question about kanji?

Question

If kanji is chinanese why do the japanese use it. My question is this do japanese poeple only use it in writing not oral. I know that they use the katakana and the hiragana witch seem much easyer than the kanji in symbol. But they dont use kanji to speak right.

Answer 1

Kanji (Japanese: 漢字 (help·info)) are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (平仮名), katakana (片仮名), and the Arabic numerals. The Japanese term kanji (漢字) literally means "Han characters".

THEY USE IT FOR READING AND WRITING

Chinese characters came to Japan from China with Kanji articles on which they are written. Their early instances include a gold seal discovered in 1748, which was identified as the one given by the emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 57 CE. It is not clear when Japanese people started to command Classical Chinese by themselves. At first documents were probably written by Chinese immigrants. For example, the diplomatic correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of the Song Dynasty in 478 has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called fuhito were organized under the monarch to read and write Classical Chinese. From the 6th century onwards, Chinese documents written in Japan tended to show interference from Japanese. This suggests the wide acceptance of Chinese characters in Japan.

When first introduced, texts were written in the Chinese language and would have been read as such. Over time, however, a system known as kanbun (漢文) emerged, essentially using Chinese text with diacritical marks to allow Japanese speakers to read the characters in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar.

The Japanese language itself had no written form at the time. A writing system called man'yōgana (used in the ancient poetry anthology Man'yōshū) evolved that used a limited set of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning.


The characters for Kanji, lit. "Han characters".Man'yōgana written in cursive style became hiragana, a writing system that was accessible to women (who were denied higher education). Major works of Heian era literature by women were written in hiragana. Katakana emerged via a parallel path: monastery students simplified man'yōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two other writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are actually descended from kanji.

In modern Japanese, kanji are used to write parts of the language such as nouns, adjective stems and verb stems, while hiragana are used to write inflected verb and adjective endings (okurigana), particles, native Japanese words, and words where the kanji is too difficult to read or remember. Katakana is used for representing onomatopoeia and non-Japanese loanwords.


[edit] Local developments
While kanji are essentially Chinese hanzi used to write Japanese, there are now significant differences between kanji and hanzi, including the use of characters created in Japan, characters that have been given different meanings in Japanese, and post World War II simplifications of the kanji.


[edit] Kokuji
Kokuji (国字; literally "national characters") are characters peculiar to Japan. Kokuji are also known as wasei kanji (和製漢字; lit. "Chinese characters made in Japan"). There are hundreds of kokuji (see the sci.lang.japan FAQ: kokuji list). Many are rarely used, but a number have become important additions to the written Japanese language. These include:

峠 とうげ(tōge) (mountain pass)
榊 さかき(sakaki) (sakaki tree, genus Camellia)
畑 はたけ(hatake) (field of crops)
辻 つじ(tsuji) (crossroads, street)
働 どう(dō), hatara(ku) (work)
Some of them like "働" have been introduced to China.


[edit] Kokkun
In addition to kokuji, there are kanji that have been given meanings in Japanese different from their original Chinese meanings. These kanji are not considered kokuji but are instead called kokkun (国訓) and include characters such as:

沖 oki (offing, offshore; Ch. chōng rinse)
椿 tsubaki (Camellia japonica; Ch. chūn Ailantus)

[edit] Old characters and new characters
The same kanji character can sometimes be written in two different ways, 旧字体 (Kyūjitai; lit. "old character style") (舊字體 in Kyūjitai) and 新字体 (Shinjitai; "new character style"). The following are some examples of Kyūjitai followed by the corresponding Shinjitai:

國 国 kuni, koku (country)
號 号 gō (number)
變 変 hen, ka(waru) (change)
Kyūjitai were used before the end of World War II, and are mostly, if not completely, the same as the Traditional Chinese characters. After the war the government introduced the simplified Shinjitai in the "Tōyō Kanji Character Form List" (Tōyō Kanji Jitai Hyō, 当用漢字字体表). Some of the new characters are similar to simplified characters used in the People's Republic of China. Also, like the simplification process in China, some of the shinjitai were once abbreviated forms (略字, Ryakuji) used in handwriting, but in contrast with the "proper" unsimplified characters (正字 seiji) were only acceptable in colloquial contexts. This page shows examples of these handwritten abbreviations, identical to their modern Shinjitai forms, from the pre WWII era. There are also handwritten simplifications today that are significantly simpler than their standard forms (either untouched or received only minor simplification in the postwar reforms), examples of which can be seen here [1], but despite their wide usage and popularity, they, like their prewar counterparts, are not considered orthographically correct and are only used in handwriting.

Many Chinese characters are not used in Japanese at all. Theoretically, however, any Chinese character can also be a Japanese character—the Daikanwa Jiten, one of the largest dictionaries of kanji ever compiled, has about 50,000 entries, even though most of the entries have never been used in Japanese.


[edit] Readings
Because of the way they have been adopted into Japanese, a single kanji may be used to write one or more different words (or, in most cases, morphemes). From the point of view of the reader, kanji are said to have one or more different "readings". Deciding which reading is meant will depend on context, intended meaning, use in compounds, and even location in the sentence. Some common kanji have ten or more possible readings. These readings are normally categorized as either on'yomi (or on) or kun'yomi (or kun).


[edit] On'yomi (Chinese reading)
The on'yomi (音読み), the Sino-Japanese reading, is a Japanese approximation of the Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was introduced. Some kanji were introduced from different parts of China at different times, and so have multiple on'yomi, and often multiple meanings. Kanji invented in Japan would not normally be expected to have on'yomi, but there are exceptions, such as the character 働 'to work', which has the kun'yomi hataraku and the on'yomi dō, and 腺 'gland', which has only the on'yomi sen.

Generally, on'yomi are classified into four types:

Go-on (呉音; literally Wu sound) readings, from the pronunciation of the Wu region (in the vicinity of modern Shanghai), during the 5th and 6th centuries.
Kan-on (漢音; literally Han sound) readings, from the pronunciation during the Tang Dynasty in the 7th to 9th centuries, primarily from the standard speech of the capital, Chang'an.
Tō-on (唐音；literally Tang sound) readings, from the pronunciations of later dynasties, such as the Song and Ming, covers all readings adopted from the Heian era to the Edo period
Kan'yō-on (慣用音) readings, which are mistaken or changed readings of the kanji that have become accepted into the language.
Examples (rare readings in parentheses)

Kanji Meaning Go-on Kan-on Tō-on Kan'yō-on
明 bright myō mei (min) -
行 go gyō kō (an) -
極 extreme goku kyoku - -
珠 pearl shu shu ju (zu)
度 degree do (to) - -
輸 transport (shu) (shu) - yu

The most common form of readings is the kan-on one. The go-on readings are especially common in Buddhist terminology such as gokuraku 極楽 "paradise". The tō-on readings occur in some words such as isu "chair" or futon.

In Chinese, most characters are associated with a single Chinese syllable. However, some homographs called 多音字 (pinyin: duōyīnzì) such as 行 (pinyin: háng or xíng) (Japanese: kō, gyō) have more than one reading in Chinese representing different meanings, which is reflected in the carryover to Japanese as well. Additionally tonality aside, most Chinese syllables (especially in Middle Chinese, in which final stop consonants were more prevalent than in most modern dialects) did not fit the largely-CV (consonant-vowel) phonotactics of classical Japanese. Thus most on'yomi are composed of two moras (syllables or beats), the second of which is either a lengthening of the vowel in the first mora (this being i in the case of e and u in the case of o, due to linguistic drift in the centuries since), or one of the syllables ku, ki, tsu, chi, or syllabic n, chosen for their approximation to the final consonants of Middle Chinese. In fact, palatalized consonants before vowels other than i, as well as syllabic n, were probably added to Japanese to better simulate Chinese; none of these features occur in words of native Japanese origin.

On'yomi primarily occur in multi-kanji compound words (熟語 jukugo), many of which are the result of the adoption (along with the kanji themselves) of Chinese words for concepts that either didn't exist in Japanese or could not be articulated as elegantly using native words. This borrowing process is often compared to the English borrowings from Latin and Norman French, since Chinese-borrowed terms are often more specialized, or considered to sound more erudite or formal, than their native counterparts. The major exception to this rule is surnames, in which the native kun'yomi reading is usually used (see below).


[edit] Kun'yomi (Japanese reading)
The kun'yomi (訓読み), Japanese reading, or native reading, is a reading based on the pronunciation of a native Japanese word, or yamatokotoba, that closely approximated the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. As with on'yomi, there can be multiple kun readings for the same kanji, and some kanji have no kun'yomi at all.

For instance, the kanji for east, 東, has the on reading tō. However, Japanese already had two words for "east": higashi and azuma. Thus the kanji character 東 had the latter pronunciations added as kun'yomi. However, the kanji 寸, denoting a Chinese unit of measurement (slightly over an inch), had no native Japanese equivalent; thus it only has an on'yomi, sun.

Kun'yomi are characterized by the strict (C)V syllable structure of yamatokotoba. Most noun or adjective kun'yomi are two to three syllables long, while verb kun'yomi are more often one or two syllables in length (not counting trailing hiragana called okurigana, although those are usually considered part of the reading).

In a number of cases, multiple kanji were assigned to cover a single Japanese word. Typically when this occurs, the different kanji refer to specific shades of meaning. For instance, the word なおす, naosu, when written 治す, means "to heal an illness or sickness". When written 直す it means "to fix or correct something" (e.g. a bicycle or a poorly written Wikipedia article). Sometimes the differences are very clear; other times they are quite subtle. Sometimes there are differences of opinion among reference works -- one dictionary may say the kanji are equivalent, while another dictionary may draw distinctions of use. Because of this confusion, Japanese people may have trouble knowing which kanji to use. One workaround is simply to write the word in hiragana, a method frequently employed with more complex cases such as もと moto, which has at least five different kanji, 元, 基, 本, 下, 素, three of which have only very subtle differences

Answer 2

Kanji can be pronounce as Hiragana (and of course Katakana). So "oral Kanji" sounds a little strange cause for example "漢字" is pronounced exactly the same as "かんじ".
It's a bit like "$" and "dollar". Both the same.

Japanese people also start from Hiragana when we are elementary school.
We usually study Japanese for more than 10 years to use it properly.
In fact, average 12-year-old Japanese student cannot read Japanese normal news paper.

Anyway, you can see about Kanji here a little, although the website seems to be new and still poor contents.
http://kanji-tattoo.red-goose.com/about-kanji/

Hope this help !