What is the best way to decipher a Japanese symbol?

Answer 1

The first step to figuring out the meaning of a Japanese character is to determine which writing system it's written in. Japanese uses three writing systems: katakana, hiragana, and kanji.

片仮名/カタカナ katakana and 平仮名/ひらがな hiragana, known collectively as the 仮名 kana syllabaries, have about 50 basic characters each and each represent a single syllable.

* Katakana are primarily used for foreign loanwords (ex. コンピューター konpyūtā, computer; パン pan, meaning "bread", from Portugese pão), for onomatopoeic expressions (ex. パラパラ parapara, falling in large drops/pattering), or for emphasis of certain words or expressions. Katakana are the squarest, straightest characters in Japanese and considered the more "masculine" of the kana.

* Hiragana are used for words that have no kanji such as particles (ex. から kara, "from, because of"; でも demo, "but, however") and for inflection of kanji stems (ex. ～べました ~bemashita in 食べました tabemashita). Hiragana are more "curly" and "feminine" than katakana.

There are no easy ways to identify which sound the kana make without learning all of their shapes.

漢字 kanji are characters borrowed from Chinese. There are thousands of these, each representing an complete idea rather than just a sound, as they do in Chinese. The easiest way to identify what a kanji means without learning all of them is to learn the radicals, or basic parts that make up the kanji, to try to guess their meaning.

For example, if you know that 木 means "tree," you might be able to guess the meaning of 森, three trees together: forest. If you know that 人 means "person", you might be able to remember the meaning of 休, "rest" or "vacation", by thinking of a person resting against a tree... etc. You can learn more Chinese characters than you might think by learning the basic parts and building on your knowledge from there.