Preface

Japanese has been described as a difficult language so often and so widely that what is meant by this is now seldom questioned. It is undeniable that such features as a large vocabulary, the constant coining of new words of all kinds, the complications of respectful forms of the language, and, to most Westerners at least, the peculiarities of idiom and sentence structure make Japanese appear a formidable opponent, particularly if, in the early stages of study, the material the student meets is not carefully controlled. Any language has its difficulties, however, and Japanese is no exception in this nor, conversely, in also having aspects, such as its pronunciation, which present very few problems to most foreign students. All in all, therefore, the Japanese language as such is only marginally more difficult than, say, a European language.

Where Japanese does present unique complications and difficulties is in its writing system, a combination of phonetic signs and the ideographic characters that the Japanese call kanji (literally, "Chinese characters"), which, as the word suggests, were originally derived from China. The learning of some hundred such phonetic signs and many hundred kanji constitutes a considerable barrier to the ready use of the written language, especially so since each character can have several different possible readings depending upon context, to say nothing of the quite separate problem of the characters and readings used in proper names.

Yet the spoken and written forms of Japanese are so inextricably linked that a good familiarity with characters is necessary for anything more than superficial conversation, and the practical problem therefore is how best to acquire and retain a knowledge of the written forms. This inevitably requires a great application of time and effort and there need be no end to the learning of characters, but it is important not to exaggerate the difficulties of developing the ability to deal at least with the modern written language. The phonetic signs and their usage can be mastered in a couple of days and, as a result of the postwar attempts to simplify the written language, most popular publications now use no more than around two thousand kanji.

The core of the problem, then, is the memorization of some two thousand characters, and this is no light task, particularly if the characters are all learned as isolated items without understanding their structure, whenever and however they happen to be met in the reading of Japanese. On the other hand, the limitation of the number of characters in general use does mean that, once they and their main readings are learned, the understanding of most modern Japanese writing becomes comparable in difficulty to reading a language written in a phonetic script.

The present book therefore aims to ease the learning of the two thousand most essential characters and their main readings, and it seeks to do this in three main ways:

First, it introduces the characters systematically, in that the simpler and more common ones are given first, and the compounds illustrating the readings of a character use only the character itself and such others as have already appeared in the course. This arrangement reinforces the knowledge of characters already learned by their sporadic reappearance and makes it possible to know exactly how many characters have been covered fully at any particular time. In addition, the main-character entries have been arranged so that it is easy to test how well the characters and their readings have been remembered and how many of them can be written, by using a cut-out card to cover whichever part of the entry is to be tested. It is assumed that students will be reading Japanese material of various kinds and meeting characters in an uncontrolled fashion while using the course and that, as they progress through it, they will have the encouragement of seeing characters which they already know partially from their reading.

Second, the book makes use of the fact that the same phonetic element occurring in different characters often gives them all the same Sino-Japanese on reading in modern Japanese. Kangi consisting of a radical (indicating the general area of meaning of a character) and a phonetic (indicating its sound or reading) form by far the largest group, more than three-quarters of the total number, and by showing on the introduction of a character that its phonetic has the same reading in other characters too and by grouping all these characters together under the same entry in the index of readings (Part II), the on readings of a number of different characters can be learned at one and the same time.

Third, the index of on and kun readings in Part II lists, after the main entries, characters which, because they contain similar elements, may be thought to have the same reading but which, in fact, are read differently in modern Japanese. These contrastive characters serve as warnings and, at the same time, provide reminders of what their different readings are.

Part I of the course gives both readings and vocabulary items for each character, but, of the two, the readings have been regarded as the more important. This means, for example, that where in giving words and phrases for a character a choice had to be made between a common word and a less common reading, the latter was generally chosen on the grounds that, while a common word may already be known or will be met soon anyway, a good knowledge of the varied readings of a character can save a great deal of time in looking up words in dictionaries. The basic aim of the course is to bring the student as quickly as possible to the stage where, in reading modern Japanese, he can largely dispense with the use of a character dictionary. The occasional use of such dictionaries may be unavoidable, but familiarity with the various readings of a character and increasing experience of the language will usually suggest the reading most likely in the particular context and, if the meaning is not then known, recourse can be had immediately to such dictionaries as the alphabetically arranged Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, which gives full examples for each meaning, or to any of a number of good, phonetically arranged, Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, which give very precise definitions for each word. All too often the foreign student of Japanese confronted by a character of uncertain reading goes first to a Japanese-English character dictionary as a matter of course, and then has to decide whether to try to make do with a one-word meaning which may not seem to fit the context or, now that the reading is known, to go to another dictionary for more help; but the character dictionary is best regarded as a valuable aid during an intermediate stage which should be outgrown as quickly as possible.

The process of gradually dispensing with a character dictionary for reading modern Japanese can begin as soon as the first characters are learned and can be largely completed after two years' study of the language. In that time, it is perfectly reasonable for an average, conscientious university student to come to recognize (as distinct from write) two thousand characters and to learn their main readings, when studying them as part of a full-time Japanese course. Thereafter, this familiarity with the characters and readings used in ordinary modern Japanese can save him many hours of dictionary use and lead him to regard the written language not as an obstacle or an end in itself, but as the means by which to broaden and deepen his interest in Japan.

Finally, I should like to express my thanks for the exemplary calligraphy included in Part I, by two well-known Japanese teachers of the art. The main, brush-drawn characters are the work of the late Takatsuka Chikudo and are taken from his book Kakikata Jiten (How-to-Write Dictionary), published by Nobara-sha, Tokyo, 1959, and are reproduced by kind permission of Shimura Bunzo, President of Nobara-sha. The smaller, pen-drawn characters have been done expressly for this book by Arayashiki Shunrai, who belongs to the same school of calligraphy as did Chikudo. I hope their fine work will be an inspiration to the users of this book, as the pleasure of writing characters well can greatly ease the task of learning them.