かんじ: Introduction to Kanji
In addition to hiragana and katakana, the Japanese use kanji. Japan's Ministry of Education requires Japanese grade schools to teach 1,006 kanji from grades one through six. By the time they graduate from high school, Japanese people are expected to know a total of 1,945 kanji. More than 85% of the characters used in the newspaper are kanji. As these figures suggest, kanji is an important part of Japanese language.
Kanji represent both reading and meaning. In around 100 A.D., kanji entered from China through the Korean peninsula. Japanese language borrowed thousands of words from Chinese and people in old days adopted those words with the Chinese readings, which are now called on-yomi. In addition, people started to use the concept of kanji to express the meaning of Japanese native words, whose readings are called kun-yomi. As a result, most kanji now have more than one sound or reading.
In each unit of Japanese 1b, you will learn approximately ten new kanji. The Unit 1 kanji are numbers. You have learned a lot of number-related expressions, such as how to express time, dates, months, and age, and how to count people. Do you remember that there are several irregular readings? For example:
One o’clock: いちじ 一時
One minute: いっぷん 一分
The first day of the month:ついたち 一日
January: いちがつ 一月
One person: ひとり 一人
These irregular readings are expressed only one kanji, 一. This is how you can express the meaning of words.
In addition, there is no word space between words in Japanese writing. Actually, kanji shows the boundaries of words very clearly, so spaces are not necessary with hiragana, katakana, and kanji efficiently intermixed like the sentence below:
クリスマスは十二月二十五日です。 Christmas is December 25th.
Please click here to look at the new kanji. You will practice reading and writing kanji as much as possible so that you will be able to use kanji fluently and correctly. Although handwriting is not tested, you should practice handwriting using the worksheet, paying attention to stroke order and stroke direction.
Graded Assignments
Please return to the Section 1 Tasks & Assignments folder to complete the graded assignments for Section 1, Part G.
