Kanji In Context: 呪文

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I acquired a great deal of Japanese reading material during my time in Japan. Though I am nowhere near fluent in Japanese (I failed the JLPT level 3 twice) I nevertheless enjoy reading, and occasionally struggling, through a japanese manga or light novel.

There are a couple of lessons I've learned while trying to find books that not only interest me, but also achieve that delicate balance between amusement and challenge. I need something that will push me to learn something new, but not something so hard that reading it becomes a chore. I find the best books for me are those which are set in our reality with maybe a hint of something otherworldly to make it interesting. It's even better if the story is set in a school. The reason being is that I have become quite comfortable with words associated with school life and those were the most useful for me to learn while I was in Japan.

While One Piece may be my favorite manga in English, I found it too time consuming to really appeal to me in Japanese. It taught me a number of interesting words like pirate, captain, and navy. However, it is so seeped in its own world that I found myself having to look up every other word and taking as much as an hour to get through a single chapter. I instead started gravitating to titles such as Super Dog Rilianthal, Kuroko no Baske, Enigma, and Yotsuba&! They were easier to follow and helped reinforce vocabulary I would use on a regular basis while also introducing me to new words. I still read a bit on the slow side, but can get through a volume of one of these titles in a few days if I'm really motivated.

Before I get to the crux of this post, I suppose I should explain briefly what kanji is. Japanese actually consists of three forms of writing: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana is closest to the English alphabet, with a symbol to represent one of 46 syllables. For example, to write the syllable "de" you use the symbol "で". Katakana is a second alphabet with letters representing the same 46 syllables as hiragana. The difference between the two is in usage. Katakana is used exclusively for loan words, words taken from other languages. So the "で” from earlier becomes"デ”. Confused yet? Well, it gets worse...

Kanji is the third form of writing in Japan. Unlike hiragana and katakana, kanji consists of pictographs, symbols that represent ideas more than they do sounds. Due to the complicated way in which kanji was brought over from China and adapted for the Japanese language, each kanji can have several pronunciations, though their meanings are fairly consistant. The trouble with kanji, and something I didn't realize until I actually visited Japan, is that without it you are illiterate. While some writing, especially comics or books for kids, will include the hiragana readings for kanji, a practice called furigana, most do not as it is assumed the average citizen knows how to pronounce it.

As yet another avenue to share my growth and experience with the Japanese language, I thought it would be fun to occasionally share what I'm currently reading and explain a word I've recently learned from it.

Today's word comes from a light novel called Kuromajosan ga Toru. It's the story of an elementary witch in training. As such, though today's word will rarely come up in conversation, it's nevertheless a fun one to know. The word is 呪文(じゅもん, jumon) and means spell, charm, incantation, or magic word. The first kanji 呪(のろ, noro) can mean charm or curse. I became familiar with this kanji while reading Enigma, as the character Moto often refers to his power as a curse early on. The second kanji 文(ぶん, bun) has a number of meanings, though I've most often seen it associated either with art in words such as 文化(ぶんか, bunka) which means culture or with literature, figures, and sentences in words like 文書(ぶんしょ, bunsho) which means document or writing. Putting the two together gives you a compound meaning something along the lines of "cursed word" or "charmed sentence" thus explaining how the same term could apply to a single word or an entire incantation.

I'll no doubt run across a few more unfamiliar words as I work my way through this book (I just finished chapter one after all) and when I do, I'll be sure to do my best to explain what I've learned from it. If your interested in attempting reading japanese manga to help your studies, I'd suggest yesasia as a good place to start. I've also found jisho.org to be the best, most comprehensive online Japanese to English dictionary. See you next time.