Tuttle Learning Japanese Kanji. Glen Nolan Grant
written Japanese, being used alongside a pair of much simpler phonetic syllabaries, katakana and hiragana. Katakana are generally employed to denote foreign words, as well as various technical and scientific terms. Hiragana, on the other hand, have a largely grammatical function, and are used for everything from verb endings to particles. As you can see from the examples below, katakana and hiragana are visually similar; they never contain more than four strokes. Kanji, however, are more varied; they can have anywhere from one to more than 20 strokes.
Hiragana: か き く け こ
Katakana: カ キ ク ケ コ
Kanji: 東 曜 秋 語 意
Written Japanese is thus a mixture of three elements, and a single sentence can have all three present, as in the following example.
アフリカで水牛とキリンを見ました。
I saw a water buffalo and a giraffe in Africa.
Number and Frequency of Kanji
As katakana and hiragana can be learned quickly (there are only around fifty of each), this book will focus exclusively on learning kanji. It’s worth keeping in mind that the Japanese Ministry of Education has stipulated that high school students in Japan are expected to learn 2,136 characters (the so-called “general-use” kanji) by the time they graduate. Magazines and newspapers can employ upwards of 3,000 kanji, although these “extra” characters are often accompanied by hiragana showing how they are to be pronounced; without this, most Japanese would often be unsure of both the meaning of the character in question and its pronunciation.
Despite there being so many kanji, it is important to understand that some are used far more frequently than others. The 500 most common, for example, make up approximately 80% of the kanji you will see. The 1,000 most common bring this figure to over 90%. Learning the 520 kanji presented in this volume, therefore, will offer great immediate benefit.
The Composition of Kanji
In general, kanji dictionaries divide characters into groups that share a common part (called a “radical”). As you can see below, the kanji in the first row all share the same left-hand radical. The kanji in the second row share the same top while the radical in the third row appears in various positions.
| 休 | 化 | 体 |
| 安 | 家 | 字 |
| 冬 | 夏 | 愛 |
At times this book will break kanji apart into fragments smaller than radicals. To keep things simple, all radicals and parts that make up a kanji – but are not themselves kanji – are called components, and will always be presented in a separate text box immediately before the first character in which they appear.
Stroke Order
Stroke order refers to the sequence of lines that are used to correctly write out a kanji. Knowing this order is important for several reasons. First, it will help train you to quickly count the number of strokes in a character, and thus make it easier to locate unfamiliar kanji (or those for which pronunciations may have been forgotten) in a kanji dictionary. It will also aid you in breaking down characters visually, making it easier to see the components that will help you recall a kanji’s meaning. Stroke order diagrams accompany each entry in this book. The accompanying
An Overview of On-yomi and Kun-yomi
On-yomi and kun-yomi are the two main branches of pronunciation (or “readings”, as they are called) that are present in modern day Japanese. On-yomi are sometimes called the “Chinese readings” of the kanji, as these were the initial pronunciations attached to the characters when they first arrived from China. The kun-yomi, on the other hand, developed from within Japan, and are thus referred to as “Japanese readings”. This, along with the fact that different on-yomi for the same character sometimes arrived from China centuries later, helps explain how a single kanji in Japanese can sometimes have more than one of each type of reading.
Clearly, memorizing these various pronunciations and knowing when to use them are two of the most difficult tasks in learning Japanese. There are, however, reasons to be optimistic. Over 60% of the kanji have only a single on-yomi, or one on-yomi and one kun-yomi. In addition, when multiple on- or kun-yomi are present, there is usually only one dominant reading for each. This book will help you determine the most important pronunciations to be learned by classifying every reading as either “common” or “less common”. Those that are less common do not merit being learned at this stage of your language study; they are presented only for future reference.
An interesting aspect of Japanese (and an unlucky one for us in this volume!) is that the most complex kanji in terms of pronunciation are often amongst the most simple to write. Do not get discouraged, therefore, when thorny characters such as “person” (Entry 2), “one” (Entry 3), “sun” (Entry 6), and “large” (Entry 17) all show up in the first chapter, as these can be classified with the most difficult in the language. Be patient with such characters, and take comfort in knowing that by the time you finish this book you will have dealt with the trickiest entries in the entire range of the general-use kanji.
Rules for Using On-yomi and Kun-yomi
There are some useful ground rules that you should keep in mind when learning to read single kanji and compounds (words formed from several kanji put together):
1. Kanji in most compounds are usually read with their on-yomi. Note, that when the pronunciations for on-yomi are given, these are conventionally written in katakana, and indicated by uppercase letters in English.
| KANJI | PRONUNCIATION | MEANING |
| 火山 | KA·ZAN カ · ザン | volcano |
| 家具 | KA·GU カ · グ | furniture |
| 弓道 | KYŪ·DŌ キュウ · ドウ | (Japanese) archery |
| 同時 | DŌ·JI ドウ · ジ | simultaneous |
2. Compounds only rarely mix on-yomi and kun-yomi. Note here that kun-yomi are conventionally written in hiragana, and indicated by lowercase letters in English.
| KANJI | PRONUNCIATION | MEANING |
| 中古車 | CHŪ·KO·SHA チュウ·コ·シャ | used car |
| 十二月 | JŪ·NI·GATSU ジュウ · ニ · ガツ | December |
| 小春 | ko·haru こ · はる | Indian summer |
| 花見 | hana·mi はな · み | cherry blossom viewing |
3. Kanji in compounds that are accompanied by hiragana are almost always read with their kun-yomi.
| KANJI (+ HIRAGANA) | PRONUNCIATION | MEANING |
|
|