Thinking about Japanese IV

When I first discovered kanji in Japanese, I fascinated by the idea of a small picture representing a idea. But, it was daunting to learn how complex it was to read these characters. In Japanese, each hiragana character represents exactly one sound or syllable. The character ひ is always pronounced as "hi" (short i vowel). When reading kanji, not only are there one to many syllables per character, but there are often multiple readings for each character given the kanji on either side. These are calling kanji compounds.

Let us consider one of the most simple characters, its pronunciations and meanings: 本. If you know any Japanese, you will know that Nihon or Nippon is the name of Japan in Japanese. It is written as 日本. The first character, 日, is "ni" and means day or sun in this context. The second character, 本, is "hon" or "ppon" (hold the p sound in your lips) and means base. This is why Japan is nicknamed in Western nations as the Land of the Rising Sun.

From the looks of this example, it should be relatively simple to learn syllables to associate with different kanji. Unfortunately, given the preceding or proceeding kanji, the pronunciation of 本 may change. There is a famous city in the north of Japan called Matsumoto. The center of the city has an ancient, well-preserved castle. It is written as 松本. Here, 松 is "matsu", and 本 is "moto". Suddenly, we have a second pronunciation for the same character, 本. Even worse, now this character represents two syllables, where it previously represented one syllable.

And I'll keep going: 元 is pronounced the same, "moto", and also means base or bottom. There is another character, 基, that has the same pronunciation, "moto", and same meaning.

This is getting hard.

Context sometimes changes the definition of a character, such as 六本木 (Roppongi). This is the name of a famous neighborhood in Tokyo frequented by foreigners. It translates to six trees. The first character, 六, means six, and the third character, 木, means tree. What about the second character, 本? It is now used as a counting device for cylindrical objects. Trees, being roughly cylindrical, must be counted using this character.

To give you some perspective, this is an easy example.

If you cannot create the correct sounds to read these characters, you know their basic meaning in any language. Understanding a street sign is reasonable, but reading it aloud is much more difficult.