Choosing Kanji

One of the things that makes Japanese hard is the writing system. Written Japanese consists of essentially four alphabets, Kanji (borrowed chinese characters (1,000 needed for literacy, 2000 base characters, about 5,000, give or take a thousand, in active use)), Hiragana (Used for Japanese words (46 characters)), Katakana (Used for foreign words (46 characters)), and Roman characters (foreign words, English (26 lowercase, 26 uppercase)).

The number of alphabets confuses things a bit but you get used to it fairly quickly. The hardest issues tend to arise in learning and using kanji. There are literally thousands characters. Each character can have multiple ways of reading it in different contexts sometimes seemingly arbitrary, especially in names of products and people. Reading names in a general sense is nearly impossible for foreigners and Japanese alike. In fact whenever you have to write your name (like on forms and business cards), you usually need to indicate how it is read. 大 is not used much but is a notoriously hard to read first name because of the sheer number of readings. You can work around names somewhat easily since they are usually already known, i.e. a friend, relative, acquaintance, or indicated for you, i.e. written above the name on a business card.

But names are not really what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about choosing the kanji when writing Japanese words that have different kanji but the same reading. Yes, that’s right. Not only are there lots of ways of reading each kanji, but there are many words that are read the same but have different kanji. Actually these can be broken up into two types as well, Those words that are read the same way but have different meanings, and those that are read the same way that have similar meanings. I want to talk about the simply the second category.

Words such as ある. This word means essentially “to be” but is written with different kanji based on the context. 有る means to be, to have, to exist. 時計が有る = “A clock is there” or “I have a clock”. But 或る is used for specifying a specific thing. 或る日 = “That day” or “This one day”. For people or animals you use 居る for “to be”, so when someone says 或る人 you might get confused but it’s perfectly valid.

The worst examples are ones like おさまる which has about 4 different ways to write it (収まる、納まる、治まる、修まる) and just as many meanings. To insert, To pay, To calm down, to acquire (e.g. a skill) etc. However, these meanings and the kanji seem to overlap. My excellent “Intermediate Kanji Book” lists them as follows:

• 収まる = To calm down
• 納まる = To be paid, To be inserted, To be put away, To be taken care of
• 治まる = To be governed
• 修まる = To be acquired (e.g. skills)

But fire up the dictionary and you get example sentences like the following:

• 私の頭痛が治まった: My headache settled down.
• その辞書は棚に収まる: That dictionary goes on the shelf.

Shouldn’t the first one be 収まった? Shouldn’t the second one be 納まる? There may be a specific “right way” to use these kanji but when the dictionary and textbooks don’t agree how is one supposed to figure this out?