Hello,
I am learning Japanese and have a question about Kanji. I know there are 4 types of Kanji. Pictograph, ideograph, compound ideograph and keisei moji. Is there an app for the phone or something that tells me what category a kanji falls under as I learn the kanji one by one? Thank you!
4 comments
I’ve been studying Japanese a while now and Im working towards N4 and I’m not sure how important that knowledge is?
The reason I say that is because I’ve used a lot of apps now and none of them placed importance on the distinction.
Not sure if anyone else can shed light on the matter?
If you look a character on wiktionary there will usually be a ‘glyph origin’ part. Keisei moji are called phono semantic compounds
I’m studying for my N2, been in Japan for over 2 years, and I’ve never heard of these classifications. I don’t think this is important information or something you need to worry about for studying.
It is a very interesting subject. There are actually not 4 but 6 class. The last two are very specific and somehow derivative from the 4 first so sometime omitted. This is called rikisho (althrough it is written 六書).
This is not something you need to know to learn japanese so there are not many ressources in foreign language (there are probably in chinese/korean), all links below are in japanese.
You can have details on those 6 categories here (in simple japanese) : https://nihongokyoiku-shiken.com/the-formation-and-classification-of-kanji-six-books/
You’ll notice that the last 2 are reusing an existing kanji because reading/meaning was similar.
For the dictionnary, you can find this one which shows the rikisho : https://kanjitisiki.com/
For example : https://kanjitisiki.com/tyugako/tyugaku06/080.html
You can see at the bottom of the page 成り立ち and under :形声 and then it tells you 意 and 音 for the meaning/sound part.
That being said you also have to know that almost 90% of the kanjis are keisei 形声・会意 with the majority being the 1st one (see https://blog.goo.ne.jp/ishiseiji/e/dea472b49df5b474d84effa48407364e)
One last thing is the kanji ethymology is a subject by itself. There are sometime different explanations depending on the “master”. The first dictionnary with this classification is from Xu Shen and date back from year 0 or something but kanjis are much older. If you are interested search for 説文解字 (which is actually referenced in the link above.