A resident of New Jersey, Adam Porcher is pursuing a computer science degree at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, NJ. During his free time, Adam Porcher engages in a diverse range of interests, including the study of the Japanese culture and language.
Japanese is known as one of the most difficult languages to master for English speakers, largely due the complexity of the writing system. In addition to having not one but two alphabets, Japanese relies heavily on kanji, an ideographic system in which characters correspond to sounds, words, and entire concepts. Complicating matters further, kanji characters can often be read in multiple ways.
The complexity of kanji can be traced to its origins and the early history of the Japanese language. Originally, Japanese was only a spoken language, without any form of writing system at all. Japan’s neighboring country, China, did have a writing system, and as the two cultures intermingled, Japanese speakers began to adopt Chinese ideographic characters to represent Japanese spoken words. These ideographic characters became known as kanji.
Early Japanese speakers didn’t simply map their own pronunciations onto Chinese characters. They sometimes adopted the Chinese pronunciation, as well. This meant that some kanji could have two completely different pronunciations meaning the same thing. For example, the kanji for “mountain,” which looks a bit like the head of a three-tined pitchfork, can be pronounced “yama,” the traditional Japanese word for “mountain,” or as “san,” which is the way the Chinese pronounced the character from which the kanji is derived.
