radicals. For hundreds of years, Chinese dictionaries have organized kanji characters according to their radicals. Each Chinese character was assigned a radical and placed in an appropriate section of a dictionary according to the designated radical.
It is not always clear which component of a kanji is the radical, but this workbook shows the radical for each kanji at the upper right corner of the page. Whenever you learn a new kanji using this book, check its radical. It will help you understand and remember the meaning and the internal composition of the kanji. Eventually, you will be able to identify the radical just by looking at a kanji. There is an index of characters organized by radical near the end of this book.
Depending on its position in a kanji character, radicals are classified into seven categories, as shown in the chart on page 8.
How do I look up a kanji in a Japanese dictionary?
Many dictionaries list kanji characters according to their pronunciation, for both on-readings and kun-readings, either in kana or in Roman letters. So, if you know the reading of a kanji character, you can easily find it in such a dictionary using its pronunciation-based index. For example, The Original Modern Reader’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary by Andrew N. Nelson (Tuttle Publishing), has an on/kun index in the back, and kanji characters are alphabetically listed according to both their on-readings and their kun-readings in Roman letters with a unique code number provided for each character. Using that code number, you can easily find the page you should go to in the dictionary.
What if you see a kanji, but you don’t know how to read it? You could then use the radical index included in most dictionaries. In a radical index, hundreds of radicals are listed according to the radical’s total number of strokes. For example, 日 is the radical of 明, and it has 4 strokes. You can find the radical 日 in the radical list under the section for four-stroke radicals in just a few seconds. There you will find a code number, which will guide you to the list of all the kanji with the radical 日. For example, you will see many kanji, including 明, 晴, and 時, on the page specified by the code number for the radical 日. They are ordered according to their total stroke count. You can easily find the kanji character you want in the list.
If you have no clue about either the pronunciation or the radical of the kanji, you can use the kanji’s total stroke count as a reference. This book specifies the total stroke count for each kanji at the upper left corner of the box containing the kanji, but if you always write kanji in the correct stroke order and with the correct stroke count, you can figure it out by yourself.
How are kanji characters written?
To write kanji properly and legibly, it is very important to know how each stroke in a kanji is drawn. Here are some principles and tendencies for stroke endings, stroke directions, and stroke orders.
Stroke Endings
Each stroke ends in とめ tome (stop), はね hane (jump), or はらい harai (sweep). (Note that some diagonal lines end in stop-sweep.) For example, a vertical straight line can end in stop, jump, or sweep, as shown below:
Stroke Directions
A stroke can be vertical, horizontal, diagonal, angled, or curved, or can be just a short abbreviated line.
Vertical lines always go from top to bottom, and horizontal lines always go from left to right.
Diagonal lines can go either downward or upward. For example:
If a stroke forms a corner, a sharp angle, or a curve, it goes from left to right and then goes down, or goes down and then left to right. For example:
Some strokes have a combination of a sharp angle and a curve. For example:
Some strokes are extremely short and are called て ん ten. They may be vertical or slightly diagonal:
Stroke Order
You should remember how the strokes in each character are ordered in order to write a character neatly with the appropriate shape. Most kanji characters are written following the general principles of stroke order:
1. Kanji are written from top to bottom.
2. Kanji are written from left to right.
3. Horizontal strokes usually precede vertical strokes when crossing, although there are some exceptions such as 王 and 田.
4. A central line usually precedes the strokes placed on its right and left.
5. An outer frame must be written first before finishing the inside except for the bottom line. The bottom line of an outer frame must be completed at the very end.
6. A right-to-left diagonal stroke precedes a left-to-right diagonal stroke.
7. A vertical line piercing through the center of a character is written last.
8. A horizontal line piercing the center of the character is written last.
How do I learn to write kanji?
Remember that a good beginning and good planning are the keys to success in learning kanji. The following are some suggested steps for learning kanji using this workbook.
Get used to the strokes
Before writing any kanji, practice drawing some of the simple strokes with different endings many times on a sheet of scrap paper. For example, try drawing the strokes presented above (e.g., vertical lines, diagonal lines). Each time you end the stroke, say とめ tome (stop), はね hane (jump), or はらい harai (sweep), depending on which type of ending you are working on. If you have a brush and ink, try to make changes in the thickness of different portions of each
