How Kanji Were Made: Pictographs, Indicatives, Compounds and Phonetic-Semantic Kanji

The idea of sorting Chinese characters by how they were made goes back about 1,900 years, to a book compiled by Xu Shen in the Eastern Han dynasty: the Shuowen Jiezi (説文解字, せつもんかいじ in Japanese). It arranged 9,353 characters under 540 radicals and explained how each was formed. Its postface describes six categories of characters, known as the liushu, or rikusho (六書) in Japanese (original text).

The six are 象形 (shōkei, pictographs), 指事 (shiji, indicatives), 会意 (kaii, compound ideographs), 形声 (keisei, phonetic-semantic compounds), 転注 (tenchū) and 仮借 (kasha). The first four describe how characters were built. The last two are usually explained as ways existing characters came to be used, so I leave them out here. Japanese children learn the same four: the national curriculum guide notes that many of the 80 kanji taught in first grade are pictographs or indicatives, and a common fifth-grade unit names and sorts the four types.

If you are learning kanji and wonder why they look the way they do, this post goes through the four types with kanji you will meet early on, and explains why the fourth type matters most for learners.

Pictographs: drawings of things

象形文字 are kanji that began as pictures of visible things. The Shuowen describes them as drawing the thing itself, and gives 日 and 月 as examples.

日 (sun): the shape of the sun
月 (moon): a crescent moon
山 (mountain): three peaks
川 (river): flowing water
木 (tree): a tree with branches and roots
目 (eye): an eye, turned on its side
魚 (fish), 鳥 (bird), 馬 (horse): whole animals

Many of the kanji Japanese children learn first are of this kind.

Indicatives: marks for things you can’t draw

You can’t draw “above” or “below.” Indicatives, 指事文字, show such ideas with lines and dots. The Shuowen’s examples are 上 and 下.

上 (above) and 下 (below): a mark above or below a base line
一, 二, 三 (one, two, three): the number of strokes is the number
本 (origin, book): a mark at the base of 木, pointing to the root
末 (tip, end): a mark near the top of 木, pointing to the tip

本 and 末 differ only in where the mark sits on the same tree. Seen side by side, they are hard to confuse again.

Compound ideographs: meanings added together

会意文字 combine existing characters so their meanings add up to a new one.

林 (grove), 森 (forest): two trees, three trees
休 (rest): a person (亻) by a tree
明 (bright): sun and moon
男 (man): a field (田) and strength (力)
鳴 (cry, of an animal): a bird and a mouth
岩 (rock): mountain and stone

Phonetic-semantic compounds: one part for meaning, one for sound

形声文字 combine a part that shows the meaning with a part that shows the sound. The Shuowen’s examples are 江 and 河, both words for rivers. The water radical 氵 shows the meaning, and 工 and 可 show the sound.

This is the largest group. The Japanese encyclopedia Nipponica says that “most kanji were made this way” (Kotobank, 漢字).

For learners, the important part is the sound component. Japanese on’yomi come from the Chinese readings of the characters, so kanji that share a sound component often share an on’yomi too.

板 (board), 飯 (cooked rice), 坂 (slope): all have 反 for sound and are read ハン. The meaning parts differ: wood, food, earth.
問 (ask) and 聞 (hear): both have 門 for sound. 問 is read モン and has 口 (mouth) for asking. 聞 is read ブン and has 耳 (ear) for hearing.

問 and 聞 contain 門 (gate), but they have nothing to do with gates. The 門 is there for its sound. 間 (gap, interval), on the other hand, is usually explained as a compound ideograph: light shining through a gap in a gate. The same component can play different roles in different kanji.

The sound part is a clue, not a rule. 返 (return) also contains 反 but is read ヘン. Readings within a family don’t always stay together.

Phonetic-semantic kanji and radicals

The meaning part of a phonetic-semantic kanji is very often its radical. 板 has the tree radical, 飯 the food radical, 問 the mouth and 聞 the ear.

So once you know the common radicals, you already know half of many kanji. The radical gives you a guess at the meaning, and the other part a guess at the on’yomi. Radicals and their positions are in Learning Kanji by Radicals, and how on’yomi and kun’yomi differ is in On’yomi and Kun’yomi.

Kanji made in Japan

Japan also made some kanji of its own, called 国字 (kokuji). Japanese dictionaries describe most of them as compound ideographs, usually with no on’yomi, since there was no Chinese reading to borrow (Kotobank, 国字). 峠 (mountain pass) puts 山 (mountain) with 上 (up) and 下 (down): the place where a mountain road stops climbing and starts to descend. 畑 (field) puts 火 (fire) with 田 (field), and 辻 (crossroads) is another. 働 (work) is an exception: it has the on’yomi ドウ, taken from 動 (move).

Does knowing the formation help?

It can, for two reasons.

First, there is less to memorise. Remembering 森 as twelve strokes is hard; remembering it as three trees is easy. A phonetic-semantic kanji made of a radical you know and a sound part you know is hardly a new kanji at all.

Second, a character with a reason is harder to forget. If you know that the line in 本 is low because it points at the root, you are less likely to write 末 by mistake.

A warning, though. Explanations of how particular kanji were formed often differ between dictionaries and scholars, and some have changed as older forms of the characters have been found. Take the explanations here as the well-known version, not the final word. Formation also won’t tell you everything about modern shapes: some components changed form over time, which is part of why some kanji look alike. Telling those apart is in Similar-Looking Kanji Learners Mix Up.

Building kanji from parts with KanjiN

KanjiN is a kanji app for iPhone and iPad where you answer by handwriting. Instead of tapping a choice, you write on the screen with a finger or stylus. The interface is available in 16 languages, including English.

Two games are close to the way kanji were formed. In Radical Builder, two to four radicals and parts appear on screen, and you handwrite the kanji that uses all of them. It is practice in assembling compound and phonetic-semantic kanji from their parts. In Radical Sort, you drag kanji into groups by radical, which puts kanji with the same meaning part side by side. Category Sort groups kanji by meaning instead.

You can practise school grades 1 to 6, Kanken levels 10 to 5, and JLPT N5 to N3. Today’s Drill, Today’s Challenge and the 10-question Skill Check are free. A one-time purchase, Unlock Everything, opens every drill, including Radical Builder and Radical Sort, with no ads and no subscription. The first time you use it, the app downloads what it needs to read handwriting, so you need an internet connection then.

A first session is described in Getting Started with KanjiN.