Lingofiles #1 - The Usefulness of Synonyms in Japanese

8 April 2025

This is a new "series" I'm starting because I want to get back into writing on here. It won't be especially well-researched, or even mediocrely researched like my last language piece, but it's all just for fun, really, so please afford me the kindness of overlooking this laziness.

Applications of Kanji

Many people gripe and moan about kanji when learning Japanese. They're intricate, challenging to write, and daunting to read when you're getting started in Japanese, having just gotten the hang of the kana syllabaries. Personally, I think these chinese imports are great, and actually make things pretty efficient.

For the most part, kanji in Japanese are used for content words, i.e. nouns, adjectives, verbs. Function words, like determiners or particles, along with inflections (verb conjugation and noun/adjective declension) seem to overwhelmingly¹ be written in kana, even in the many cases where there is a kanji equivalent (e.g. まで - 迄 made, meaning until). Thanks to this, and despite Japanese not relying on spaces to denote word boundaries, it is actually easy when reading to know when a character is part of a content word, or if it's a mere morpheme. Texts designed for early learners tend to avoid kanji in an attempt to increase legibility; in my experience though, the difficulty in those early texts is not particularly in reading the individual characters, but parsing what word they belonged to, ironically making the text harder to read. Because the reader is not given the additional context clues of whether a group of characters is a content word (written in kanji) or a function word (kana), effort is needed to go through the various possibilities of how to group the characters to reach the right meaning.

Here's a contrived example that demonstrates my point. Try to make out the content words from the function words:

Learners should not be scared of kanji or try to avoid learning them because they seem difficult. They are actually essential to efficient and effective communication, as I've just outlined, and once you have a solid foundation I think you will soon find how fun it can be to play with kanji to make new compounds and express different ideas.

Kanji Features²

OK, so before I go too deep into my main point, I feel like I need to lay out a couple stepping stones for how I got there. To keep it brief, I'm just going to explain a few groundwork structures of kanji. There exists generally four categories of kanji with regard to their onyomi (chinese reading): those that express concrete things (e.g. 雨 rain, droplets of rain falling from the sky), those that express abstract ideas (一、二、三 1, 2, 3), those with one semantic component paired with a purely phonetic component ( 語 language, word (言 provides semantic aspect of "language" + 吾 provides phonetic aspect go)), and finally, those that "tell a story" by combining multiple abstract idea characters into one to form a more semantically complex character (休(人 person + 木 tree) = rest ). What interests us today is this last category, because just like how new meanings can be generated from merging two semantic components into one character, by joining different characters together, we can create compound words, or even sets of compounds easily.

Kanji Compounds

Japanese is a very fun language, and you can seemingly create new words by just mashing multiple kanji together:

I consider this to be an especially productive feature of the language. Granted, from this example it doesn't seem like the resulting word is a perfect merger of the parent kanji, but I think you can see how we got there in the end. This sort of compound formation is alluring to me, because it seems to me that words can be created in a very efficient way, comparable to the use of latin or greek-derived words to create scientific or technological compound words in English; for example "television" being formed in the same way as the by then-common telephone.

Let's consider a second case of related compound words. Specifically, we'll be looking at words that mean adult and child in Japanese.

When considering 大人, one may wonder what the point of the onyomi reading (dainin, for those of you following along at home) is, when the native japanese reading (otona) seems semantically identical. Of course, it is my fault for presenting the two as such, when really they have a subtle use-case difference.

As it turns out, dainin has a useful purpose³, specifically in the domain of tickets and fares, where children and youth often get a discount compared to the standard adult fare. I hope at this point you can see how practical it is to use 大(big), 中(middle), and 小(small) as modifiers to the base 人.

Thanks to this productive feature of the language, and thanks to the way compound words work in Japanese, the cumbersome way this is handled in English can be entirely avoided (children under 6, children between 8-12).

Who Cares?

"HEY!!!!", you might be yelling to yourself, "Didn't you already mention 'child' and 'youth' as suitable translations of these words?! What's so damn special about them that we don't have in English then?!!" You're right, we do have those words. They do a pretty good job of being both easy to read and simple to write, and avoid the cludgy "children under ~" verbiage, although those forms are also common. What I would say is that these -nin forms in Japanese seem to be exclusive to ticket pricing⁴, whereas the english terms are more general forms that can also be used in fare scenarios. Is that really such a big deal? No, not really, but I still find the existence of this group of words interesting. Not only do the three compounds create a clearly distinguishable visual contrast (when looking at a big sign, for instance), but also because of the fact that Japanese could have very well stuck with the standard otona or kodomo for fares, just as they do for everything else, but the fact that they didn't suggests to me that there is some benefit to using these words over the standard ones.⁵

Personally, I just find the contrast neat.

Wrapup

That's it! Thanks for sticking around to the end! I'll try to write more as I continue to learn Japanese, and to post about whatever interesting quirks of the language I come across, or that compare interestingly to English or French or whatever. I try my hardest to keep to the facts and to be clear about what's my opinion, but I'm not a very good writer, so if some faults shine through at you, I'm most of all sorry, and also please know that I'm writing this instead of studying for an exam in 2 days, so I'm not being as thorough as I normally would be.

Footnotes