As I explained in the article, Japanese People Cannot Read Kanji, reading and pronouncing Kanji characters can be very difficult even for Japanese people. This fact is highly related to the linguistic definition of Kanji characters. In other words, Kanji characters are defined as ideograms, therefore, they often don’t tell us how to read or pronounce them. If Kanji characters were defined as phonograms and told us their pronunciations correctly, we wouldn’t face this difficulty. Actually, this problem may sound weird to Japanese learners whose first language consists of characters defined as phonograms. Reading or pronouncing words written in phonogram characters is usually not so difficult. Certainly, pronouncing English words can be difficult sometimes, but still we can guess their pronunciations from their appearances.

I already mentioned that reading and pronouncing Japanese words written in Kanji can be difficult. In Japanese, interestingly, this difficulty is playing a role of creating new words. A lot of Japanese words are misread, mispronounced or misunderstood, and then they become a new words. In this article, I will introduce some of them to you.

I believe that one of the most famous words in this field is:

dokudanjou 独壇場(どくだんじょう)

This word means “monopoly”, “unchallenged position” or “unparalleled position”. The pronunciation, “dokudanjou”, is commonly used and widely accepted today, but this word was born by misunderstanding. Its original and perhaps correct* word is:

dokusenjou 独擅場(どくせんじょう)

As you can see, this Kanji expression looks almost the same as the previous one. Only one difference is the second Kanji “擅”, but this is very similar to “壇” used in “dokudanjou 独壇場(どくだんじょう)”. It is no wonder  that even Japanese people cannot distinguish these two Kanji expressions and also that the second one becomes a commonly used expression. I’m not sure how new words are created in other languages, yet in Japanese, new words are often created by misunderstanding. Fortunately, the examples above have different Kanji expressions, so we can find the difference. However, new words don’t always have a different Kanji expression from their originals. In the following paragraph, I will explain the word only whose pronunciation is different from the original one.

Hitogoko 他人事(ひとごと)

Taningoto 他人事(たにんごと)

The top one “hitogoto 他人事(ひとごと)” is a correct pronunciation. Nonetheless, these days, we often hear people saying “taningoto 他人事(たにんごと)” instead of “hitogoto 他人事(ひとごと)”. In my opinion, although the second one is not correct, its pronunciation “taningoto 他人事(たにんごと)” is acceptable because Kanji expressions, “他人” and “事”, can be read as “tanin” and “goto” respectively. I can relate to their minds.

By the way, the word “hitogoto 他人事(ひとごと)”, means “a problem not related to you”, “his/her business” or “a problem you are not involved in”. This expression is often used as sarcasm for people who are not responsible for their own problems.

So far, I’ve explained two words born by our misunderstandings. While writing this article, I realized the word “他人事” can be typed in both way “taningoto” and “hitogoto”. I think that this shows how words or perhaps languages are changing. Misunderstood, used and then accepted.

*to be honest, it’s hard to say “correct” because today the word “dokudanjou 独壇場(どくだんじょう)” is more widely accepted than the original one “dokusenjou 独擅場(どくせんじょう)”. For those who don’t know this history, “dokudanjou 独壇場(どくだんじょう)” is a correct word.