Kanji in my Mind

I haven’t updated forever. Sorry guys. I’ve got a lot of craziness going on in my life. Heh. Good craziness, but, it’s crazy!

Anyway, for a quick thought that just crossed my mind… Kanji!

Everyone knows Kanji as those ridiculous picto-grams that take even Japanese people years and years to master. Most people can learn enough to get by before high school, but to -really- master them… it literally can take a life time. There are easy Kanji, like the Kanji fro “one”, 一… and there are hard kanji, like the kanji for ‘rose’ 薔薇, a classic difficult Kanji that most Japanese people cannot write off the top of their head. Of course, if you can’t write rose in Kanji, you can always write it in Hiragana, like ばら。 Hiragana only has 46ish characters and is phonetically arranged, so it’s actually quite easy if you just sit down and do it.

Now that the basics are out of the way, this is why I was thinking about Kanji. Today a coworker came up to me and said “ha-bi, kyou ha raikyaku ga aru, meeting no jikan wo 2ji kara 2:30 he hennkou shitai kedo, ii?” like “今日は来客があるので、今日のMeetingの時間を2二時から二時半に変更したいけど、いい？” Now, the cool thing about Kanji is this.

I have never heard the world “raikyaku” “来客” before. But, get this. From hearing RAI-KYAKU, in my head, I was like, whoa. What is that word. Kyaku sounds like the character ‘kyaku’ used in, 客さん kyakusan, which means customer… and RAI hrm… It sounded like he was saying a customer is coming, and the kanji for come, 来、 can be also pronounced (read) as “rai”, so maybe that’s it. So maybe it means coming, and it is, and it does mean like… a customer coming.

That whole thought process happens all up in my head like, within half a second. I don’t even really notice it anymore, until today. I guess it’s cause I just got back from a 3 month stay in the states.

Also, Kanji works the other way too. If I saw the Kanji 来客 written down, I would guess it meant a customer was coming, even if I didn’t know how to pronounce it.

Isn’t that kinda cool? This way, in Japanese, even if you have no idea what a word means, you get not only the context of the sentence to guess from, but also the possible context of the Kanji characters.

3 cheers for random explanations of random topics!

-Harvey