ANIMAL KANJI CHARACTERS.

About Kanji Characters

Kanji is a written language used in Japan. Unlike English and other Western languages, it's pictographic and ideographic instead of phonetic. This means that instead of the written characters representing sounds which are then spoken, the individual characters represent the nouns, verbs and adjectives themselves. For example, the word "dog" would be written down as a single unique character. The disadvantage of Kanji is that you require a lot of characters. Kanji uses approximately 4,000 characters, half of which are used on a daily basis. This makes Kanji difficult to learn, and also difficult to use with computers.

Kanji is not the only written language used in Japan. Kana is also used, which is phonetic rather than ideographic. There are 101 phonetic sounds in the Japanese language, as opposed to the thirty odd used in the English language. These phonetic sounds are represented by unique characters or combination of characters, in a similar manner to the English alphabet. There are two sets of Kana symbols, Hiragana and Katakana. Hiragana is used in conjunction with Kanji and used to describe native words which lack Kanji symbols, while Katakana is used for foreign words. While it looks like it is possible to use Kana by itself, there are many words which sound alike yet have differing meanings, so Kanji is still required to differentiate these words.

Finally there is Romaji, which uses English phonetics and characters to represent the Kana characters.

There are specific rules for drawing Kanji characters and even though general guidelines exist, there are many exceptions. Here are a few guidelines to help in the drawing of Kanji and Kana.

• You should start at the top and work down, then work from left to right.
• Horizontal lines should be drawn before vertical intersecting lines.
• Left slanting lines should be drawn before intersecting right slanting lines.
• Central strokes before short symmetrical strokes. (Wings.)
• Outside before inside. Boxes should be drawn first, leaving the bottom line until the interior strokes are complete.

Listed Characters

Bear
Dog
Dragon
Fox
White Fox
Raccoon Dog
Raven
Tiger
Wolf

Bear

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		Ku/ma

Dog

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		I/nu

Dragon

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		Ryu/u

Fox

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		Ki/tsu/ne

White Fox

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		Byakko

Raccoon Dog

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		Ta/nu/ki

Raven

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		Ka/ra/su

Tiger

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		To/ra

Wolf

KANJI	KANA	ROMAJI
		O/o/ka/mi