The meaning of Japanese characters with translation into Russian. Japanese characters and rules for writing them

Tattoos in the form of Chinese and Japanese characters are very popular in European countries. The hieroglyphs of the tattoo carry originality and mysticism, since their meaning is practically unknown to anyone except the owner himself. But, despite this, under a seemingly simple symbol, a deep meaning and powerful energy can be hidden. In fact, only Europeans put Chinese and Japanese characters on their bodies, while the inhabitants of these Asian countries prefer English inscriptions, moreover, written with grammatical errors. Be that as it may, hieroglyphs are very difficult to translate.

Before choosing any sketch you like, take some time to find out the exact meaning of the symbols. Otherwise, you can get into an unpleasant situation, for example, the one that happened two years ago with a German teenager. Having paid 180 euros, the young man asked the tattoo artist to apply Chinese characters to him, meaning "love, respect, obey."

Having made a long-awaited tattoo, the guy went to rest in China. What was his surprise when Chinese waitresses in restaurants constantly paid attention to him. The young man decided to ask why his tattoo causes such an effect. Having learned the correct translation of his hieroglyphs, the young man was shocked. On his arm was the inscription "At the end of the day I become an ugly boy." Returning home, it turned out that the tattoo parlor was closed. The unlucky boy had to do laser tattoo removal for 1200 euros.

If you still decide to make hieroglyphs of a tattoo, find out their meaning in advance in authoritative reference books, or choose from the most popular and sought-after symbols.

The meaning of hieroglyphs

Chinese characters tattoo

Zi is the name of the traditional Chinese script used to write official documents in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese settlements. The Chinese "alphabet" (let's call it so conditionally) contains 47,000 letters-symbols of zi. In order to improve the literacy of the population, the government passed a law to simplify the writing system. Many dashes, sticks and dots have disappeared from use.

The Chinese themselves say that it takes only 4,000 characters to speak and write Chinese fluently. Yes, hieroglyphs are really difficult both to write and to translate. However, there has already been a definite trend for tattoos. The most popular and sought after hieroglyphs of a tattoo are symbols meaning love, strength, family, luck, peace, fire. This does not mean that your choice is limited to these words. With the help of Chinese tattoos, you can express your positive or negative emotions, inspire yourself with encouraging words, or capture a pleasant moment in your memory.

Japanese characters tattoo

Japanese hieroglyphic tattoos, like Chinese ones, are popular almost everywhere, except for these countries themselves. Writing in Japan consists of three systems: kanji, katakana, and hiragana. Kanzi is the most common of the three. The characters from this system came from Chinese writing. However, Japanese characters are easier to write. In total, the alphabet has 50,000 characters, most of which belong to nouns. Katakana is used mainly for loanwords, internationalisms, and proper names. Hiragana is responsible for adjectives and other grammatical phenomena. Tattoos based on the symbols of this system are much less common than the previous two.

Many celebrities have chosen Japanese characters as tattoos. For example, Britney Spears chose a symbol that translates as "weird". However, in fact, the singer wanted to get a tattoo with the inscription "mystical". Melanie C, an ex-peppercorn, has never hidden her girlish strength. The phrase "Girl Power" was the band's motto. It was these words that Mel C tattooed on her shoulder. Pink expressed her happiness with a Japanese tattoo of the same name.

Would you like a tattoo like this?We look forward to your comments!

Modern Japanese has two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana.

Japanese hiragana alphabet

Hiragana is usually used in combination with hieroglyphs, where it denotes prefixes, suffixes and other grammatical elements, all sorts of particles, etc. You can just write a Japanese word in this alphabet in various situations. For example, some words are usually written in this alphabet, and not in hieroglyphs, or as a transcription of hieroglyphs, etc.

For example, the expression "bon appetit" in the Japanese hiragana alphabet is written as follows: and pronounced like "itadakimas"

And it means "I'm sorry" in Japanese and reads sumimasen.

Japanese katakana alphabet

Katakana is used to write foreign words, titles, names and other things. This alphabet is also sometimes used to write Japanese words in italics to highlight a word.

As you may have noticed, some letters are missing from the Japanese language. Therefore, to record words with missing letters, the ones closest to the sound are used. For example, s=w=sh, c=b, z=dz, l=r, f=x, etc. In addition to the letter H, there are no consonants in the Japanese alphabet that are not included in syllables. They are replaced by syllables with the letter U, and since there are no TU and DU syllables, TO and DO are applied.

As an example, let's look at how to write the name Maxim in Japanese: マクシーム
Ma=マ, k=ku=ク, si=シ, ー is the accent mark, m=mu=ム and it turns out “makushima”

Following example, let's write the name Victoria in Japanese: ビクトーリヤ
vi=bi=ビ, k=ク, to=ト, ー – accent mark, ri=リ, i=ヤ = bicutoria

However, in the 20th century, foreign words began to be used more and more and the Japanese katakana alphabet was supplemented.

Now you can write the name Victoria not as Bikutoria, but with new signs Victoria - ヴィクトーリヤ
And the name Zina in Japanese will be ズィーナ, and not Jina, as it was written before. ジーナ

You can write a name using any option, but the second one is more modern and better conveys the recording of a foreign name / word. By the way, it is used when translating names on this site.

If you want to learn the Japanese alphabet, then the most effective way is to read texts in Japanese alphabets. It is also very good to learn the Japanese alphabet by songs:

Japanese hiragana memorization song

Japanese katakana memorization song

In the modern world, Eastern culture is very popular. The Japanese language is studied by people all over the world, or simply using Japanese characters and their meaning in various areas of life.

History of Japanese writing

The origin of Japanese writing is directly related to the introduction of Chinese traditions into the life of the Japanese. While writing was already developed in China, there was not a single mention of a written version of the language in the history of the Land of the Rising Sun.

In the 6th century BC, China and Japan begin to build close diplomatic relations, as a result of which the Japanese begin to borrow the Chinese script and eventually adapt and modify it to the grammatical and phonetic features of Nihongo.

Structure of the Japanese language

In the modern language of Japan, there are three main leavings:

• Kanji are hieroglyphs borrowed from Chinese;
• Hiragana - syllabic alphabet of words and names for which there are no hieroglyphs;
• Katakana is a syllabary used to write words borrowed from other languages.

Kanji and its readings

After the Chinese writing came to the territory of Japan, it was greatly modified and adapted to the peculiarities of local speech. The Japanese began to create new kanji or give different meanings to Chinese, which led to a significant difference between reading the same kanji. There are two main types of reading:

• Onyomi (Chinese reading);
• Kun'yomi (Japanese reading).

Onyomi is also called onyomi reading. It consists in the adaptation of hieroglyphs borrowed from the Chinese language. One kanji can have more than one onyomi.

Kun'yomi or kun reading is used to reproduce native Japanese words.

The same symbol can have one type of reading, or several at once. There are a number of kanji that, depending on the type of reading, completely change their meaning.

Using Japanese Characters

Japanese characters and their meaning in Russian are of great importance. Examples of their use:

• tattoos;
• mascots with kanji;
• gifts (handmade cards, cups and t-shirts with kanji, etc.);
• decoration of interior elements (wallpaper, pillows, curtains, etc.).

Japanese characters and mascots Omamori

In the culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, there are a large number of traditional talismans. Among them, a special role is played by a talisman called Omamori. Mamori means "protection" in Japanese. These amulets are made in the form of small bags of silk fabric of different colors and are stored in wallets, pockets, hung in a car, on a bag or mobile phone.

Inside the bag, you can put money or herbs, and so that the amulet does not lose its strength, after creating it, you cannot open the bag. Symbols are often sewn on the outside of the fabric, which are important for those to whom this amulet is intended. They are used to attract money, luck, love and so on.

Popular Japanese characters

Hieroglyph of money

The kanji for "money" is written as follows: 金. It is read as "kane" (kane). When used together with other symbols, it has many meanings:

• Metal, gold;
• Rich man;
• Price;
• Debt and so on.

Hieroglyph of love

Another popular character is 愛. In translation, it means "love" and is read as "ai" (ai). In combination with other hieroglyphs, it acquires the following meanings:

• love or appreciate;
• Sweet, lovely, beloved;
• Passion;
• Attachment;
• Patriotism;
• fan and so on.

Hieroglyph of happiness and good luck

The single kanji 幸 is used in nihongo to represent important words such as happiness and luck. This word is read as "ko" (ko). Meaning:

• Happiness, luck, bliss;
• Gifts of the forest or gifts of the sea;

Hieroglyph of health

Health is written as 健康 and reads like "kenko" (kenko). This word is made up of two separate kanji. The kanji 健 (ken) does not have a meaning of its own and is found in words such as "healthy", "a lot", "hardy" and so on.

Japanese names and their meanings

Female Japanese names

For women, names are often chosen that include kanji, meaning the character trait that parents would like to endow their daughter with. One of the most popular in this case is 美 (mi), which means "beauty". It is an integral part of such names as:

• Akemi (meaning - bright beauty);
• Kazumi (harmonious beauty);
• Miho (beautiful bay);
• Manami (the beauty of love);
• Netsumi (summer beauty);
• Harumi (beauty of spring) and so on.

There are many such kanji. A popular component in a female name is the character for love 愛, which reads "ai" or "ai". Kanji such as "mind", "calm", "wisdom" and so on are also used.

Often a symbol with the meaning of a plant forms the basis of a female name. Among them are the following kanji:

• 桃 means "peach" and reads like "momo" (found in names like Mommo and Momoko);
• The female name 菊 (Kiku) means "chrysanthemum";
• The name 藤 (Fuji) means wisteria, and so on.

Male Japanese names

Reading male names is one of the most difficult parts of nihongo because it uses different readings. There is no single algorithm for pronouncing a man's name. Therefore, the correct pronunciation of the name should be clarified with its bearer.

Let's talk about Japanese. It is worth mentioning right away that this language is unique and its position in the system of other languages ​​is still controversial. Usually it is considered as an isolated language, but there is an opinion that Japanese should still be attributed to the Altaic languages. For example, the same language family includes Korean and Mongolian. The total number of Japanese speakers in the world is about 140 million people.

Japanese is the mother tongue of over 125 million Japanese. In its grammatical structure, it is agglutinative, that is, the language in which the main method of word formation is agglutination, that is, an abundance of various suffixes and prefixes, due to which words change form. Japanese also expresses grammatical meanings synthetically: synthetic languages ​​express grammatical meanings within the word itself through stress, internal inflection, and so on. The Russian language is also classified as a synthetic language.

Usually, when teaching Japanese to foreigners, it is called "nihongo", that is, literally "Japanese". In Japan itself, as part of its native culture, it is called "kokugo" - the national language. I will not go into the history of the origin of the Japanese language yet, this is an even more controversial and complex issue than its position in the world system of languages.

I called this post "Three Types of Japanese Writing" for a reason, because there are exactly three of them. Moreover, two of them are generally unique, and one, let's say, is not at all unique =) I'll start a little from afar. It is often argued in which direction the Japanese write. It's simple: there is a traditional way, borrowed from the Chinese - characters are written from top to bottom, and columns go from right to left. This method is still used in newspapers and fiction.

Things are different in scientific sources: there you often have to use Western terms, so the characters are written in the usual way for us - from left to right, in lines. In general, horizontal writing was officially adopted only in 1959, and is now used everywhere. It sometimes happens that the symbols go horizontally, but from right to left - a rare case used on signs and slogans, but in fact in this case just each column consists of one character. That's all, today the Japanese for the most part write like us.

Now, actually, to the topic of this post. The first part of Japanese writing, which I will talk about, is called "kanji" - these are hieroglyphs borrowed from China. This term literally translates as "Han letters", this is one of the Chinese dynasties. An example of a kanji is 武士道 (literally "", the first two characters mean "warrior", the last one means "way").

Presumably, this type of writing came to Japan in the 5th century AD along with Buddhist monks. Each hieroglyph represents a certain meaning or its abstract expression, that is, one character can be either a whole word or meaning, or part of a word. Today, kanji are used to write the stems of nouns, adjectives and verbs, and their number has been reduced to two thousand. Showing all the kanji here would be a bit of an odd act, so I'm only showing a group of characters that require 18 hand movements to write.

In those days when Chinese characters got into, the country did not have its own script. Then, to record Japanese words, the writing system “Manyogana” was created, its essence is that words are written in Chinese characters not in meaning, but in sound. Further, the man'yōgana, written in italics, is converted into "hiragana" - a writing system for women.

In ancient Japan, higher education was not available to them and the study of kanji was closed to them. In parallel with hiragana, "katakana" arose - the most simplified man'yogana. As a result, these two alphabets turned into modern katakana and hiragana, the first types of writing studied in the elementary grades of Japanese schools. In these alphabets, each character is a syllable, since the Japanese language has a clear syllabic structure.

Based on the 46 basic hiragana characters and a few additional icons, you can write anything in Japanese. Katakana is commonly used to write foreign words, terms, names, and so on. Hiragana, on the other hand, I write down native Japanese words. For example, let's take the same phrase - the Way of the Warrior. In Japanese it is read as "Bushido". In hiragana, it looks like this - ぶしどう. And in katakana it's ブシドイ. Below are two character tables with readings, first hiragana, below katakana.

The symbols of syllabic alphabets are more often used to write those same suffixes and prefixes. As for kanji, compared to the Chinese "hanzi", they have a lot of purely Japanese additions: some hieroglyphs were invented in Japan ("kokuji"), some have changed their meaning ("kokkun"). There is also an old and a new way of writing the same thing - "kyūjitai" and "shinjitai" respectively.

In general, this topic is very extensive, and I have not written much here, but I think there is no point in closing the topic for the time being.

Most people who start learning Japanese sooner or later also start learning Japanese characters.
The Japanese have a saying: "How you sit while writing a hieroglyph is how you write it."

That is, the posture while writing the hieroglyph must be correct: the feet are located on the floor, the hips are on a chair parallel to the floor, the back is straight.

By the way, when writing hieroglyphs, the elbows should not be located on the table, but should be gently lowered from the table. The distance between the notebook on which you are writing and your eyes should be sufficient - you do not need to lean forward too much.

In writing hieroglyphs, there are rules - they must be written in a strictly defined order, line by line.

Let's look at other rules:
1. It is very important to write hieroglyphs harmoniously, that is, all parts of the hieroglyph should be arranged so that these parts make up a single hieroglyph. A common mistake beginners to study hieroglyphs is that they write the parts that make up the hieroglyph at a fairly large distance from each other.
Hieroglyphs should be written compactly:

2. Hieroglyphs should be written from left to right or top to bottom.
Let's first look at what types of hieroglyphs are written from top to bottom.

3. follows from left to right.

From left to right, characters are written as follows:

Also, from left to right, small lines are written, following one after another at the bottom of the hieroglyphs:

4. There is a sufficient number of hieroglyphs when one line crosses the entire hieroglyph.
In such cases, this trait is written last:

5. should be written vertically.

Beginners to learn Japanese often make a common mistake - they write characters with an inclination either to the right or to the left. Of course, there are Japanese who write hieroglyphs with a slope, but still they should be written strictly vertically:

So, we have considered the basic rules for writing hieroglyphs.

I hope that they will help you write hieroglyphs correctly and beautifully!