Read Japanese Today. Len Walsh

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 , your writing will be understood by anyone who reads it. The fact that you violated all the conventions of writing script does not detract from your ability to make your writing understood, although your writing may not win an award for penmanship. In the same way, when writing kanji, a few contraventions of stroke order will not compromise your ability to be understood, as long as you have the picture right and all the strokes in the right place.

      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 the kanji 聞 actually represents only KI, the root sound of the word. The KU sound, which is the grammatical ending representing the infinitive form of the verb, must be written in kana.

      The infinitive form of the verb is the one most often used in English-Japanese dictionaries, so it is shown in this book in roman letters to make it easier for you to look up these words in a dictionary later.

      The main portion of the book is organized into 10 sections consisting of roughly 40 kanji each. You should proceed through the book from beginning to end, rather than jumping from place to place, since the elements and kanji are arranged so that those introduced earlier in the book become the building blocks for those in the later pages.

      Each section contains approximately the number of kanji that you could readily learn in a day. Thus, if you follow this prescription, you should be able to learn the 400+ kanji in this book in a period of 10 days. However, there is no particular reason why you need to complete a section in a single day. You should feel free to read or re-read the book for 5 minutes or 5 hours at a stretch according to your mood and convenience.

      The Afterword following Section 10 provides some advice for continuing with your kanji studies. Appendix B features a Kanji Summary Table that includes all of the kanji introduced in this book. The kanji are listed in the order they are presented in the book, and a page reference, common readings, English meanings, and example word are included for each. Appendix C is an alphabetical index of the English meanings for all of the kanji introduced in the book.

      You will learn the meaning of the kanji most quickly by focusing on the pictographs and what the Chinese meant them to represent, then linking each pictograph or combination of elements, through whatever mnemonic you are comfortable with, to current Japanese usage.

      ♦ SECTION 1 ♦

      The ancient Chinese saw the sun like this , so that is how they wrote the word for sun. They later found it took too long to write the rays, so they shortened the pictograph to . When they simplified the character to its final form, to make it even easier to write and at the same time look aesthetically acceptable to the Chinese eye, they squared the circle and changed the dot into a line 日.

      The basic meaning of 日 is sun. The Chinese saw that the passage of the sun across the sky took one day, so they extended 日 also to mean one day. This kanji, as do most, has several pronunciations. When 日 forms a word by itself, it is generally pronounced HI. When it is put together with other kanji in a compound word it is pronounced NICHI or JITSU.

      The Chinese pictograph for tree was . It was gradually simplified to ,