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Оглавление♦ INTRODUCTION ♦
What Is Japanese Writing?
The Japanese write their language with ideograms they borrowed from China nearly two thousand years ago. Some two thousand years before that, the ancient Chinese had formed these ideograms, sometimes called pictographs or characters, and known in Japanese as “kanji” 漢字 (literally translated as “Chinese letters”), from pictures of objects and actions they observed around them.
To the Chinese, the sun had looked like this , so this became their written word for sun. This pictograph was gradually squared off and simplified, first to then to and finally to 日, to give it balance and an idealized shape, and to make it easier to read and write. This is still the way the word sun is written in both China and Japan today.
The ancient Chinese first drew a pictograph of a tree like this . Over centuries it was gradually simplified and stylized and proportioned to fit into a uniform square for easy writing and recognition. It was squared off, first to and finally to 木, which became the written word for tree.
To form the word for root or origin, the Chinese just drew in more roots at the bottom of the tree to emphasize that portion of the picture. Over time, they squared and simplified this pictograph to 本, which is still today the written word for root or origin.
When the characters, the kanji, for sun 日 and for origin 本 are used together in a compound word, that is, a word made up of more than one kanji, they form the word 日本, which is how you write the word Japan in Japanese.
When the individual pictograph for sun 日 and the one for tree 木 are combined to make one new composite kanji 東, it shows the sun at sunrise rising up behind a tree, and becomes the pictograph for east.
The Chinese drew a pictograph of the stone lantern that guarded each ancient Chinese capital then gradually, over centuries, squared it off and simplified it to a stylized form, first and finally 京, which is now the written word for capital. These two kanji, 東 and 京, put together into a compound word 東京, form the written word Tokyo, eastern-capital, the capital of Japan.
Kanji may look mysterious and impenetrable at first approach, but as these examples show, they are not difficult at all to decode and understand. The kanji characters are not just random strokes: each one is a picture or a composite of several pictures and has a meaning based on the content of the pictures.
The Japanese written language contains a number of kanji, but not as many as Westerners often assume. To graduate from grammar school a student must know about 1,000 characters. At this point the student is considered literate. A high school graduate should know about 2,000 kanji, which is about the number used in daily newspapers. To read college textbooks, a student will need to know about 3,000. In a good dictionary, there may be about 6,000 characters.
These thousands of kanji, however, are all built up from less than 300 separate elements, or pictographs, many of which are seldom used. Once you learn the most frequently used elements you will know not only a number of the common kanji (some of the elements stand alone as kanji themselves), but you also will be able to learn hundreds of other kanji simply by combining the elements in different ways.
For example, you already know the kanji for tree 木. The kanji for a person is a pictograph of a person standing up 人. When the element for person is combined with other elements to make a new kanji, it is often squared off to , for better balance and aesthetic appearance in the new pictograph. When you combine the element for tree and the element for person you form a new kanji 休, a pictograph of a person resting against a tree. The meaning of this new kanji is to rest.
The Chinese also combined the element for person 亻 with the element for root 本 into a new composite kanji, a pictograph showing “the root of a human”. The meaning of this new kanji 体 is the human body.
Another example is the kanji meaning old 古. It is formed by combining the element 十, which by itself is a separate kanji meaning ten (it is a pictograph of two crossed hands having ten fingers), and the element 口, which also is a separate kanji by itself, meaning mouth (obviously a pictograph of a mouth). The new kanji 古, literally ten mouths, figuratively ten generations, means old.
In kanji that are formed from combinations of elements, of which some are themselves stand-alone kanji and some are not, there are generally two to four elements, occasionally five or more. When combining elements, the Chinese placed each separate element either at the left, right, top, bottom or center of the kanji square in which the characters are written, wherever it looked the best.
For example, the kanji for tree 木, when used as an element in other composite kanji, is sometimes placed on the left side of the new kanji, as in 村, sometimes on the right, as in 休, sometimes on the top, as in 杏, and sometimes on the bottom, as in 集. A few elements form a frame 口 or a partial frame around the kanji square. The kanji 困, meaning to be in trouble, is an example of the element for tree 木 being circumscribed by a frame 口.
Naturally, some kanji are used with greater frequency than others. The objective of this book is to teach you to recognize and understand the basic meaning of more than 400 of the most common and useful characters after only a few hours study. Through associations with Japanese proper names like Ginza, Tokyo, Osaka, Honda, Nissan, Hitachi, and Mr. Yamamoto, and with Japanese words you already know, like kimono, geisha, and typhoon, you will also be able to remember the pronunciations of many of these 400 characters with very little effort.
For full comprehension of the Japanese language, spoken or written, knowledge of grammar is of course absolutely necessary. There are already many excellent textbooks on Japanese grammar and other aspects of the Japanese language available to anyone who has the time and desire to learn Japanese. This book is limited therefore to teaching only how to read and understand the Japanese kanji and how the kanji are used in Japanese.
In the 1960s, when the first edition of this book was issued, kanji were taught through rote memory, whether to Japanese school children in their own school systems or to foreigners interested in the language. The number of strokes in each kanji, the order in which the strokes were written, and penmanship were stressed. Students were required to write each new kanji enough times so that its shape stuck in their memory.
There was no attempt, except in scholarly research papers, to show how the kanji were first formed as pictures by the Chinese and then developed into ideographs, or how to explain the structure of each kanji is built up from a few parts, each part with its own distinctive meaning.
Now, there are several books in English which teach kanji through mnemonic systems based on the meaning of the pictographs and symbols that the Chinese drew when they invented kanji. There are now also many books written in Japanese for Japanese primary-school children suggesting to the children that they learn kanji the easy way, through the mnemonic of the pictographs on which the Chinese based the kanji, although the traditional rote-memory method is still preferred in the Japanese school system.
One Japanese scholar, for example, wrote in the preface to his recently-published Primary School Pictograph Kanji Dictionary: “There are many children who do not like the study of kanji. There are also many children who say the only way to pass the kanji tests is by rote memory. Haven’t you all had the experience of being able to memorize the kanji only by writing each character over and over again? This naturally turns you away from the kanji. But there are many kanji that look like pictures and many parts of kanji repeated in different characters. Looking at kanji this way will make the study of kanji much more friendly. This dictionary clearly and simply explains how kanji were developed and how they were constructed, and will make your study of kanji much easier.”
It is possible, of course, to learn the kanji through rote memory, but at great expense in time and effort. The shortcut is to learn the meanings of the interchangeable parts rather than simply try to memorize a square full of lines. The character for the word listen 聞 becomes much less formidable when you see that 門 is a picture of a gate , and that 耳 is a picture of an ear eavesdropping at the gate.
READ JAPANESE TODAY uses this time-saver—the principle that each kanji is composed of interchangeable parts and that if you remember the meaning of the parts it will help you remember the meaning of the whole. Each part was originally a picture drawn by the Chinese to represent an actual object or action, just as in western culture the Egyptians did the same to draw their hieroglyphics. To memorize the kanji all you need to do is look behind the pictographs and see what the Chinese used as models.
Looking behind the pictographs into antiquity to see what scenes the Chinese actually drew at first, and how these pictographs evolved over the centuries, is often very difficult. Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars have been successful in tracing the history of many kanji, but for other kanji there are still differences of opinion on what the original pictograph was, what its original meaning was, and how both pictograph and meaning evolved.
This book is not a history, and my objective is just to show you the easiest way to understand and memorize the kanji and their meanings. Where there are disputes between the scholars on the origin or evolution of a kanji, I have selected the version which best helped me remember the kanji. If you, the reader, can discover a better mnemonic, by all means use it.
How The Characters Were Constructed
The earliest writing in both the East and the West was done with pictographs. To write the ”word” for cow or mountain or eye, both the Chinese and those in early western cultures drew a picture of a cow, a mountain, or an eye. To the Chinese these pictures were , , and . To the early Westerners—Sumerians, Phoenicians and Egyptians—they were , , and .
To write words which stood for ideas or actions or feelings—words that pictures of single objects or actions could not express—the Chinese combined several pictographs to depict a scene which acted out the meaning of the word. They combined, as we saw above, pictures of the sun 日 and a tree 木 in a scene to show the sun rising up behind the tree 東. They used this scene to stand for the word east —the direction you face when you see the sun rising up behind a tree.
In other examples, two pictographs of trees were put side by side 林 to stand for the word woods, and three pictographs of trees were put together 森 to stand for the word forest.
At the point where the Chinese ran out of concrete objects to draw, symbolism became essential. Without symbols, scenes representing complex thoughts would have grown to the size of panoramas. The kanji for these complex pictographs would then have too many elements and lines, generally called strokes, to be written in one square and still be readable.
Some Chinese characters have over 60 strokes, but the Chinese found out early on that kanji having more than 25 or 30 strokes were difficult to read and write. They continually abbreviated many of the kanji, reducing the number of strokes in some elements and eliminating other elements entirely. They are still abbreviating the kanji to this day. Some, but not all, of the Chinese abbreviations have been adopted by the Japanese.
Symbols are images that a society agrees represent something else. Any symbol can represent anything, as long as everyone agrees that this is so, like red and green traffic lights. The Chinese agreed on symbols for their written language. They decided, for example, that the symbol would represent the word for up. It started out as , and is now written 上. Down began as the reverse , and is now written 下.
To stand for the words power or authority, rather than devise a scene showing perhaps a general backed by his army, or a father disciplining his children, the Chinese simply used the symbol of a hand holding a stick to symbolize this meaning. (The Egyptians used a pictograph of a whip to symbolize the same thing.)
As a kanji by itself, the hand holding a stick was first drawn by the Chinese as , gradually stylized as , then , and now is written 父, meaning father. When the hand holding a stick is used as one element in a composite kanji, it is usually further stylized to 攵 or 尹.
In the same way, pleasure was symbolized by a drum and cymbals in Chinese, and by a man jumping with joy in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Another technique the Chinese used to form new kanji was to add what they called an “indicative” to an existing kanji to call attention to a part of the picture that highlights the meaning of the new character. For example, the pictograph for sword was drawn by the Chinese, and eventually squared to 刀. Then the Chinese added an indicative, a dot ヽ on the edge of the blade, and made the pictograph of a new kanji , written in final form 刃, meaning blade.
Another example of an indicative is the addition of a line signifying “roots” to the bottom of the kanji for tree 木 to form the new kanji 本, meaning root or origin, as we saw above.
Placing the “indicative” in different sections of the pictograph will change the aspect that is emphasized, and thus the meaning of the new kanji. For example, adding an indicative to a tree 木 down around the roots, as noted above, gives the meaning root 本. Adding the same line as an indicative among the branches of the tree 未 emphasizes that the tree is still growing and producing new branches, and gives the new kanji the meaning of still growing or immature or not yet. Adding instead a slightly longer line closer to the top of the tree 末 emphasizes the top of the tree and makes a new kanji meaning tip or end or extremity.
To remember the meanings of the kanji as they are used in Japanese, there is no need to remember whether an element is a pictograph, a symbol, an indicative, or an ideograph, or indeed to trace the permutations of the original Chinese drawing of a specific kanji down to its form today. That is best left to the scholars, who themselves still find different theories about the origins. Rather, your objective is to memorize the meaning of the present-day kanji by using your own understanding of what the pictures in the ideograph meant to the Chinese who first drew it.
For example, the kanji 口, as described above, means mouth. When a line is drawn through the middle of the mouth it forms the new kanji 中 meaning center or middle. Some scholars say this form is an indicative, the added line in the center emphasizing center. Other scholars say it is a picture of a flagpole with another pole drawn through its center. Some say it is a pictograph of an arrow piercing the center of a target. Others say it is a board with a line through the center or a box with a line down the middle.
At this stage of your study, it is important only to remember that 中 means center or middle. Whatever symbolic connection you make between 中 and center that helps you to remember the connection between them is the mnemonic that you should use.
I have given my interpretation, based on a composite of opinions among Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars, of the meanings of the pictures in each kanji. The purpose is to help you remember the 400+ kanji in this book. If you find an interpretation of the pictures which better helps you to remember the kanji, then that is the interpretation you should use.
There came a time when the early nations of the Western world decided to give up pictographic writing for something simpler. They began to use a phonetic system in which a specific picture stood for a certain sound instead of standing for a certain meaning. Their scholars arbitrarily selected some pictures to stand for the sounds they used in their language and abandoned all the other pictures. One of the phonetic systems thus developed was, of course, the forefather of the English alphabet.
The pictograph the Egyptians selected for the sound of A was cow , by this time written . The meaning cow was dropped. The picture stood for the pronunciation A and nothing else. Through many hundred years of change, came gradually to be written , which became the English letter A. (The Chinese pictograph for cow , on the other hand, basically has not changed at all, and still means cow.)
The Egyptian pictograph for eye came to be our letter O, and the Egyptian pictograph for mountain became our letter S. In fact, all 26 letters of the our alphabet are, in one way or another, direct descendants of this early picture writing of the West. The Chinese, on the other hand, just went on with the characters. They did at one time start the rudiments of a phonetic system but abandoned it.
The simple Chinese pictographs can be grouped into a few major categories. Most pictographs were drawn from objects the Chinese saw around them. Many were drawings of human beings in different shapes and postures, and of parts of the human body. Natural objects such as trees, plants, rocks, the sun, birds, and other animals were another major source. Weapons, which in that era meant only hand-held weapons like bows and arrows, knives, axes, spears, and lances, also were a source. Other important categories were houses and buildings, kitchen utensils, and clothing.
After the Chinese had invented all the characters they needed at the time, their next step was to standardize the kanji into a form easy to read and write. Over a period of about 2,000 years, they did this by simplifying and re-proportioning the pictures so they would all be about the same size, fit into the same-sized square, and be uniformly written throughout the country.
This was done by squaring circles, straightening some lines and eliminating others, and abbreviating or eliminating the more complicated portions of the picture. The shapes of some were changed slightly to make them more aesthetic or to make them easier and quicker to write. In fact, when the characters first took on their modern form they were called “clerical script” and were the form followed by the government bureaucrats in their record-keeping.
Some of the changes differed according to where in the square the element would be put. For example, the pictograph fire became the kanji 火. When added as an element at the top of a composite kanji, fire 火 is generally written , for example 炎, and when added at the bottom is generally written 灬, for example 黒.
When the kanji for person 人 is added at the left of a composite kanji, it is generally written 亻, as in 休, a person next to a tree, meaning to rest. When a person is added at the top of a composite kanji, it is generally written 亠, as in the character 亡, meaning die. (The picture means corner.) The composite character was originally written , “a person being hidden in a corner, no longer seen”, then squared to , and finally to 亡.
The process of combining pictographs into new kanji, then stylizing and simplifying them, made the final characters a little more abstract and less pictorially representative than the original pictures, of course, but the form of the original picture is still clearly visible and with just a little imagination on your part the pictures and scenes depicted in the kanji will come alive.
How Japan Borrowed Characters From China
Until the third century A.D., scholars say, the Japanese had no written language at all. How their society, already well-developed by that time, was able to get along without a script is very difficult to imagine. I suspect that somewhere along the line an archeologist will discover evidence of native writing or a form of borrowed script that existed in Japan before it borrowed characters from China. But until that time, what the scholars say must be accepted.
In any case, the Japanese had a spoken language, and when they saw that their neighbor, China, had both a spoken and a well-developed written language, they decided to borrow the Chinese writing system. The Japanese took the written Chinese characters and attached them to the Japanese spoken words of corresponding meaning. Where the Japanese had no equivalent word, they borrowed the Chinese meaning and pronunciation as well as the written character. They called these characters kanji, a compound word composed from two separate kanji, kan 漢, meaning China, and ji 字, meaning letter.
While the Japanese could use these imported Chinese characters to write the basic roots of Japanese words, they could not use the characters to write grammatical word endings because Japanese grammar and morphology were so different from Chinese. In Chinese, there were no grammatical endings to show what part of speech a word is (corresponding in English to endings such as –tion, –ish, –ed, –ful, and to such auxiliary words as had been, will be, could, and would), whereas in Japanese there were.
At first, the Japanese tried to use the Chinese characters to write both the word root and the grammatical ending. But after a few hundred years they concluded that this did not work too well, so they decided to abbreviate some of the Chinese characters into a phonetic system, similar to what some early Western cultures had done to form an alphabet from their pictographs.
The Japanese then used Chinese characters to write the roots of the words and wrote the grammatical endings, where grammar was needed, in the phonetic system they had just developed. They called the phonetic letters kana.
The Japanese actually have two separate sets of kana, one called katakana and one called hiragana. The pronunciation of each set is identical to the other. The function of each set is also identical to the other, although each set of kana is used in different situations.
The Japanese written language is now composed, therefore, of word roots (the kanji) and grammatical endings (the kana.) The word root remains the same no matter what part of speech the word is. The same kanji is used as the word root whether the word is a noun, adjective, or verb, and some words, particularly nouns, just need the root. Then, where grammatical endings are needed, different kana are added to show the grammar or the part of speech.
This works basically the same as in English, where, for example, beaut would be the word root. The root alone is usually a noun. Adding –ify makes beautify, the verb. Adding –iful makes beautiful, the adjective, and adding –ifully makes beautifully, the adverb. The Japanese use kanji for the root beaut and use kana for the grammatical endings –ify, –iful, and –ifully.
Some Japanese words were formed with only one kanji, plus the grammatical ending where needed, and some with two kanji. Words of one kanji usually represent a more elementary thought than words of two kanji. Some words may contain three or even four kanji, but this is comparatively rare. One example is the English word democracy, which translates in Japanese to a four-kanji word 民主主義 MINSHUSHUGI.
Any of the kanji, with a few exceptions, can be used either as a word by itself or together with other kanji to form compound words. A kanji can theoretically form a compound with any other kanji, although of course not all the possible compounds are actually in use. As the Japanese need new words, they can coin them by combining two appropriate kanji into a new compound.
The pronunciation of a kanji when it is used as a word by itself is usually different from its pronunciation in compounds. A kanji will generally keep the same pronunciation in any compound in which it appears, although there are many exceptions. One reason for the different pronunciations is that sometimes the same kanji was borrowed from different regions of China at different times.
For example, the kanji 京, meaning capital, is pronounced MIYAKO when it is used by itself. In the compound word 東京 TOKYO, the capital city of Japan, it is pronounced KYŌ. In the compound word 京阪 KEIHAN, the abbreviation for the Kyoto-Osaka region, it is pronounced KEI.
It is quite easy to distinguish the kanji from the kana. The kana are written with at most four separate lines, or strokes, and usually with only two or three. The kanji, on the other hand, except for the word one, which is just one horizontal line 一, and one other exception, have a minimum of two strokes and often many more.
| Examples of katakana: | ア イ ウ エ オ カ キ ク ケ コ |
| Examples of hiragana: | あ い う え お か き く け こ |
| Examples of kanji: | 漢 雨 運 罪 競 線 歯 聞 街 |
Kana will appear at the end of many words to give them grammatical context. A typical written Japanese sentence will have a mix of kanji and kana, and look like this:
私の友達は金曜日に東京を発ちます。
The difference in written form between the kanji and the kana should be easily recognizable. Japanese does not leave spaces between separate words. The grammatical endings in kana usually show where each word ends.
Japanese books and newspapers, being in sentence form, are written with both kanji and kana. The language a visitor to Japan will see in the streets—shop names, advertisements, prices, street names, traffic signs, tickets, bills, receipts, train station names, family names—not generally in sentence form, are most often written with kanji only.
The kana are not difficult and both sets can be learned in a few days. It is just a matter of memorizing them as you memorized the alphabet as a child and will not take much more effort. For those readers interested in learning the kana, a chart and additional description are included as Appendix A.
The stories of the origin and development of each pictorial element in each kanji character were taken mainly from the compendium SHUO WEN CHIE TSU, published in China about 1,800 years ago.
For many of the kanji, the SHUO WEN lists more than one theory of their origin. This is understandable since more than 2,000 years passed between the first invention of the kanji and their compilation in the SHUO WEN lexicon. During that time, there were many changes in the form of the characters and their pronunciation, and many new interpretations of the history of each kanji. After the SHUO WEN, etymologists, including scholars from Japan, have discovered what they believe to be still other interpretations of the origin of some of the characters.
Whether the explanations of the origins given in the SHUO WEN CHIE TSU or by later scholars are correct is not important here since this book is not a text in etymology but rather a simplified method for learning the kanji. Where there is a difference of opinion between scholars, READ JAPANESE TODAY uses the interpretation which, I hope, is best mnemonically for English-speaking readers.
Japanese Pronunciation
Japanese pronunciation is comparatively straightforward. The vowels are pronounced as in Italian—the A as in car, the E as in bed, the I as in medium, the O as in go, and the U as in Luke—and the consonants as in English. Sometimes in Japanese the vowels are long and sometimes they are short. Long vowels when written in roman letters will have a line drawn over the top of the letter. In Japanese, long vowels are handled by the kana.
When speaking in Japanese, just drag the long vowels out for twice the time as the short. This is often a difficult thing to do, but it is a very important distinction to make—a SHOKI 書記 is a secretary and SHŌKI 笑気 is laughing gas; a SHŌJO 少女 is a young girl and a SHŌJŌ 猩猩 is an orangutan. For practical purposes, there is no difference in the pronunciation of these sets of words except that some vowels are long and some are short.
In certain cases consonants are doubled, that is a single K becomes KK or a single P becomes PP. The double consonant is pronounced by holding it slightly longer than a single consonant. Like the long and short vowels, this is an important distinction to make but one quite easy to effect, and the reader will master it with just a little practice.
Another important note in pronouncing Japanese words is that the syllables are about equally stressed, whereas in English multi-syllabic words usually have one syllable stressed heavily. The Japanese say YO – KO – HA – MA, giving each syllable equal weight and length, since there are no long vowels in this word. Some English-speakers say YO – ko – HA – ma, accenting the first and third syllable, and some say yo – ko – HA – ma, heavily accenting the third syllable.
When foreigners pronounce Japanese with this heavy extra stress on certain syllables, some of the other syllables are drowned out for Japanese listeners. The first Americans to come to Japan told the Japanese they were a – ME – ri –cans. The Japanese couldn’t hear the A sound and thought the visitors said they were Merikens. This is why the Japanese named the wheat flour the Americans brought with them merikenko, the Japanese word for flour being ko.
How To Write The Kanji
Japanese school-children spend untold hours each year in practice kanji-writing. They do this to reinforce the kanji in their memory, to drill the correct order in which each kanji stroke is drawn, and to develop the proper style of penmanship.
For English-speaking visitors who will not be in Japan that long, the reason to practice writing the kanji is only to reinforce the meaning of the kanji in their memory. Each kanji is a work of calligraphic art, but it would take years of practice before a non-native could write the kanji at that level. Very few will ever be able to write Japanese in the cursive style. If a non-native can write each kanji so it can be clearly read by native Japanese, then what can be expected in a reasonable length of time will have been achieved.
In writing kanji, the order of each stroke and the direction of the pen during the stroke follow specific, rigid rules. The rules were developed by the Chinese to produce a uniform, idealized, artistically balanced script, particularly in cursive writing or writing with a brush. The rules follow logical precepts that make it easy to write the characters in printed-script, and also in the cursive script where each stroke blends into the next without lifting pen or brush from paper. When writing fast or jotting down informal notes, however, Japanese and Chinese adults often ignore the rules and follow shortcuts.
For your own purposes, I suggest that you follow the rules of stroke order as closely possible without excessive concern for minor alterations. The important goal is to get all the strokes into the right position and in the right proportion inside the square so a native speaker can correctly read the kanji that you write. Art and penmanship can follow later.
You should practice-write each kanji as many times as it takes you to memorize the pictograph. The quickest way to learn the kanji is by relating the meanings of the pictographs in each kanji to the word the kanji represents, not by memorizing the stroke order by rote repetition. You will eventually master stroke order, but it will take a lot longer. At this early stage, your time is better spent impressing each picture into memory.
In writing practice you should draw the kanji as a set of picto-graphs. Each kanji should fit into the same-size square, and each element, that is, each sub-pictograph, should be placed in the same portion of the square as it is in the model that you are copying. There are general rules of stroke order, and the reader should follow these general rules as closely as possible without being obsessive. Each general rule has exceptions, and there are exceptions to the exceptions.
Only a simplified version of the general rules of stroke order and some of the exceptions are given here. This should be enough to allow you to memorize the 400+ kanji in this book in a week or two, which is the book’s objective. As you proceed to further study of the kanji, you will find many excellent texts in English which provide material for your next step.
The first general rule of stroke order is to begin at the top left point in the square and proceed to the bottom right point in the square. The first exception is that when the right top point is higher than the left top point, as it is in hand 手, pronounced TE, the first stroke starts from the right top point and is drawn to the left .
Other important rules are (and remember that there are exceptions to each):
1. Draw from top left point to bottom right point.
2. Horizontal strokes are written left to right.
3. Horizontal strokes are written before vertical.
4. Vertical strokes are written top to bottom.
5. If there is a complete element in the left-hand side of the square, it is drawn in full before the right-hand side is started.
6. If there is a complete element in the top part of the square, it is drawn in full before the bottom part is started.
7. An outer frame is drawn first, except that the bottom line goes in last, after the strokes inside the square are drawn.
8. Central vertical strokes are drawn before the left and right diagonal strokes.
9. Diagonal lines on the left side precede diagonal lines on the right side.
10. Horizontal or vertical lines that cut through a kanji are written last.
In learning to recognize each kanji and its meaning, the rules of stroke order and the art of writing kanji are only marginally helpful. In English, for example, to write the word “book” you could as easily start at the right bottom of the letter k and continue leftward until you reach the left side of the letter b. As long as the finished word looks like , your writing will be understood by anyone who reads it. The fact that you violated all the conventions of writing script does not detract from your ability to make your writing understood, although your writing may not win an award for penmanship. In the same way, when writing kanji, a few contraventions of stroke order will not compromise your ability to be understood, as long as you have the picture right and all the strokes in the right place.
How To Use This Book
READ JAPANESE TODAY provides a pictorial mnemonic method for learning kanji. Each kanji character is presented with its pictorial origin, its modern meaning, its main pronunciations, and examples of how it is used. The examples were selected from common applications that visitors to Japan will see frequently as they travel about the country, such as on signs, in newspapers, in magazine ads, on product packaging, and so forth.
The pronunciations given in the text for each kanji are limited to the most common ones, generally the pronunciations needed to read the kanji that are usually seen by visitors to Japan.
The kana endings, which show the grammar of the words, are generally omitted in the examples in this book so the reader can focus on remembering the kanji. The grammatical endings of some of the words are given in roman letters, however, so the reader can see the pronunciation of the base form of the word. For example, the pronunciation for the kanji 聞, to hear in the verb form, is given in this book in roman letters as KIKU, whereas the kanji 聞 actually represents only KI, the root sound of the word. The KU sound, which is the grammatical ending representing the infinitive form of the verb, must be written in kana.
The infinitive form of the verb is the one most often used in English-Japanese dictionaries, so it is shown in this book in roman letters to make it easier for you to look up these words in a dictionary later.
The main portion of the book is organized into 10 sections consisting of roughly 40 kanji each. You should proceed through the book from beginning to end, rather than jumping from place to place, since the elements and kanji are arranged so that those introduced earlier in the book become the building blocks for those in the later pages.
Each section contains approximately the number of kanji that you could readily learn in a day. Thus, if you follow this prescription, you should be able to learn the 400+ kanji in this book in a period of 10 days. However, there is no particular reason why you need to complete a section in a single day. You should feel free to read or re-read the book for 5 minutes or 5 hours at a stretch according to your mood and convenience.
The Afterword following Section 10 provides some advice for continuing with your kanji studies. Appendix B features a Kanji Summary Table that includes all of the kanji introduced in this book. The kanji are listed in the order they are presented in the book, and a page reference, common readings, English meanings, and example word are included for each. Appendix C is an alphabetical index of the English meanings for all of the kanji introduced in the book.
You will learn the meaning of the kanji most quickly by focusing on the pictographs and what the Chinese meant them to represent, then linking each pictograph or combination of elements, through whatever mnemonic you are comfortable with, to current Japanese usage.
