Tattoos in the form of Chinese and Japanese characters are very popular in European countries. Tattoo hieroglyphs carry originality and mysticism, since their meaning is practically unknown to anyone except the owner himself. But despite this, a seemingly simple symbol can hide deep meaning and powerful energy. In fact, only Europeans apply Chinese and Japanese characters on their bodies, while residents of these Asian countries prefer English inscriptions, which are written with grammatical errors. Be that as it may, hieroglyphs are very difficult to translate.
Before choosing any design you like, take a little time to find out the exact meaning of the symbols. Otherwise, you can end up in an unpleasant situation, for example, the one that happened two years ago to a German teenager. After paying 180 euros, the young man asked the tattoo artist to infuse him with Chinese characters meaning “love, respect, obey.”
Having got the long-awaited tattoo, the guy went on vacation to China. Imagine his surprise when Chinese waitresses in restaurants constantly paid attention to him. The young man decided to ask why his tattoo had such an effect. Having learned the correct translation of his hieroglyphs, the young man was shocked. On his arm was the inscription “At the end of the day I become an ugly boy.” Returning home, I discovered that the tattoo parlor was closed. The unlucky guy had to undergo laser tattoo removal for 1,200 euros.
If you decide to get hieroglyphs as a tattoo, find out their meaning in advance in authoritative reference books, or choose from the most popular and sought-after symbols.
Meaning of hieroglyphs
Chinese characters tattoo
Zi is the name of the traditional Chinese script used to write official documents in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Chinese settlements. The Chinese “alphabet” (let’s call it that) contains 47,000 letter-symbols Tzu. In order to improve the literacy of the population, the government passed a law to simplify the writing system. Many dashes, sticks and dots have disappeared from use.
The Chinese themselves say that to speak and write fluently in Chinese, you only need 4,000 characters. Yes, hieroglyphs are really difficult both to write and to translate. However, a certain trend has already emerged for tattoos. The most popular and sought-after tattoo hieroglyphs are considered to be symbols meaning love, strength, family, luck, peace, fire. This doesn't mean your choices are limited to just these words. With the help of Chinese tattoos, you can express your positive or negative emotions, inspire yourself with encouraging words, or capture a pleasant moment in your memory.
Japanese characters tattoo
Japanese hieroglyph tattoos, like Chinese ones, are popular almost everywhere except these countries themselves. Writing in Japan consists of three systems: kanji, katakana and hiragana. Kanzi is the most common of the three. The symbols from this system come from Chinese writing. However, Japanese characters are easier to write. In total, the alphabet has 50,000 characters, most of which belong to nouns. Katakana is used primarily for loanwords, internationalisms, and proper names. Hiragana is responsible for adjectives and other grammatical phenomena. Tattoos based on the symbols of this system are much less common than the previous two.
Many celebrities have chosen Japanese characters as tattoos. For example, Britney Spears chose a symbol that translates as “strange.” However, in reality the singer wanted to get a tattoo with the words “mystical”. Melanie C, the ex-peppercorn, has never hidden her girl power. The phrase "Girl Power" was the group's motto. It was these words that Mel C tattooed on her shoulder. Pink expressed her happiness with a Japanese tattoo of the same name.
Would you get such a tattoo for yourself?We look forward to your comments!
Most people who start learning Japanese sooner or later also start learning Japanese characters.
The Japanese have a saying: “How you sit while writing a character is how you will write it.”
That is, the posture while writing the hieroglyph must be correct: the feet are on the floor, the hips are on the chair parallel to the floor, the back is straight.
By the way, when writing hieroglyphs, the elbows should not be placed on the table, but should be gently lowered from the table. The distance between the notebook on which you are writing and your eyes should be sufficient - you do not need to lean forward too much.
There are rules in writing hieroglyphs - they must be written in a strictly defined order, line by line.
Let's look at other rules:
1. It is very important to write hieroglyphs harmoniously, that is, all parts of the hieroglyph must be arranged so that these parts form a single hieroglyph. A common mistake that beginners make when learning hieroglyphs is that they write the parts that make up the hieroglyph at a fairly large distance from each other.
Hieroglyphs should be written compactly:
2. Hieroglyphs should be written from left to right or from top to bottom.
Let's first look at what types of hieroglyphs are written from top to bottom.
3. follows from left to right.
From left to right, the following hieroglyphs are written:
Also, small lines are written from left to right, following each other at the bottom of the hieroglyphs:
4. There is a sufficient number of hieroglyphs when one line crosses the entire hieroglyph.
In such cases, this line is written last:
5. should be written vertically.
Beginners learning Japanese often make a common mistake - writing characters slanted either to the right or to the left. Of course, there are Japanese who write characters with an angle, but they should still be written strictly vertically:
So, we looked at the basic rules for writing hieroglyphs.
I hope that they will help you write hieroglyphs correctly and beautifully!
The last and most famous aspect of Japanese writing is kanji. Kanji are Chinese characters adapted for Japanese. Most Japanese words are written in kanji, but the sounds are the same as in hiragana and katakana.
Stroke order
From the very beginning of studying, pay attention to the correct order and direction of the lines to avoid bad habits. Often students don't see the point in stroke order if the result is the same. But what they miss is that there are thousands of characters and they are not always written as carefully as they appear on print. The correct stroke order helps you recognize hieroglyphs, even if you write quickly or by hand.
The simplest symbols, called radicals, are often used as components of complex symbols. Once you learn the stroke order of the radicals and get used to the principle, you will find that it is not difficult to guess the correct order for most kanji.
Most often, strokes are applied from the upper left corner to the lower right. This means that horizontal strokes are usually drawn from left to right, and vertical strokes are usually drawn from top to bottom. In any case, when you are in doubt about the stroke order, consult a Kanji dictionary.
Kanji in the lexicon
Modern Japanese uses a little over 2 thousand characters, and memorizing each one individually does not work as well as with hiragana.
An effective strategy for mastering kanji is to study with new words with more context. So, to consolidate in memory, we associate a symbol with contextual information. Kanji is used to represent real words, so focus on the words and vocabulary rather than the characters themselves.
You'll see how kanji works by learning a few common kanji and words in this paragraph.
Kanji readings
The first kanji we'll learn is 「人」, the character for "person". This is a simple symbol of two lines, each of which is drawn from top to bottom. You may have noticed that the character in the font doesn't always look like the handwritten version below. This is another important reason to check the order of strokes.
Kanji in Japanese have one or more readings, which are divided into two categories: kunyomi(or kun, or kunnoe reading) and onyomi(or He, or onny reading). Kun'yomi is the Japanese reading of the character, while on'yomi is based on the original Chinese pronunciation.
Kun'yomi is mainly used for words of one character. As an example, a word with the meaning “person”:
人 【ひと】 - person
Kun'yomi is also used for native Japanese words, including most adjectives and verbs.
Onyomi is mostly used for words that come from Chinese, often consisting of two or more kanji. For this reason, onyomi is often written in katakana. More examples will follow as we learn kanji. One very useful example of onyomi is adding 「人」 to country names to describe nationality.
- アメリカ人 【アメリカ・じん】 - American
- フランス人 【ふらんす・じん】 - French
Although most kanji do not have many kun'yomi or on'yomi, the most common kanji, like 「人」, have many readings. Here I will provide only readings that apply to the words being studied. Learning the readings without word context creates unnecessary confusion, so I don't recommend teaching all the readings at once.
Now that we've gotten to know the general idea, let's learn a little more words and their accompanying kanji. The red dots on the stroke order diagrams show where each stroke begins.
- 日本 【に・ほん】 - Japan
- 本【ほん】 - book
- 高い【たか・い】 - tall; Expensive
- 学校【がっ・こう】 - school
- 高校 【こう・こう】 - high school (third level of education, equivalent to grades 10–12 in our country)
- 小さい 【ちい・さい】 - small
- 大きい 【おお・きい】 - big
- 小学校 【しょう・がっ・こう】 - primary school (first stage of education, corresponds to grades 1–6 in our country)
- 中学校 【ちゅう・がっ・こう】 - secondary school (second stage of education, grades 7–9 here)
- 大学【だい・がく】 - college; university
- 小学生 【しょう・がく・せい】 - primary school student
- 中学生 【ちゅう・がく・せい】 - high school student
- 大学生 【だい・がく・せい】 - student
- 国【くに】 - country
- 中国 【ちゅう・ごく】 - China
- 中国人 【ちゅう・ごく・じん】 - Chinese
| 語 | Meaning: language |
| Onyomi: ゴ |
With just 14 characters, we've learned over 25 words - from Chinese to schoolboy! Kanji is usually perceived as a major learning obstacle, but can easily be turned into a valuable tool when learned alongside words.
Okurigana and changing readings
You may have noticed that some words end in hiragana, such as 「高い」 or 「大きい」. Since these are adjectives, the accompanying hiragana, called okurigana, is needed for various transformations without affecting kanji. Remember exactly where kanji ends and hiragana begins. There is no need to write 「大きい」 as 「大い」.
You may also notice that the kanji readings individually do not match the readings in some words. For example, 「学校」 is read as 「がっこう」 and not 「がくこう」. Readings are often transformed in this way to make pronunciation easier.
Ideally, check your reading of each word that is new to you. Luckily, with the help of online and electronic dictionaries, finding new kanji is easy.
(English)
Kanji is often used to create nuance or give a different flavor to the meaning of a word. For some words, it is important to use the correct kanji in the right situation. For example, the adjective 「あつい」 - “hot” - when describing climate it is written as 「暑い」, and if we are talking about a hot object or person - 「熱い」.
In other cases, although kanji are used that are correct for all meanings of the chosen word, the author has the right to choose characters with a narrow meaning according to style. The examples in this book generally use common and simple kanji. For details on using different kanji for the same word, see (English).
Let's talk about the Japanese language. It’s worth mentioning right away that this language is unique and its position in the system of other languages is still controversial. It is usually considered as an isolated language, but there is an opinion that Japanese should still be classified as an Altai language. For example, the same language family includes Korean and Mongolian. The total number of Japanese speakers in the world is about 140 million people.
Japanese is the native language of more than 125 million Japanese people. In its grammatical structure, it is agglutinative, that is, a language in which the main method of word formation is agglutination, that is, an abundance of various suffixes and prefixes, due to which words change shape. Also, the Japanese language expresses grammatical meanings synthetically: synthetic languages express grammatical meanings within the word itself using stress, internal inflection, and so on. The Russian language is also classified as a synthetic language.
Usually, when teaching Japanese to foreigners, it is called “nihongo”, that is, literally “Japanese language”. In Japan itself, as part of the native culture, it is called “kokugo” - the national language. I will not go into the history of the origin of the Japanese language for now; this is an even more controversial and complex issue than its position in the world system of languages.
It’s not for nothing that I called this post “Three Types of Japanese Writing,” because there are just three of them. Moreover, two of them are generally unique, and one, let’s say, is not unique at all =) I’ll start a little from afar. There is often an argument about which direction the Japanese write. It's simple: there is a traditional way, borrowed from the Chinese - the characters are written from top to bottom, and the columns go from right to left. This method is still used in newspapers and fiction.
Things are different in scientific sources: they often have to use Western terms, so symbols are written in the usual way for us - from left to right, in lines. In general, horizontal writing was officially adopted only in 1959, and is now used everywhere. It sometimes happens that the symbols run horizontally, but from right to left - a rare case, used on signs and slogans, but essentially in this case, each column simply consists of one sign. That's all, today the Japanese for the most part write like us.
Now, actually, to the topic of this post. The first part of Japanese writing that I will talk about is called “kanji” - these are hieroglyphs borrowed from China. This term literally translates as “Han letters”, this is one of the Chinese dynasties. An example kanji is 武士道 (literally " ", the first two characters mean "warrior", the last one means "path").
Presumably this type of writing came to Japan in the 5th century AD along with Buddhist monks. Each hieroglyph represents a certain meaning or its abstract expression, that is, one symbol can be either a whole word or meaning, or part of a word. Today, kanji are used to write the stems of nouns, adjectives and verbs, and their number has been reduced to two thousand. It would be a bit strange to show all the kanji here, so I'm only showing a group of kanji that require 18 hand movements to write.
At the time when Chinese characters came to China, the country did not have its own written language. Then, to record Japanese words, the “Man’yōgana” writing system was created; its essence is that words are written in Chinese characters not by meaning, but by sound. Next, Man'yogana, written in italics, is converted into "hiragana" - a writing system for women.
In Ancient Japan, higher education was not available to them and the study of kanji was closed to them. In parallel with hiragana, “katakana” also arose - the most simplified man’yogana. Subsequently, these two alphabets turned into modern katakana and hiragana, the first types of writing studied in the elementary grades of Japanese schools. In these alphabets, each character is a syllable, since the Japanese language has a clear syllabic structure.
With 46 basic hiragana characters and a few additional symbols, you can write anything you want in Japanese. Katakana is commonly used to write words of foreign origin, terms, names, and so on. I use hiragana to write native Japanese words. For example, let's take the same phrase - The Way of the Warrior. In Japanese it is read as "bushido". In hiragana it looks like this - ぶしどう. And in katakana - ブシドイ. Below are two character tables with readings, first hiragana, below katakana.
Symbols of syllabary alphabets are more often used to write those same suffixes and prefixes. As for kanji, compared to the Chinese “Hanzi”, they have many purely Japanese additions: some hieroglyphs were invented in Japan (“kokuji”), some changed their meaning (“kokkun”). There is also an old and a new way of writing the same thing - "kyūjitai" and "shinjitai" respectively.
In general, this topic is very extensive, and I have not written much here, but I think there is no point in closing the topic for now.
In today's article we will take a closer look.
You will learn:
- How did hieroglyphs appear in Japan?
- Why do hieroglyphs need “on” and “kun” readings?
- How many hieroglyphs do you need to know?
- Why the Japanese won't give up hieroglyphs
- How to read the symbol "々"
- What order of writing strokes should be followed?
- And much more!
At the end of the article you will find copybooks that will help you write several Japanese characters yourself.
Japanese characters and their meaning
For writing, the Japanese use special characters - hieroglyphs, which were borrowed from China. In Japan, hieroglyphs are called “Letters (of the Han Dynasty)”, or “Chinese characters” 漢字 (kanji). The system of Chinese characters is believed to have originated 
as early as the 16th century BC. Japanese is the language until the 5th century AD. had no written form. This was due to strong state fragmentation. Japan was a weak state, consisting of many principalities, each of which had its own power, its own dialect. But gradually strong rulers came to power, the unification of principalities began in the country, which led to the adoption of the culture and writing of the most powerful state at that time. It is not known exactly how Chinese writing ended up in Japan, but there is a widespread version that the first hieroglyphs were brought to the country by Buddhist monks. Adaptation of Chinese writing was not easy, because... The Japanese language has nothing in common with Chinese in grammar, vocabulary, and phonetics. Initially, Kanji and Chinese Hanzi were no different from each other. But now a difference has appeared between them: some characters were created in Japan itself - “national characters” 国字 (kokuji), some received a different meaning. And after World War II, the writing of many kanji was simplified.
Why do Japanese characters need multiple readings?
The Japanese borrowed from the Chinese language not only hieroglyphs, but also their readings. Having heard the original Chinese reading of a character, the Japanese tried to pronounce it in their own way. This is how the “Chinese” or “on” reading came about – 音読 (onyomi). For example, the Chinese word for water (水) – “shui”, taking into account the peculiarities of Japanese pronunciation, turned into “sui”. Some kanji have multiple onyomi because they were borrowed from China several times: in different periods and from different areas. But when the Japanese wanted to use characters to write their own words, Chinese readings were not enough. Therefore, there was a need to translate the hieroglyphs into Japanese. Just as the English word "water" is translated as "みず, mizu", the Chinese word "水" has been given the same meaning as "みず". This is how the “Japanese”, “kun” reading of the hieroglyph appeared - 訓読み, (kunyomi). Some kanji may have several kuns at once, or may not have them at all. Frequently used Japanese characters can have ten different readings. The choice of reading a hieroglyph depends on many things: the context, the intended meaning, combination with other kanji, and even the place in the sentence. Therefore, often the only sure way to determine where the reading is on and where the reading is kunnoe is to learn specific constructions.
How many hieroglyphs are there in total?
It is almost impossible to answer the question about the total number of hieroglyphs, since their number is truly enormous. Judging by the dictionaries: from 50 to 85 thousand. However, in the computer field, font systems have been released that contain encodings for 170-180 thousand characters! It includes all ancient and modern ideograms ever used throughout the world. In ordinary texts, for example, newspapers or magazines, only a small part of hieroglyphs is used - about 2500 characters. Of course, there are also rare hieroglyphs, mostly technical terms, rare first and last names. There is a list of “kanji for everyday use” (“joyo-kanji”) approved by the Japanese government, which contains 2136 characters. This is the number of characters a Japanese school graduate should remember and be able to write.
How to quickly memorize hieroglyphs?
Why don't the Japanese give up hieroglyphs?
Many students of Japanese or Chinese often wonder: why does such an inconvenient writing system still exist? Hieroglyphs are classified as ideographic signs, the outline of which retains at least a symbolic, but similarity with the depicted object. For example, the first Chinese characters are images of specific objects: 木 - “tree”, 火 - “fire”, etc. The relevance of hieroglyphs today is partly explained by the fact that ideographic writing has some advantages over phonographic writing. People speaking different languages can communicate using the same ideograms, because an ideogram conveys the meaning, not the sound, of a word. For example, when seeing the sign “犬”, a Korean, Chinese and Japanese will read the character differently, but they will all understand that it is about a dog. Another advantage is the compactness of the letter, because one sign represents a whole word. But if the Chinese, for example, have no alternative to hieroglyphs, then the Japanese have syllabary alphabet! Will the Japanese give up hieroglyphs in the near future? They won't refuse. Indeed, due to the huge number of homonyms in the Japanese language, the use of hieroglyphs becomes simply necessary. Even if they sound the same, words are written in different hieroglyphs depending on their meaning. What can we say about the Japanese mentality, which implies loyalty to traditions and pride in its history. And thanks to the computer, the problem associated with complex writing of hieroglyphs was resolved. Today you can type Japanese texts very quickly.
Why is the symbol needed?々 »?
The symbol "々" is not a hieroglyph. As we already know, any ideographic sign has at least one specific phonetic correspondence. The same icon constantly changes its reading. This symbol is called a repetition sign, and it is needed in order to avoid re-writing hieroglyphs. For example, the word “people” consists of two characters for “person” - “人人” (hitobito), but for simplicity this word is written “人々”. Although Japanese does not have a grammatical plural form, it can sometimes be formed by repeating kanji, as in our human example:
- 人 hito - person; 人々 hitobito - people;
- 山 pit - mountain; 山々 yamayama - mountains;
It also happens that some words change their meaning when doubled:
- 時 currents - time; 時々 tokidoki - sometimes.
The character "々" has many names: the dancing sign 踊り字 (odoriji), the repetition sign 重ね字 (kasaneji), noma-ten ノマ点 (due to its similarity to the katakana characters ノ and マ), and many others.
What is the order of writing traits in hieroglyphs?
Along with Chinese, Japanese characters have a certain sequence of writing strokes. Correct stroke order helps ensure that characters are recognizable even when you write them quickly. The Japanese reduced this order to several rules, which, of course, have exceptions. The most important rule: hieroglyphs are written top to bottom and left to right. Here are some more basic rules:
1. Horizontal lines are written from left to right and parallel;
2. Vertical lines are written from top to bottom;
3. If a hieroglyph has both vertical and horizontal lines, then the horizontal ones are written first;
4. The vertical line that intersects the hieroglyph or its element in the center is written last;
5. Horizontal lines passing through the sign are also written last;
6. First the slash to the left is written, then the slash to the right;
With the correct order of strokes, the hieroglyph turns out beautiful, and it is much easier to write. All kanji must be the same size. For a hieroglyph to be balanced, it must strictly fit into a square of a given size. Now that you know what order of strokes you need to follow, try writing a few simple hieroglyphs, which we have already encountered in this article:
人 - person
山 - mountain
水 - water
木-tree
火 - fire
I hope that you learned something new and interesting from this article. As homework, write down the above several times. I think that everyone who is familiar with hieroglyphs has their own favorite hieroglyph, the one that was immediately remembered or liked. Do you have a favorite hieroglyph? Share in the comments about completing your homework, I will also be glad to hear your impressions. Second part .
Want to learn more about hieroglyphs?
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