Read Japanese Today. Len Walsh

      ♦ 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

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