Tuttle Learning Japanese Kanji. Glen Nolan Grant

      INTRODUCTION

      This book can help you greatly reduce the time and effort involved in learning to read Japanese. It does so by introducing a method that is both effective and easy to use in memorizing the meanings and pronunciations of kanji, the array of characters that are used in the language to symbolize everything from abstract ideas to concrete nouns.

      Learning any of the kanji, you will find, is a two-step process, requiring that you remember both the visual aspect of a character (so you can recognize it when you see it) and the aural aspect (so you will know how to say and, thus, read it). The method presented here will show you how to tackle both of these aspects from the outset, and by so doing enable you to immediately get down to the practical (and fun!) business of recognizing and reading kanji on everything from street signs to newspapers. By the time you finish this book, in fact, you will be able to boast of a Japanese vocabulary numbering in the thousands of words.

      Kanji and the Japanese Writing System

      Kanji (literally, “Chinese characters”) arrived in Japan along with Buddhism and other aspects of Chinese culture approximately 1,500 years ago. As with many concepts introduced into the country from abroad, this writing system was gradually shaped and modified over the centuries to better suit the Japanese themselves. Kanji today comprise one part of written Japanese, being used alongside a pair of much simpler phonetic syllabaries, katakana and hiragana. Katakana are generally employed to denote foreign words, as well as various technical and scientific terms. Hiragana, on the other hand, have a largely grammatical function, and are used for everything from verb endings to particles. As you can see from the examples below, katakana and hiragana are visually similar; they never contain more than four strokes. Kanji, however, are more varied; they can have anywhere from one to more than 20 strokes.

      Hiragana: か き く け こ

      Katakana: カ キ ク ケ コ

      Kanji: 東 曜 秋 語 意

      Written Japanese is thus a mixture of three elements, and a single sentence can have all three present, as in the following example.

      アフリカで水牛とキリンを見ました。

      I saw a water buffalo and a giraffe in Africa.

      Number and Frequency of Kanji

      As katakana and hiragana can be learned quickly (there are only around fifty of each), this book will focus exclusively on learning kanji. It’s worth keeping in mind that the Japanese Ministry of Education has stipulated that high school students in Japan are expected to learn 2,136 characters (the so-called “general-use” kanji) by the time they graduate. Magazines and newspapers can employ upwards of 3,000 kanji, although these “extra” characters are often accompanied by hiragana showing how they are to be pronounced; without this, most Japanese would often be unsure of both the meaning of the character in question and its pronunciation.

      Despite there being so many kanji, it is important to understand that some are used far more frequently than others. The 500 most common, for example, make up approximately 80% of the kanji you will see. The 1,000 most common bring this figure to over 90%. Learning the 520 kanji presented in this volume, therefore, will offer great immediate benefit.

      The Composition of Kanji

      In general, kanji dictionaries divide characters into groups that share a common part (called a “radical”). As you can see below, the kanji in the first row all share the same left-hand radical. _{The kanji in the second row share the same top while the radical in the third row appears in various positions.}

      At times this book will break kanji apart into fragments smaller than radicals. To keep things simple, all radicals and parts that make up a kanji – but are not themselves kanji – are called components, and will always be presented in a separate text box immediately before the first character in which they appear.

      Stroke Order

      Stroke order refers to the sequence of lines that are used to correctly write out a kanji. Knowing this order is important for several reasons. First, it will help train you to quickly count the number of strokes in a character, and thus make it easier to locate unfamiliar kanji (or those for which pronunciations may have been forgotten) in a kanji dictionary.

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