LLearn Japanese

What necessitates の in strings of kanji?

  • April 9, 2026

Sometimes I will see a long string of kanji with の in the middle.

Examples from what I've seen are:

南海電鉄の新観光列車

機関保証制度の保証料月額

留学生交流等の国際教育

I know one of the perks of kanji is that sometimes, you don't need the の like 失業者の数 can just be 失業者数

Can we do it in the above examples? Like 南海電鉄の新観光列車 becomes 南海電鉄新観光列車? If not, why?

by TheAlexAndPedro

3 comments

  1. Using の doesn’t really change the meaning, but it does change if it’s one big noun or a phrase made up of multiple nouns. You can *sorta* do this in English too:

    都市改善委員会 = the city improvement committee

    都市の改善の委員会 = the committee for the improvement of the city

    A big reason to utilize の is for the sake of readability / listening comprehension. If you use a large kanji compound it can be hard to tell where word begin and end, and in conversation it can be hard to parse. But using の breaks it up into easier to understand chunks.

    Also it’s worth mentioning you can’t and/or shouldn’t *always* omit の (like for example 都市改善委員会の演説 would generally be preferred to 都市改善委員会演説).

  2. sometimes people just stick a の in long compound words to break it up a bit and make the word not as long, there really isn’t that much else to it, it doesn’t really change the meaning in any significant way

Comments are closed.