerners being jealous of China.
[3] Japanese people learned a lot of Chinese from Koreans who were not actually that great at Chinese. You can understand how mistakes might creep into this process.
[4] During the Tang Dynasty, Japanese people were like “okay, we have a bunch of different inconsistent ways to pronounce Chinese, partially because some of us learned Chinese from Koreans who were not actually that great at Chinese”. So they decided to standardize on how Chinese was pronounced in China at that time. This standardized sound was called Kan-on and mostly caught on, but not completely, because Japanese people just love having fifty pronunciations for a single kanji.
[5] Japanese people will sometimes call this ateji. Depending on who you ask, gikun is either a type of ateji, or the exact opposite thing of ateji. Honestly, if you’ve read to this point, it should be pretty clear that this is far from the biggest consistency problem Japanese has.
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