How did the Japanese integrate Chinese characters into their writing system?
To begin with, both hiragana and katakana in Japanese actually originated from Chinese characters. Back when Japan had not yet adopted its current name, during China’s Tang Dynasty, Japan imported the Tang Empire’s advanced institutions and technologies, and written language was introduced to Japan for the first time. They also used Chinese characters for phonetic notation.
For instance, the character 犬 means dog. However, if people wanted to pronounce this word in native Japanese using only Chinese characters, they had to write the phonetic transliteration 以奴.
This method was extremely cumbersome, so the Japanese simplified the Chinese characters that matched each Japanese sound. They created two sets of phonetic scripts from these simplified character fragments: katakana and hiragana.
From then on, they were able to transcribe Japanese pronunciation far more easily.
以奴 → いぬ
We will not dive deeper into the kana system here.
So how do Japanese people use Chinese characters?
Here is a sample Japanese sentence:
私は山に登っています
It contains three kanji: 私, 山, 登.
It is important to note that written Chinese is not a phonetic script.
This allowed the Japanese to read kanji using their native spoken language:
- The character 私 is pronounced sī in Mandarin, but watashi in Japanese.
- The character 山 is pronounced shān in Mandarin, but yama in Japanese.
- The character 登 is pronounced dēng in Mandarin, but nobo in Japanese.
The English translation of this Japanese sentence is:
I'm climbing a mountain To help you visualize this kanji-mixing logic in English, the constructed hybrid writing would look like this:
私'm 登ing a 山
Yet it is still pronounced exactly as the original English sentence:
I'm climbing a mountain.
If we follow the rule of writing the simpler form whenever possible, the streamlined version would be:
I'm climbing a 山
