This week’s Word Of The Week is – Densha (電車) meaning (Electric) Train – which in Japan is an integral part of everyday life, especially in the larger cities.

A train station such as Shinjuku in Tokyo claims over 3.5 million commuters passing through its gates daily – an incredible figure.

Densha is made up of just two kanji – 電車 (でんしゃ).

The first kanji (電) means electricity and only has one reading (デン) or in hiragana – でん. At the beginner level you will most likely come across this kanji in the word for telephone (電話 – literally Electricity Talk).

The second kanji is – 車 – meaning car or vehicle. The reading for car is most often くるま but as part of another word we use しゃ. An example is the word for bicycle – 自転車 (じてんしゃ).

So to wrap up this week’s Word of the Week we join 電 – Electricity and 車 – Vehicle, which gives us an Electric Vehicle or Train.

As a side note, you may have noticed the little ゃ in the reading しゃ for the kanji 車 and wondered what was going on.

A beginner may read しゃ as “shiya” but when you see the small “ゃ” you need to use a different rule and the reading is actually “sha”. This can also happen with ゅ (yu), ょ (yo) and っ (tsu). See my article about the small tsu for more information.

Examples

Kanji	Hiragana	Meaning
電	でん	Electricity
車	しゃ	Car, Vehicle
電車	でんしゃ	Electric Train
電話	でんわ	Telephone
自転車	じてんしゃ	Bicycle
車道	しゃどう	Roadway

Please note that I have only included the relevant kanji readings for this example in the table above. Almost all kanji have multiple readings but not all are applicable to the examples in this article.

Any questions? Please leave a comment below.

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