More About Dates: Writing Kanji (月、日)

Let's now focus on writing Japanese and learn two new kanji.

Writing Japanese

The origin of kanji

As you learned in Lesson 11, kanji (Chinese characters) were imported from China by the Japanese as a writing system beginning about 1600 years ago. With the development of hiragana and katakana over a thousand years ago, the current system of writing Japanese gradually began to evolve. It is estimated that there are approximately 50,000 kanji! Most Japanese today recognize 2,000-3,000 kanji.

The use of kanji

Kanji are used to write the roots of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as well as the names of people and places. Hiragana are used to write the endings on words, such as -ます (-masu) and -ません (-masen) on verbs. Thus, kanji and hiragana can be used together to write a single word. In Japanese the words mimasu and mimasen are written this way:

見ます
- kanji root: 見
- hiragana ending: ます
見ません
- kanji root: 見
- hiragana ending: ません

Writing gatsu and nichi

As in the case of hiragana, each kanji is written following a prescribed stroke order. Be sure to use the correct stroke order as you practice the two new kanji introduced in this lesson.

With kanji, you will sometimes notice slight differences in digital forms and hand-written forms. One of the most obvious examples of this is a kanji we learned earlier which we use for person (noun: ひと、particle: -にん):

Handwritten:

The kanji 人 is presented as a gif using its handwritten form

Typed:

人

Practice: Kanji Stroke Order

The following flashcard will demonstrate the handwritten stroke order for the two new kanji: 月 and 日. The animation only plays once, so if you would like to watch it again, reload the page. Either in your notebook, or with your finger, practice drawing the kanji using the stroke order from the animation.

*Note: as mentioned on the flashcard, 日 can also be read as -ka as in futsuka and itsuka. Thus, ichi-gatsu futsuka is written as １月２日.

Japanese Calendar

One of the first places you will likely see these kanji are in a Japanese calendar. The table below is a recreation of a calendar that includes two weeks of a Japanese calendar with days and dates written in Kanji and Hiragana. Pay careful attention to the different ways that the kanji can be read.

**Japanese Calendar**
Sunday 日よう日 (いちようび)	Monday 月よう日 (げつようび)	Tuesday 火よう日 (かようび)	Wednesday 水よう日 (すいようび)	Thursday 木よう日 (もくようび)	Friday 金よう日 (きんようび)	Saturday 土よう日 (どようび)
１ついたち 1日一日	２ふつか 2日二日	３みっか 3日三日	４よっか４日四日	５いつか５日五日	６むいか６日六日	７なのか７日七日
８ようか８日八日	９ここのか９日九日	１０とうか１０日十日	１１じゅういちにち１１日十一日	１２じゅうににち１２日十二一日	１３じゅうさんにち１３日十三日	１４じゅうよっか１４日十四日

Practice Activities: Kanji in the Real World

Activity 1: Calendar

Answer the following question using the information found in the calendar above.

Activity 2: Newspaper Activity

Look carefully at the image of a Japanese newspaper then answer the questions.

A photograph of a portion of a Japanese newspaper. Text details included on the page — Image text (the text in the image is a bit hard to read, especially the top line - a close approximation of the image text is included below):
Top Line:
昭和27年11月26日第3種郵便物認可　(日刊)©読売新聞社 2009年
Left Side:
衆院選
開票速報 5 6 7 8 9 10
Right Side:
鳩山代表の歩み
海外でも大きく乳
各地の候補の表情
自民55年目の落日

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