Why Fuji-san?

One thing that confused me for a while was why Mount Fuji was often written or spoken as Fuji-san.

The first confusing part is that in Japanese, the word "san" is attached as a suffix to names. It roughly translates to Mr/Mrs/Miss in English, but its usage is significantly broader. So Mr Tanaka is Tanaka-san. Easy enough. But Fuji-san isn't that sort of san... Oh no, nothing that simple.

To understand why, you need to understand the kanji that is used to write Mt Fuji in Japanese. It is written as "富士山" which uses the kanji for "Fuji" and "mountain". So far so good. Now kanji usually have a single meaning, but several ways of reading them (more on kunyomi and onyomi another time.) As a rule, "山" by itself is read as "yama". So in the sentence "that mountain is tall isn't it?", you would read it literally as "ano yama wa, se ga takai desu ne" or "あの山は、背が高いですね".

However another way of reading the kanji "山" is as "san". Aha, it is all falling into place! As you would might have guessed, that's the correct way of reading "富士山".

So what can you take away from all this, apart from a slight headache?

If you want to refer to Mt Fuji in English, go wild with Mt Fuji, since it is a safe bet. If you want to use the Japanese version, use Fuji-san. You might even come off sounding all worldly. Or you might not...

As a word of caution, don't use Fuji-yama! It is just plain wrong and will earn you naught but scorn and derision from all who know you.

Writing Japanese 101

I thought it would be fun to impart a little bit of knowledge with everyone on the Japanese writing system. I'll try and keep it short and amusing, so bear with me a little here.

Japanese has 3 primary writing systems, 4 if you count the use of English characters. Let's not and just say we did though.

So, first up we have hiragana, an alphabet of some 46 characters (not including compounds) used to represent sounds. This system is used initially by children to write all words. However as they progress through school, most of the hiragana is replace by kanji, leaving it to be used to write particles, modify verbs and other specific situations. The well known "konnichiwa" (good day/hello) is written entirely in hiragana - こんにちは.

The second of these systems is katakana. Similar hiragana it is a defined alphabet with 46 base characters. This is used to write all words of foreign origin. Can you guess what the English word behind クリスマス (Kurisumasu), ウイスキー(uisukii) and テレビ (terebi) are? Katakana is also used to write telegrams, cause you know we use those all the time these days, and in advertising to spice things up.

Finally we arrive at kanji, the vast array of complicated symbols that were imported from China (thanks a bunch guys!) at around 57 AD. Kanji represent meaning rather than a single set sound. This means that each kanji may represent anything from a single syllable to a whole word, or both depending on the circumstances. There are tens of thousands of kanji in existence, however you need only know 1945 of them to be able to read a newspaper.

I've been learning Japanese twice a week for about 18 months now and I've picked up about 300 of the little suckers. 300 of the easy ones. And I've probably forgotten half of them at any given time. Not my favourite aspect of Japanese I admit.

One of the kanji I recently learnt is quite amusing - 議 - which is pronounced "gi" or "ぎ" when written in hiragana. About 20 individual strokes make up that character, all for a single syllable. Inconceivable!

What's in a Name?

A quick one this time - why is this blog called Japansei?

Well it is a (not very clever) play on words. Obviously the Japan part means... well, Japan. The word "sei" is a suffix applied in Japanese to mean "made in". So something made in Japan would be 日本製 (nihonsei) where 日本 (nihon) means "Japan" and 製 is the kanji for "sei" or "made in". Linguistic fun for everyone!