Education in 1958, and are considered the most authoritative. The guidelines apply either to individual strokes or to the arrangement of component elements, as the case may be. The first two are especially important.
1. Top to bottom.
three 25
word 118
guest 270
2. Left to right.
province 320
faction 965
example 635
3. Horizontal strokes usually precede vertical strokes when crossing.
ten 35
earth 64
till 699
4. However, in a few cases vertical strokes precede horizontal ones.
king 5
field 63
bend 279
5. Centre usually precedes right and left where the latter do not exceed two strokes each.
small 38
water 42
receive 736
Note the two exceptions are the heart radical and fire
6. Outer frame first, but bottom line last.
country 136
sun 66
moon 18
Note the order of with the left-hand stroke joined to the bottom (e.g. ).
7. Right-to-left diagonal stroke precedes left-to-right.
person 41
father 216
again 2003
8. Central vertical line last.
middle 59
vehicle 33
thing 309
9. Strokes which cut through come last.
woman 37
child 27
boat 1450
Note that the only exception is
The following pointers should also be observed.
a. squares are written with three strokes not four
b. vertical strokes should not slope, (e.g. not )
c. horizontal strokes may slope, but should be parallel (e.g. )
d. characters should be of uniform size.
Editorial and Typographical Matters; Romanization
As indicated in 7.2 in the Introduction, for each character entry we show in the top left corner of the frame its number in the sequence of the corpus of 2,136. Directly underneath we give a number from L1 to L5, which indicates the level of the Japanese Proficiency Test (JLPT)—level 5 being the lowest, and level 1 being the highest. Unfortunately there seems to be some difficulty in obtaining full data on these levels, and we have been obliged to make our own estimates in some cases. On the right-hand side of the sequence number and the JLPT level, we give the character.
To the right of the character, we give three identifiers, namely pronunciations/readings on the top line, English meanings below, and stroke count below that. In the readings we indicate the unvarying earlier part of verbs and adjectives in standard (non-italic) case, and show the end-syllable(s) to be written in kana by using italicized lower case. Thus, for example, 決 (‘decide’ / ‘be decided’, entry 289), which can be transitive or intransitive, is given as ‘kimeru/kimaru’ to indicate that the end-syllables should be written in kana (okurigana) as 決める/決まる. There can be variation in okurigana usage (e.g. hikikomori ‘children staying at home’ can be written as 引き籠もり, 引き籠り, or 引籠り), though modern practice does tend towards an explicit model. Note that some characters have numerous readings and meanings, potentially causing space problems. Sometimes, such as with the character 下 (shita ‘below’, entry 7), readings can extend over several lines. (Also, for considerations of spacing within the frames it has been necessary sometimes to use abbreviated English forms, such as ‘assoc sense’ for ‘associated sense’, and for the same reason an informal semi-note style is employed sometimes in the main explanatory text of entries.)
Beneath the readings, English meanings, and stroke count, we give three example compounds for each character, where possible trying to illustrate its range of meanings and readings. In these compounds the Sino-Japanese (on) elements (‘readings’) are indicated by upper case, and the native Japanese ones (kun) by lower case (it is not uncommon to have a mix of the two in one word, e.g. 茶の湯 CHAnoyu ‘tea ceremony’, hence the upper and lower case combination). Western loanwords also use upper case, e.g., パン屋 PANya “baker(y).” (PAN “bread” is from Portuguese.) An asterisk against a romanized form indicates that the way of reading the characters (or one of the characters) concerned is irregular, e.g. 部屋 heya* ‘room’, in which 部 BU (‘part, section’) has the irregular reading he. Changes in pronunciation such as consonantal change in non-initial position, e.g. k changing to g (as in 筒型 tsutsugata ‘cylindrical’ [cf. kata ‘mold’]) or h to b (as in 火曜日 kayōbi ‘Tuesday’ [cf. hi ‘day’]) are not treated as irregular, and on the whole are not specifically noted in the readings, as we assume that readers have at least a basic level of familiarity with the Japanese language.
In this book, for Japanese we use a modified Hepburn system. The syllabic nasal (the element written ん or ンin kana) is represented in Sino-Japanese by the letter N or n followed by an apostrophe where necessary to avoid ambiguity. An example of this is 単位, which is romanized as TAN’I to show that it is the word (of three short syllables, たんいin kana) meaning ‘unit’ as opposed to the word tani ‘valley’ (two short syllables, たに in kana). The long vowel equivalents of o and u are indicated by a macron, as in tōri ‘road’.
For modern Chinese we use Pinyin romanization, with the tone marks omitted for typographical simplicity (an exception is ‘Peking Palace’ [not ‘Beijing Palace’], as here the older spelling seems entrenched). For early stages of Chinese we have followed the system employed by Schuessler, though modified in some cases to make it more readily understood by readers without a linguistic background.
THE KANJI
THE 80 FIRST GRADE CHARACTERS
1
L5
一
ICHI, ITSU, hito-
one
