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Princess Mononoke Film ComicLearning to Read Japanese
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Because of my interest in anime and manga, I am working on learning to read Japanese. Of course, I am also learning to speak it.
Contents
Introduction
Japanese is written with three types of characters: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are simple phonetic "alphabets" in which each character represents a syllable. Hiragana is written with smooth strokes and is used for native words, particles, and inflections. Katakana is written with squared strokes and is used for foreign words and for emphasis. There are about 50 symbols in each of these alphabets. There is a table summarizing them.Kanji are a huge mass of characters derived from Chinese writing. About 2000 of them are used in magazines and newspapers, up to 6000 in literary and classical writings. Clearly, kanji is the hard part! The key to these characters is to learn the simpler components they are built from. The character for "see" above looks like a big eye on two bending legs. Both the "eye" and the "legs" appear in many other kanji.
The steps I recommend in learning to read Japanese are:
- Learn some basic sentence patterns in spoken form from good set of audio tapes or a language class. Try not to learn "spellings" of words in Romanized form - it's a handicap in the next step.
- Using a book of mnemonics like Kanji Pict-O-Graphix, learn the hiragana and katakana syllables. After that, never write a Japanese word in Romanized form if you can possibly help it.
- Using a book of mnemonics like Remembering the Kanji, learn to recognize and write the general-use kanji. Don't try to learn all the readings right away. That will come gradually in the next step.
- As you learn new words in Japanese, look them up in a dictionary and see what combinations of kanji are used in writing them. The common roots will make learning vocabulary much easier.
The audio tapes I found most useful:
-
Pimsleur tapes. They don't
require you to follow along in a book, so they can be practiced while
driving. They use a graduated-interval recall method that increases
memorization. And they concentrate on putting together basic sentences
instead of just learning tourist phrases.
I found the following books very useful:
- Japanese for Everyone
(Susumu Nagara et. al., 1990, Gakken Co. Ltd.)
This book gets into the hiragana and katakana syllable writing systems right away. Learning Japanese with the words translated into the Roman alphabet is a crutch that should be given up as soon as possible, they say. Grammer is taught with a functional approach -- how to get idea patterns across.
Link to the book at amazon.com- Remembering the Kanji I
(James W. Heisig, 1977, Japan Publications Trading Co, Ltd.)
Using this book of mnemonic stories I was able to learn to recognize and write most of the 2042 general-use kanji in about 6 months. (Note: this book is rather controversial. Many people don't like it, but I couldn't find any better way to make rapid progress in reading and writing.)
Link to the book at amazon.com- Kanji Pict-O-Graphix
(Michael Rowley, 1992, Stone Bridge Press)
This is another set of mnemonics presented in picture form. There are several sample pages from it available on the net. I prefer Heisig because for me more imagination can be used in creating "stories" instead of just pictures.
Link to the book at amazon.com- Kanji From the Start
(Martin Lam and Shimizu Kaoru, 1995, Kodansha International)
A set of reading lessons that gradually build up the number and variety of kanji used. Excellent grammar notes and exercises to help learn Japanese word order.
Link to the book at amazon.com- Kodansha's Furigana Japanese-English Dictionary
(Kodansha International)
It is good to get into the habit of looking up words using the Japanese alphabet. This dictionary also has sentence examples for most words and explains many points of grammar.
Link to the book at amazon.com- The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary
(Kodansha International) Edited by Jack Halpern
This uses the Halpern system of indexing kanji, allowing for very fast look-ups of unfamiliar kanji. The presentation of key meanings is also great for study.
Link to the book at amazon.com- Strategies for Reading Japanese
(Setsuko Aihara and Graham Parkes, 1992, Japan Publications)
This grammar book is a great help in learning to "decode" the Japanese sentence.
Link to the book at amazon.com - Remembering the Kanji I
Programs I found helpful on my home PC:
- Kanji Card
- a program to use along with Heisig's books to create
flashcards and for online review. The picture at the top of the
page is a sample flashcard it generated. (for Windows)
- JWP and JDIC - a Japanese word processor that works together with a Japanese-English dictionary. (for Windows)
Programs I found helpful on Unix systems
- Mule
- multi-language extensions for Emacs. Besides Japanese, it can also
be configured to handle Korean, Chinese, Russian, and many other languages.
BDF fonts for these languages are available in the ftp directories.
Emacs 2.0 and above now has Mule built-in.
- Netscape - Netscape version 2.0b3 and above support Japanese, Korean, and other character sets.
Net resources of interest:
- Japanese-English Dictionary
- You can capture Japanese strings from a web page and
paste them into a dictionary window for direct look-up.
- Monash University Japanese WWW Page Viewer - If your web browser cannot handle Japanese, this viewer can get the page for you and translate the Japanese sequences into graphic images the browser can display.
Reading Practice
For reading practice I have used, in increasing order of difficulty, a Japanese children's alphabet book, Totoro, Mangajin magazine (which is now out of business, unfortunately), and Newtype (the Japanese anime magazine).Here are some sample translations from Japanese I have made that you may find humorous (and may be able to help me to improve). I also translated my home page, anime page, and personal information page to Japanese.
