Fear Does Not Exist in This Doujyo. Does It?

Fear certainly exists when you’re trying to learn the Japanese language. For one thing, the sentence structure is opposite that of English (Subject→Object→Verb as opposed to Subject→Verb→Object). For another thing, there are three sets of characters or alphabets. Two of which are what you might think of in the traditional sense of alphabets – called Hiragana and Katakana. The third set of characters, Kanji, has somewhere north of 10,000 characters. They are basically pictograph representations of a given object or action and can be quite complex. Not many Japanese people know all of the Kanji characters, and most will tell you they can readily identify only about half. So you can imagine that learning the language can be frustrating at times!

Fortunately, I’ve learned to lean on old tricks for remembering characters or new words – memorization by association. My favorite of recent note was learning the word for factory, pronounced koujyo. In Kanji, koujyo looks like this 工場.

Hmmm, how can I remember this one? Hmmm…koujyo, koujyo, koujyo…of course, "Karate Kid". Don't you remember the scene where Daniel goes to the Karate gym, or doujyo? Ring any bells?


So, we have doujyo and koujyo. Doujyo looks like this in Kanji, 道場, and basically means training center. Notice how it shares the same second character. It turns out that jyo (場) means place. So, koujyo is the place where things are made, or a factory, and doujyo is the place where people are trained, or a gym. Thanks to Daniel and his legendary crane kick, I have a convenient way to remember the words for factory, training gym, and place.