Lesson 1ようこそ、むさしトレーディングへ！ Welcome to Musashi Trading

Let us learn kanji

For now, learn to use 10 of the 113 Kanji that appear in the elementary level N5 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test that we have selected for you.

The Kanji characters came to Japan from China long ago and are still used today.

The difficulty of Japanese Kanji lies in the many ways the characters are pronounced when read aloud. The first is in the “音読み“(onyomi) reading method, based on the original pronunciation in Chinese for each character.  The second is the ”訓読み (kunyomi) reading method which applies and attaches the original pronunciation of Japanese words to Kanji characters with the same or similar meaning.

For example, “山” the Kanji character for mountain. There are two ways to read this: san and yama. While both means mountain, “san” is originally a Chinese word, and “yama” is a word originally used by the Japanese.

サンsan　　山　　やまyama

So how do we use them properly? Onyomi is often used together with other characters. That is because onyomi by itself does not reflect the meaning. Kunyomi, on the other hand, makes sense when you hear the sound.

For example, the word “サン” usually does not conjure up images of mountains for a Japanese. On the other hand, if “富士” is placed before “サン”, it becomes “富士山”  (“Mt. Fuji”). Then it finally makes sense.

On the other hand, if you pronounce “yama”, the Japanese will automatically associate it with a mountain.

Basically, there are only these two methods of reading and pronouncing each Kanji. However, when combined with other words, pronunciation or the reading method of the onyomi and kunyomi for that Kanji changes slightly. Because there are variations in how the Kanji is read for both onyomi and kunyomi methods, you need to remember how to pronounce a Kanji for each instance.

First of all, memorize the Kanji character, its standard meaning and the Kun pronunciation as a set.  After that, as you master more Kanji, you must learn how to read and pronounce that Kanji at the same time. So, it can be said that the most difficult part in mastering Japanese Kanji is that learning how to read it, is not enough.