About Kanji, a Form of Japanese Writing

Japanese Kanji is often seen as a very complex set of characters to learn for those who are studying the Japanese language to learn. Many of the characters that are seen in Japanese Kanji come from their Chinese counterparts, or Chinese Kanji. The characters have been hard for many to learn in Japan in the past so in an effort to make the complex characters easier to read, write and understand the government of Japan made the joyo kanji hyo list of characters that were originally from china. This list includes almost 2 thousand characters that are regular and at least 160 specialized characters that are to be used for the purpose of writing people’s names in Japan. Many newspapers as well as other publications use this special form of Kanji but others use both at times or only the non specialized version of it. Learning Japanese can be a tough thing to pursue especially when it comes to learning Kanji but just like learning any other languages some may find this aspect of the language much easier than others.

An interesting fact about the word Kanji is that it means Han characters. In addition to this, in china Kanji is synonymous with the word hanzi and both variations of the word refer to the writing style of the Chinese Han Dynasty. When it comes to school children in japan it is imperitive that the start learning Kanji at an early age and they are expected to know the full range of joyo Kanji characters by the time they graduate high school. In addition to this there are many other characters in addition to the joyo ones and the people of Japan must learn these in order to write and read ordinary and specialist text making the learning of the full range of characters a very tall task for anyone who studies the Japanese language.