Remembering the Kanji 2, Third Edition

Introduction

1 Introduction As the title suggests, the present book has been prepared as a companion volume to Remembering the Kanji: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters. It presumes that the material covered in the first book has already been mastered and concentrates exclusively on the pronunciation of the Japanese characters. Those who approached the study of the kanji in a different manner may find what is in these pages of some use, but it has not been designed with them in mind. As I explained in the Introduction to the former volume, if it is the student ’s goal to acquire proficiency in using the Japanese writing system, the entire set of “general-use characters” (常用漢字) need to be learned. To insist on studying them in the order of importance or frequency generally followed in Japanese schools is pointless if some other order is more effective as a means to that final goal. A moment’s reflection on the matter is enough to dispose of the common bias that the methods employed by those who come to Japanese as a foreign language should mirror the methods used by the Japanese themselves to learn how to read and write. Accumulated experience and education—and in most cases an energetic impatience with one’s own ignorance—distinguish the older student too radically from Japanese school children to permit basic study habits to be taken over with only cosmetic changes. A clearer focus on the destination should help the older student chart a course more suited to his or her time, resources, and learning abilities—and not just run harder and faster around the same track. Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to taking full advantage of one’s privileged position as an adult foreigner is a healthy fear of imposing alien systems on Japanese language structures. But to impose a system on ways of learning a language does not necessarily mean to impose a system on the language itself. To miss this distinction is to risk condemning oneself to the worst sorts of inefficiency for the worst sorts of reasons. Obviously the simplest way to learn Japanese is as the Japanese themselves do: by constant repetition, without interference, in a closed cultural environment . Applied to the kanji, this involves drilling and drilling and drilling until the forms and sounds become habitual. The simplest way, alas, is also the most 2 | introduction time-consuming and frustrating. By adding a bit of organized complexity to one’s study investments, the same level of proficiency can be gained in a fraction of the time. This was demonstrated in the first volume as far as the meaning and writing of the characters are concerned. By isolating these skills and abstracting from any relationship they have to the rest of the language, a firm foundation was laid for the next step, the assignation of sounds or “readings” to the individual characters. That is the subject of this book. The earlier volume was described as a “complete course”; the present volume is offered as a “guide.” The differences between the two books are as important as the similarities. While both books are intended to be self-taught and allow individual readers to progress at their own pace, the former traced out a path step by step, in a clearly defined order. Here, however, the material is presented in such a way that it may be followed frame by frame or may be rearranged freely to suit the particular student’s needs. The reason is that the readings of the kanji do not allow for any more than a discontinuous systematization : blocks of repeating patterns and clusters of unpatterned material organized under a variety of rubrics. In fact, the only thing ironclad about the method is the assumption that the student already knows what the characters mean and how they are written. Without that knowledge, the systematization becomes all but opaque. In any event, it is important to gain some understanding of how the book as a whole is laid out before deciding how best to make use of it. The book falls into two parts of wildly disproportionate length. The first ten chapters cover the Chinese or on readings (音読み); the last chapter, the Japanese or kun readings (訓読み). This should not give the impression that the on readings themselves are so much more difficult than the kun readings, but only that their systematization requires...