Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese. Florence Sakade
Three: Characters 241–440
Grade Four: Characters 441–640
Grade Five: Characters 641–825
Grade Six: Characters 826–1,006
Section 2: The 2,136 General-Use Characters
Radical Index
Index of Readings
Bonus: List of the 196 Newest Jōyō Characters ONLINE at Tuttlepublishing.com http://www.tuttlepublishing.com/a-guide-to-reading-and-writing-japanese-downloadable-cd-content
INTRODUCTION
1 Aim
This newly revised edition is designed for students and others who have at least an elementary knowledge of spoken Japanese and want to acquaint themselves with the Japanese writing system. The most significant revisions are the addition of 196 characters, which were added to the Jōyō kanji (General-Use Characters) list in November of 2010. The elimination of 5 seldom-used characters now brings the total of General-Use characters to 2,136. The newly added characters reflect an information age where technology now allows characters to be more widely generated and consumed on screens. New characters reflect prefectural names and major cities and a concern with health and parts of the body. Aficionados of Japanese cuisine and culture will see familiar characters for foods (mochi, donburi, men, senbei), plants and Japanese cultural artifacts and customs, in particular inclusion of auspicious characters for tsuru and kame. Previous revisions to the Jōyō kanji list had been made in 1981 and 1946.
The highlights of this new edition are the following:
• Radical index for all characters
• Clearly marked characters found on the Kanji List of the AP Japanese Language and Culture Exam (marked with this symbol: ✓)
• Clearly marked characters (marked by level, based on past practice 1 , 2 , etc.) used for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT)
Although proficiency in the Japanese language is not determined by knowing characters alone, this revised edition will provide an excellent study guide for students who wish to increase their reading ability. All characters recommended for the high school National Japanese Exam (NJE) are included.
2 This Book and the Modern Japanese Writing System
2.1 About the Characters Selected
While the Jōyō kanji List (hereafter abbreviated to JK List) does not represent an exhaustive list of Chinese characters which the student will encounter in modern Japanese texts, in combination with the two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) it does nevertheless provide a very sound basis for reading and writing modern Japanese. In Japanese schools, 1,006 of the more commonly used JK List characters are taught in the six years of elementary school, the balance of 1,130 characters being spread out over the intermediate and high school curriculum. The JK List characters also form the basis of character usage in modern newspapers, though sometimes the Japan Newspaper Association chooses to deviate from the List in some ways.
For writing the names of their children, Japanese today can choose from a corpus of characters consisting of the JK List together with a supplementary list of characters for use in given names. The first such name character list, approved in 1951, consisted of 92 characters, but was expanded considerably in 2004. The current Jinmeiyō Kanji list, which is determined by the Ministry of Justice, includes 861 characters. We do not list these here.
This book is divided into two main sections. Section One presents the 1,006 characters designated by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to be taught during the six years of elementary school—termed here “Essential Characters.” The choice of these characters is the result of extensive research and deliberation by the Ministry. For these characters, the editors of this volume have endeavored to give illustrative character compounds that are in common use.
Section Two of this book sets out the 2,136 characters designated for general everyday use (including the 1,006 characters taught at elementary school). In 1946 the Japanese writing system underwent fairly radical reform in the direction of simplification, but the 1970s onwards saw some movement away from what some saw as an over-simplification, and the trend towards use of a bigger range of Chinese characters has been encouraged by the development and popularity from the mid-1980s of word-processors and computers that can handle conventional Japanese text. Despite this trend, the major impact of the orthographic reforms of the late 1940s has meant that the Japanese writing system of today still remains much simpler than it was before 1946.
2.2 How Characters Are Read in Japanese
Typically, each Chinese character has two types of readings—on-yomi and kun-yomi. The on-yomi (on reading, i.e., Sino-Japanese reading) is a reading originally based on the Chinese pronunciation associated with each character, and reflects the fact that the Chinese script was adopted from China the best part of 2,000 years ago, when the Japanese themselves did not have a writing system. Contrasting with the on-yomi is the kun-yomi (kun reading, i.e., native Japanese reading). In some cases, a given Chinese character has several on readings, reflecting different forms of underlying Chinese pronunciation. A given character may also have more than one associated kun reading. Context and the use or absence of accompanying kana (okurigana) are the pointers as to which reading is appropriate in a given case.
In this book, the majority of the readings set out in the JK List as it appeared in the Kanpō (Official Gazette) of 1 October 1981 have been included, but some readings have been excluded, bearing in mind the aim of this book, because they are archaic, obsolescent, or not common (e.g., nagomu [to soften] for 和). Also excluded from among the formal readings listed in this book are the sort of common minor—or relatively minor—variations in character readings which are found only in certain environments in compounds. For instance, the character 学 has the on reading GAKU, which is truncated to GAK- in the compound 学校 gakkō [school, college], the kun reading ame [rain] of 雨 changes to ama- as the first element in compounds such as 雨戸amado [rain-shutters], and the character 合 GŌ is read GAT- in the compound 合 点 gatten [understanding, consent]. It was considered best for readers of this book to learn such changes gradually as they progress.
In modern Japanese usage there are quite a number of characters which lack either an on reading or a kun reading. For instance, nowadays the character 糖 [sugar] is employed only for its on reading TŌ, while the character 箱 [box] is used only for its kun reading hako.
2.3 Writing Characters
Firstly, the student should make every effort to practice so as to keep the characters of uniform size in relation to one another. Thus, the 2-stroke character 刀 katana should be written within the equal-sized imaginary square or circle as the 15-stroke 論 RON [argument, opinion], and by the same token the element 言 should be written larger when used as an independent character (read GEN, GON, [speech, word]) than when used as a radical / component in a more complex character such as 論 RON above.
Secondly, bear in mind that Chinese characters sometimes consist of just a few strokes, sometimes many, but the characters are always written according to a set stroke order. Listed below are some principles that will be of assistance with regard to priority in the order of strokes.
1. Top to bottom:
2. Left to right:
Other rules are:
3. When two or more strokes cross, horizontal strokes usually precede perpendicular ones:
4.