Kanji #1

Japanese has many alphabets. Two are made of squiggles which represent sounds in the same way our ABC does. (So just as the letters b, n, a, are used to make up the word banana, two of the alphabets do a similar job giving us バナナ is katakana and ばなな in hiragana. )

But the one that's really interesting is Kanji - or Chinese characters; like the ones dodgy people will paint on your arm in Camden. There's lots of Kanji, thousands in fact. You need 2000 to read a newspaper it's said - and they're my favourite part about learning Japanese.

Kanji are basically ideograms - like Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many they're clearly a simplified image of what they show. 山 represents mountain, and 口 represents mouth for example, while if you can imagine this 人, is "man", then you might guess that 大 is "big" - how big was the fish? it was thiiiis big.

Just as a lego-model spaceship has a wind-shield and a seat that could also be found in a lego-car, so a Kanji often has particles that can be seen in various other Kanji. Thus 耳（ear), while a Kanji in its own right, it can also be found in 聞 (listen) for example; while 門 (gate) is also found in 開 (open) and its opposite, 閉 (close).

Sometimes the combination is itself an expression of wisdom. "Shame" or "haji", for example, is 恥: combining the particle for heart 心 and the kanji for ear. Shame is, in other words, what happens when you listen to your heart.

More interesting things happen when two or more kanji are put together into compounds.
Of course we have our share of this kind of thing in English (goldfish, headache, underground, eye-lid) but nothing to the extent to which Japanese use them. Just taking the body as an example, skull is "head-bone", cartilage is "soft-bone", organ is "inside-machine" and so on...

Often understanding the literal meaning extracts the mystique from the language. For example, "Origami", is usually translated as "the art of paper folding". Which makes it sound quite sophisticated. You can imagine monks with shaved heads chanting as they fold squares of paper into little cranes and water-bombs. However, Origami is two kanji really, "ori" (折り) and "gami" (紙); the first one means "fold", the second means "paper". So if you translate origami you get "fold paper".

Loses something in the translation doesn't it?