Read Japanese Kanji Today: The Easy Way to Learn the 400 Basic Kanji [Jlpt Levels N5 ] N4 and AP Japanese Language & Culture Exam]

by Len Walsh and Len Welsh

Book Overview

The method that has helped thousands-- Read Japanese Kanji Today provides readers with a quick and simple way to learn kanji characters. Far from being a complex and mysterious script, Japanese writing is a fascinating and straightforward pictographic and ideographic system, quickly understood and mastered. With the approach used in this easy-to-read, entertaining kanji book you'll soon be able to recognize and read over 400 kanji, whether or not...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 480531432X
• ISBN13: 9784805314326
• Release Date: August 2017
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A fantastic, essential little book for Japanese learners

The formidable hieroglyphic writing system used by Japanese is perhaps the most intimidating challenge, among many, for native English speakers. Adopted from the ancient Chinese script in the 3rd century, the Japanese written word can seem indecipherable at first glance, like a modern Rosetta Stone. But Len Walsh actually makes sense of it in this splendid little book. He organizes each character group into categories like tools, animals, derivatives of the hand, money, and the like. He shows how the Chinese script began with approximations of basic, concrete objects in nature-- the hand, the sun, the mouth, the eye, the horse, the dog, and so on-- and then began to encompass abstract concepts via metaphors, stories, and incidents involving the concrete ones. You see how the basic characters, squared off and standardized to allow for easy writing, are incorporated as radicals into more complex ones, and how compounds are formed to represent basic concepts. And since you'll learn this history, you'll learn how to glean the meaning of a character based on its constituents. You learn, for example, how the character for "mura" ("village") came about, uniting the radicals for "tree" and "law" (the latter itself a metaphorical extension of a character for "measure"), with the village symbolizing a social structure that brought law out of the tree-lined jungle. You'll learn how the character for "name" (Japanese "na" or "mei") arose from a combination of "evening" and "mouth"-- stemming from an ancient Chinese practice of sentries demanding the names of passersby at night. Thus you not only learn the characters themselves, but gain an insight into ancient Chinese and Japanese culture. Each character is not only drawn out and linked to a word in English; its reading (pronunciation) in Japanese is given as well. Japanese characters generally have multiple readings, which vary depending on whether the character is used as a standalone word in a sentence, or one character in a compound that represents another word (e.g. a stone being "ishi" by itself and "seki"-- as in "sekiyu," petroleum-- in compounds). The standalone reading is usually native Japanese, while the reading in compounds is quite frequently borrowed from the equivalent Chinese word-- although just as French-derived English words, derived usually from Old/Middle French, differ from modern French, the modern Chinese equivalent will often vary somewhat from the Japanese. Walsh illustrates the history of the characters based on the Shuo Wen Chie Tsu, the classic source from the 2nd Century A.D. explicating the origin of the Chinese characters. Walsh's own drawings are lucid and comprehensible, and the story of many characters' origins often quite humorous (still trying to figure out how "mono," meaning "thing," arose from the combination of a cow and an elephant). In any case, you should pick up this book even if you intend only to learn spoken Japanese. You'll acquire a feel for h

terrific, whimsical little guide

I've read and reread this work since buying it many years ago. It came in handy when we traveled to Japan: I actually understood much of what I was looking at--at least on signage--while the overwhelming majority of tourists stared dumfounded. A word of advice: I would look into Chinese first--please check out Diane Wolff's marvelous "Chinese for Beginners"--inasmuch as Japanese writing was built on top of Chinese. You'll get much more out of Walsh if you read Wolff first. Also, don't think for a moment that, just because you recognize a kanji, you know the meaning of the phrase in which it appears. We learned the hard way that the Japanese mind combines characters and components of characters in _very_ peculiar ways--it was often quite a surprise when a native told us what that sign over there actually meant after we told him what we ambitious gaijin thought it meant! Walsh's book cannot possibly equip you in only a couple of hundred pages to understand why "lawful-language" means "French," or why "self-move-concentrate-mind" means "Caution: automatic door"--or why "water" means "Wednesday" on that poster! Also, bear in mind that some of Walsh's explanations for the derivation of various kanji are suspect. That doesn't really matter, of course, if his mnemonic helps you remember it--as long as you're not a philologist. Take it for what it's worth, and enjoy your heart out!

Get this book!!!!

If you want to learn to read kanji, there's no faster or easier way to pick up the basics than reading this book. When Walsh promises you'll be able to read basic Japanese after "Read Japanese Today", he's not kidding. And the way it's written, you read it like you would fiction or easy non-ficiton and you pick up the Japanese characters without even realizing it!

Very nice for the price

I just bought this book two days ago and cannot put it down. Mr Walsh gives a good account of how the Chinese first devised their pictographic writing system, and how it was later borrowed by the Japanese. He supplies each kanji with a mnemonic device that makes it easy to remember. The book is written such that it is very accessible to the complete beginner. I agree with the reviewer who recommended getting this book as a first introduction to learning the kanji. To learn the kana, I would recommend Heisig's "Remembering the Hiragana" and Morsbach and Heisig's "Remembering the Katakana".

Absolute must-have! (and cheap, too)

Anyone learning or considering learning Japanese should read this book ASAP, even before looking at the kana or a grammar text (before considering books for these things, search out "The Quick and Dirty Guide to Japanese" and a good free kana drill program, if you want to save yourself time and money). The kanji are easy to memorize, given explanations of what they are supposed to look like. After reading it, kanji won't look like bizarre unreadable symbols, but familiar pictures of common things.Those pictures will make learning spoken vocabulary far easier than trying to learn spoken Japanese without the writing.Once you have it, take a whole day and read it through like a novel - twice if you have time. After that, you will be shocked at how much you retain. The title is not an exaggeration; after one day, you can be reading Japanese (though you'll need to learn the kana; this book has a simple section on that too).