Read Japanese Today. Len Walsh

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 first formed as pictures by the Chinese and then developed into ideographs, or how to explain the structure of each kanji is built up from a few parts, each part with its own distinctive meaning.

      Now, there are several books in English which teach kanji through mnemonic systems based on the meaning of the pictographs and symbols that the Chinese drew when they invented kanji. There are now also many books written in Japanese for Japanese primary-school children suggesting to the children that they learn kanji the easy way, through the mnemonic of the pictographs on which the Chinese based the kanji, although the traditional rote-memory method is still preferred in the Japanese school system.

      One Japanese scholar, for example, wrote in the preface to his recently-published Primary School Pictograph Kanji Dictionary: “There are many children who do not like the study of kanji. There are also many children who say the only way to pass the kanji tests is by rote memory. Haven’t you all had the experience of being able to memorize the kanji only by writing each character over and over again? This naturally turns you away from the kanji. But there are many kanji that look like pictures and many parts of kanji repeated in different characters. Looking at kanji this way will make the study of kanji much more friendly. This dictionary clearly and simply explains how kanji were developed and how they were constructed, and will make your study of kanji much easier.”

      It is possible, of course, to learn the kanji through rote memory, but at great expense in time and effort. The shortcut is to learn the meanings of the interchangeable parts