Hiroko Chiba - Japanese Character Writing For Dummies

Japanese Character Writing For Dummies

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Copyright 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953292

ISBN 978-1-119-47543-9 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-47545-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-47534-7 (ebk)

1. Chapter 1

Every language has its own journey and stories. This book introduces the stories of the Japanese language through the practice of kanji. More than 1,500 years ago, kanji came to Japan from China through Korea. Its a meaning-based script that is, each kanji represents a meaning. Kanji is not only an essential part of the Japanese language, but is also used as a medium for art such as calligraphy. Whatever your degree of interest in Japanese language and culture, you will feel the joy of setting foot in a new world by learning kanji. You may have heard that kanji is complicated and difficult to learn. Although it is true that one cannot master kanji overnight, you will find the learning process quite enjoyable.

This book is intended for people who have absolutely no prior knowledge of kanji. However, it is also useful for those who have learned Japanese but want to polish their kanji.

In this book, you will learn 105 characters of Japanese kanji. Each kanji is introduced with a story related to the kanji along with examples of how its used. There will be plenty of spaces (which look like square boxes) for you to practice the target kanji. Remember to follow the stroke order (the order for drawing lines in each kanji). Once you get a general sense of how the lines are ordered, you can speed up your writing, which will make learning kanji faster and more efficient. Before you start browsing kanji introduced in this book, here is some helpful information to keep in mind:

• Hiragana annotations (ruby). Weve placed the hiragana annotations above most of the kanji used in the description, in case you already know hiragana. For example, the kanji for mountain will be displayed with hiragana above it, so the result will look like this:
  
• Selection of kanji. The choice of a hundred five basic kanji is very subjective. We selected the ones that we thought were the most useful for everyday living, for understanding leaflets, signs, menus, and so on.
• Readings (pronunciations) of kanji. For most kanji, there are two types of readings: onyomi and kunyomi readings. Onyomi is an appropriation of the original Chinese sound and kunyomi is often called Japanese reading, which indicates that the word is of Japanese origin. This system is explained in more detail in . Some of the kanji weve selected here have more readings, but weve presented the most common ones.
• Kanji compounds. Kanji may be used independently with grammatical endings in hiragana. You will also see multiple kanji characters in one word. In this book, we call these multiple-kanji words kanji compounds.

I also use a few conventions in this book to help your reading go smoothly:

• In many places throughout this book, Japanese terms appear in two forms: as Japanese scripts (like what you would read if you were in Japan) and as romanized forms of words (which appear in italics so you can easily find them in the text). The official term for romanized Japanese is rmaji (rohh-mah-jee). Although, in many cases, it is easy to figure out how to pronounce rmaji, when you are not sure of the pronunciation of a rmaji sound, refer to .
• Following each Japanese term, its meaning or English equivalent is provided within a pair of parentheses.
• Conventionally, in kanji dictionaries that are written for English speakers, the pronunciation of Chinese origin is printed in uppercase letters, but the words of Japanese origin are written in lowercase. We will follow that convention in this book.

Note: Grammar points are not covered in this book, but you can learn more about Japanese grammar in Japanese For Dummies!

This is an exercise book for writing Japanese kanji. We created this book assuming the following:

• You know a little Japanese, but you never had time to study kanji characters.
• You do not know anything about Japanese, but its written form fascinates you.
• You have already done some Japanese writing, but you have forgotten it and want to practice more.