is "kanji" an uncountable noun in English?


When people who know Japanese talk about "kanji" in English, is there a
consensus with regard to whether you would say:

"I know about 10 kanji." // _uncountable_  
"I know about 10 kanjis." // _countable_

This is more an English grammar question, but few native English speakers know
what a "kanji" is.

My opinion is that "kanji" is uncountable since all Japanese nouns are
uncountable and "kanji" is a Japanese word.




I think that _kanji_ is countable in Japanese (漢字一文字、漢字二文字) and I would say it
should be countable in English, too (one _kanji_ , two _kanji_ ). The plural
form in English is often adopted (sometimes wrongly, but never mind
exceptions) from the original language (one corpus, two corpora; one
phenomenon, two phenomena). I'd say _kanji_ in English should be countable
with plural form _kanji_.

Since _kanji_ already means "Chinese character", I think "10 kanji" or "10
Chinese characters" is perfectly natural. "10 kanji characters", which would
be the literal translation of 漢字10文字, sounds a bit like the not uncommon "the
hoi polloi", where "hoi" by itself is already the article "the" in Greek.




A noun with a plural form that's the same as its singular form does not make
it an uncountable noun. No English speaker would tell you that "sheep" is
uncountable even though its plural form is still "sheep."

Kanji (and its plural form, kanji) is definitely a countable noun in English.
I don't know what makes you think that Japanese nouns are uncountable in
either Japanese or English, but that's not true at all.

EDIT: One could argue that "kanji," the concept of Chinese characters, is an
uncountable noun, and that in order to classify it in English, one would have
to say "characters of kanji." In this usage, I can agree that "kanji" is an
uncountable noun. However, in the case where it's used as the OP said such as
"I know about 10 kanji," where "kanji" is used as a gloss to mean the
individual characters in the Chinese character set, it seems evident that it
would be a countable noun.

