“Well, I’m starin’ at my Sony, a-drinkin’ Kirin beer.
I had a nickel in my pocket when it all came clear.
I hopped into my Honda, it’s a little bitty car.
And I’m drivin’ down to meet you at the Sushi Bar.
But don’t tell me I’m crazy until you hear my plan.
I’m gonna buy two tickets and move to Japan.
I’m gonna move to Japan,
I’m gonna move to Japan.”
- The Band (Levon Helm et al) – 1993
I first traveled to Japan on a business trip some 30+ years ago. The thing that struck me most was the unusual Japanese writing. While I had been to several European cities previously, at least I recognized the “ABCs” in German or Italian or French, and could take a stab at pronouncing the words. But Japanese was so foreign to me. I was determined to learn more about it when I got home.
I learned that Japanese is a complex language, with 46 different Kana characters (syllables). Each can each be written two ways (hiragana and katakana), depending on the usage. In addition, there are thousands of kanji characters, adapted from the Chinese. The “kyōiku kanji” are the 1,026 first kanji characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school, from first grade to sixth grade. The “jōyō kanji” (regular-use kanji) are 2,136 characters consisting of all the kyōiku kanji, plus 1,110 additional kanji taught in junior high and high school. How is it possible to remember so many characters? I decided to dive into it more.
One of the first things I learned was a word that I saw all over Japan- 入口. What did it mean? I learned that one way of thinking of it was it represented two legs walking into an opening- in other words, an entrance. (“iriguchi” = iri 入 (enter) + guchi 口 (opening)). And I learned my first word!
Over the next several years, I bought every textbook, CD, and online learning tool I could find. Grammar, sentence structure, word endings, particles, and vocabulary were a struggle. I kept going back to the kanji characters, which fascinated me. The one book that hooked me right away was James Heisig’s book “Remembering the Kanji”. His approach was unique- learn a primary English meaning of each kanji, without worrying about how it is pronounced, grammar, etc. You finish the first volume without knowing how to speak a word of Japanese, but you can recognize and remember the meaning of many kanji characters. I started making my own flash cards as I was learning about the various kanji characters.
To give you an example, I’ll teach you some of my favorite kanji characters- those used to represent the days of the week. In Japanese, the days of the week are represented by the following characters: Sunday = “Sun” day, Monday = “Moon” day, Tuesday = “Fire” day, Wednesday = “Water” day (water to put out Tuesday’s fires), Thursday = “Tree” day (plant a tree after putting out the fire), Friday = “Gold” day (Payday!), and Saturday = “Soil” day (a day to work in the fields). Now let’s meet the corresponding kanji characters:
Sun = 日
There are no circles in Japanese writing, so picture the 口 as a round sun. Then put a line through it to represent the sun rising over the horizon, 日.
Moon = 月
When the vertical lines on the sun extend down further, tilting to the left, it creates a bit of a crescent shape, like a crescent moon. The 2 horizontal lines could represent the face of the mythical “man in the moon”.
Fire = 火
This one’s easy- the kanji for fire looks like flames shooting up in the air from a fire pit.
Water = 水
The kanji for water looks a bit like a snowflake. You could picture a walking stick dropping down into a pool of water, sending droplets in four directions. Note the difference between “fire” and “water”.
Tree = 木
The kanji for tree looks exactly like a tree, with three roots.
Gold = 金
This is the most complicated of this group, but you can just picture bars of gold being hidden under an umbrella.
Soil = 土
For this one, just think of the “plus” sign on the ground representing a mound of soil of the ground.
One more kanji of note- “day of the week” is written as “曜日” (日 can mean “day” in addition to “sun”), so the full writing of the word “Saturday”, for example, is 土曜日, to distinguish it from “soil” alone. But frequently 曜日 is excluded if the context is understood, as on a calendar, where Saturday would just be written as “土”
You are now well on your way to learning the 2,000 basic kanji characters. You start with simple shapes and components of the kanji symbols (“radicals”), like building blocks. Remember 木 (tree)? The kanji for “grove” is 林 (2 trees close together), and the kanji for “forest is 森 (3 trees together). Or if you add another long branch above the first one in “木”, the tree is ending its growth, and you get the kanji for “end”, 末 . Or if you take a horizontal slice of the middle root, you are looking at the “origin” of the tree, 本 . You may recognize the Japanese word for the country of Japan, 日本, which you can now read as “the sun’s origin”, or “Land of the Rising Sun”. You can see how learning kanji can become addictive!
Of course if you don’t use kanji regularly, they will slip away from your memory. I’ve read about every basic kanji character (all 3 volumes of Heisig’s books), but I don’t often have a chance to use Japanese, so they are hard to retain in my brain cells. I just took an online quiz today, and the computer calculated that I currently know about 300 kanji- about 15% of what you need to know to get by (comparable to a 2nd or 3rd grade Japanese elementary school student). I’ve forgotten quite a bit since I first started studying Japanese. At my peak, I probably knew about 500 kanji characters by sight.
A few years ago, after decades of intermittent, not too serious self-study, I considered taking the easiest level of the official Japanese Language Proficiency Test (Level 4), just for fun. I bought a preparation study CD, and did fine with reading, vocabulary, and grammar sections. But what killed me was the listening comprehension. I was clueless- I just cannot understand people who are speaking Japanese. I suppose like many foreigners trying to learn English, it is all spoken too fast for me to comprehend. You can’t learn listening comprehension from reading a book, and although I could clearly take online lessons or attend classes from a native Japanese speaker, that is too much stress for me at my age. For now, I’ll be happy just dabbling in Japanese with my elementary school “See Jane Run. Run, Jane, Run.” level of understanding.
I’ll conclude with a rather complicated Japanese sentence- 日本では土曜日に森で火事がありました。It may look like gibberish, and although you may not be able to read it in Japanese, you may see some familiar kanji in there from today’s blog- 日本 (Japan), 土曜日 (Saturday), 森 (Forest), and 火 (fire). Without knowing how to speak Japanese or knowing hiragana or knowing word endings or grammar, just by looking at the shapes of the kanji characters you could perhaps infer that the sentence is talking about a fire in a forest in Japan on Saturday. And you would be correct! Interesting, isn’t it? Another fun little hobby to enjoy in my golden years!
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