Kanji are the mysterious Chinese pictographs used in China, Japan, and to a limited extent, in South Korea. While they can seem like meaningless chicken scratches at first, they’re actually a well organized complex system for communicating meaning. There are several fundamental ways that kanji are constructed, the most common being organized by radical, where similar words are grouped according to their meaning. For example, the characters for “read” “speak” and “language” all have a left section that looks like a stack of books, and words related to the weather such as “snow” “lightning” and “cloud” all incorporate the character for “rain” into them. When you look up a word using a kanji dictionary, searching for the radical first is a quick way to find the character you need to look up. Despite the complex structure of kanji, there are some characters that are made in such a way that their meaning are immediately communicated, even to beginners. Words like the kanji for the numbers for 1, 2 and 3 are easy, as are some basic words like mountain (yama). The character for “old” (furui) looks like a little Western grave stone, while the kanji for “meat” (niku) is a little rib cage. One of the simplest characters is ki (tree), which can become hayashi (woods) if you draw it twice, or mori (forest) if you draw three of them. Easy as pie!
