Ever wondered what a pictographic kanji is? How can understanding the pictography of an ideogram help you learn Japanese or even Chinese? In this article, we are going to talk a little about the pictography of a kanji in the Japanese language. For those who don't know, the ideograms used in the Japanese language appeared in China throughout human history.
The origin of Chinese ideograms is unknown because they go back 2000 years BC (before Christ). The only certainty we have is that many Chinese and Japanese characters are actually pictograms. That is, representation of images, drawings that represented the word and were simplified over time.
Japanese kanji are mostly pictographic, thus representing some kind of image that is visually similar to a real-life object. If we take this into account, it may be easier to learn Japanese and Chinese.
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Pictogram x Ideogram
In Japanese, we call everything kanji or ideograms, but there is indeed a small difference between pictographic kanji that can be called just pictograms. A pictogram is called shoukei [像形] where [像] means image, figure, portrait and [形] means form and style.
An ideogram can be called shiji [指事] where [指] means to indicate and point, while [事] means importance, reason, and fact. In other words, a pictogram is literally an image (picture) while an ideogram conveys the meaning of an idea. Ideograms are symbols that represent an idea and not an image.
This does not mean that an ideogram that is in the shiji category does not convey a pictographic idea. For example, the ideograms up [上] and down [下] are not pictograms but give a very logical idea of an arrow pointing up and down.
Kanji go beyond pictograms
It's easy to look at a simple ideogram and see that it's a pictographic kanji (木火人). But there are other ideograms that don't make as much sense as pictograms (気魚言), but they all have a reason and a long history behind their representation. Others are junctions as in the case of forest and woods (森).
This pictographic concept of representing scenes and figures by complex symbols need not be entirely literal. The purpose of the other ideograms is to express an idea through a symbolic form or change of pictograms. Knowing the pictograms, we will be able to understand the meaning of different ideograms even without knowing their readings or their pictographic logic.
Knowing all the pictograms and the pictography of a Japanese ideogram will make our learning of Japanese and Chinese less tedious and more practical. Learning pictograms also involves learning the radicals of a kanji, their order of writing, and the numerous ideas and synonyms they aim to convey.
The truth is that not every ideogram is a pictogram, but they all have some connection, either by sound or by inheriting a pictographic radical. Some may not find it productive to learn the few pictographic ideograms that exist, but knowing them will open the door to thousands of advanced-level kanji that use pictograms somewhere.
Pictographic Kanji Books
Even though our Roman alphabet is not a pictogram, many still use our letters to create books teaching children to learn words in a certain language. This works much better in Japanese and Chinese where the ideograms or kanji are pictographic.
The RTK method (Imaginary Kanji to Learn) makes good use of the idea of pictography, even though kanji is not a pictogram. Some people use this pictographic method even to learn hiragana and katakana by using real background drawings. With this goal, I picked out a few books related to pictograms for you to take a look at: