For beginner and intermediate students of Japanese, encountering a kanji such as 鬱 (utsu, depression) in the wild can be a somewhat traumatic event that, appropriately, induces a deep, introspective depression regarding their language ability. Let’s pull out our electron microscopes and examine that sucker up close: It’s got an upstairs, a downstairs and what appears to be a safety deposit box holding some secret treasure. It has a kakusū (画数, stroke count) of 29 and takes half an hour to write. How the hell would you even determine the bushu (部首, radical) in order to look up the meaning in a kanji dictionary? It looks like it has 10 bushu.
Kanji such as 鬱 generally cause students to either think that they’ve made a terrible decision to study this language or that kanji themselves should be abolished and replaced with kana (仮名, syllabary characters) or rōmaji (ローマ字, Latin alphabet letters). They’re mistaken.
Kanji may be intricate and complicated and take a significant investment of time to use correctly, but they are an essential part of the Japanese writing system. One that actually makes it easier to read the language.
Take, for example, this sentence: まいにちどらやきをさんこたべる. Without any kanji, a reader must look at each individual hiragana (平仮名) character and, after processing the pronunciation, parse out the words that make up the sentence.
While this may not seem like much to ask, try looking at the same sentence written with katakana (片仮名) characters: マイニチドラヤキヲサンコタベル. That’s enough to induce a migraine in some newbies who may believe katakana are inherently more difficult. What that tells us, though, is that language is all about familiarity. A written language that only uses hiragana might seem easier at first, but this is because beginners have more exposure to hiragana.
Rōmaji requires even less work because they use familiar Latin characters and the spacing helps sort out the words: Mainichi dorayaki wo sanko taberu. But it will be hit or miss. You either know the meanings of the words or you don’t. In other words — and this is key — not knowing the rōmaji is the same as not knowing the kanji. You have to anki (暗記, memorize) something, it’s just a matter of what.
It should be clear that writing the sentence with both kanji and kana produces a more readable result: 毎日どら焼きを三個食べる (I eat three dorayaki every day).
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the kanji, you can at least discern the pieces involved because most kanji compounds come in sets of two or four. For example, 毎日 (mainichi, every day) is a timing adverb set at the beginning of the sentence. Also, it’s easy to tell where どら焼き (dorayaki, red bean pancake) ends because it’s followed immediately by を, a grammatical particle that marks the direct object of the sentence. Beware: を is pronounced identically to お (o) but gets written “wo” in the world of rōmaji.
三個 (sanko, three items) specifies the number of dorayaki that will presumably be taken care of by the verb at the end of the sentence — ah, there it is: 食べる (taberu, to eat).
The first benefit of kanji is that they are so drastically different from kana, they stand out within a sentence, even against each other. Kanji rarely exist in a vacuum, and because readers are familiar with them as compounds (rather than just individual units) and with how kanji become verbs, using kanji helps readers parse the words in a language written without spaces.
With kanji there is also a chance that you can extract the meaning visually. For example, you might not know the exact meaning of 軽食 (keishoku), but it’s clear that it involves eating or food because of the second kanji. The first kanji you may recognize from 軽い (karui, light), so it’s simple enough to understand that this compound literally means “light food/meal,” or a snack.
The word 早食い might confuse you because 食 isn’t pronounced shoku (しょく) or taberu (たべる), but you can determine the meaning rather quickly from the kanji alone. 早 you may recognize from 早い (hayai, fast) and it’s modifying our lovely kanji 食, which we already know means “eat,” so it must be an adverb-verb relationship: eating quickly or speed eating. 食う can be pronounced kū (くう), which in this case becomes gū, so 早食い, is pronounced hayagui.
And finally, kanji make reading more efficient. Our kanji-kana sentence above was only 12 characters as opposed to 15 in the kana-only version. This may sound insignificant, but it’s 20 percent more efficient!
The way kanji create verbs is also efficient. This doesn’t save much space with verbs such as 食べる and 飲む (nomu, to drink) where the kanji only takes the place of one kana. Nevertheless, it efficiently communicates the meaning visually and lets the reader focus on how the verb is inflected: Is it past tense 食べた (tabeta, ate) or did someone overeat with 食べ過ぎる (tabesugiru, eat too much)?
And there are some verbs that replace several kana, the longest of which is 承る (undertake/take). Hidden within that single kanji are five syllables: うけたまわる (uketamawaru). You might recognize the 承 character from menus: Yoyaku wo uketamawarimasu (予約を承ります, We take reservations). Look at all the space the kanji saves compared to the rōmaji!
So the next time someone says they wish that there were more furigana (振り仮名, kana superscript pronunciation guides) or that kanji didn’t exist, tell them that they must help protect the kanji.
In the end, you too can gain access to this efficiency with many hours of study and by having soft eyes, as Detective Bunk Moreland recommends in the HBO TV series “The Wire,” as a method for examining crime scenes: “You got soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. You got hard eyes, you staring at the same tree, missing the forest.”
Soft eyes let you read compounds and pieces of the sentence together rather than seeing them as individual kanji, kana or rōmaji, and given enough time, even the individual strokes of 鬱 will turn into a familiar forest.