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
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
