Remembering the Kanji 1, Fifth Edition

Part Two: Plots (Lessons 13–19)

parttwo Plots Lesson13 By this time, if you have been following along methodically frame by frame, you may find yourself growing impatient at the thought of having to read through more than 2,000 of these little stories.You probably want to move at a quicker pace and in your own way. Take heart, for that is precisely what we are going to start doing in Part two. But if you happen to be one of those people who are perfectly content to have someone else do all the work for them, then brace yourself for the task that lies ahead. We begin the weaning process by abbreviating the stories into simple plots, leaving it up to you to patch together the necessary details in a manner similar to what we did in Part one. As mentioned in the Introduction, the purpose of the longer stories was to impress on you the importance of recreating a complete picture in imagination, and to insure that you did not merely try to associate words with other words but with images. The same holds true for the kanji that remain. Before setting out on our way again, a word of caution is in order. Left to its own, your imagination will automatically tend to add elements and see connections that could prove counterproductive in the long run. For example, you might think it perfectly innocent and admissible to alter the primitive for old to old man, or that for cliff to cave. In fact, these changes would be confusing when you meet the kanji and primitives with those meanings later on. You would return to the earlier kanji and find that everything had become one great confusion . You may have experienced this problem already when you decided to alter a story to suit your own associations.That should help you appreciate how hard it is to wipe out a story once you have learned it, particularly a vivid one. To protect yourself against this, stick faithfully to the key words as they are given, and try not to move beyond the range of primitive meanings listed.Where such confusion can be anticipated, a longer story will be presented as a protective measure, but you will have to take care of the rest. We start out Part two with a group of 23 characters having to do with travel, and the primitives that accompany them: a road, a pair of walking legs, and a car. 118 | remembering the kanji 1 * road 辶 The road envisioned here is a road for traffic, or a path or walkway . The natural sweep of these three simple strokes should be easy to remember, as it appears so often. [3] 旡 既 日 277 road-way 道 The key word carries both the sense of a road for transit and a way or method of doing something, but the former is better for forming an image.The primitives read: the neck of a road.Think of a crowded road-way where traffic has come to a standstill— what we commonly refer to as a“bottleneck.” [12] 旻 昀 昂 昃 278 guidance 導 When we accept someone’s guidance, we permit ourselves to be glued to a certain road or way of doing something,and try to “stick” to it. [15] 昞 昤 279 crossing 辻 Take the first two strokes in the sense we gave them back in frame 10, as the pictograph of a cross, and set it on a road to create a“crossing.” [5] 昧 昮 280 swift 迅 Here we see a crossing in the form of a barbed fishhook, suggesting a swifter alternate not only to the roundabouts used in Europe but also to the “cloverleaf” design used on superhighways in the United States. [6] lesson 13 | 119 是 昱 昴 昻 281 create 造 Think of creating as making something out of nothing. Then recall how the way of revelation laid out in the Bible begins with the story of how God created the world out of a dark and chaotic nothingness. [10] 晉 晒 282 urge 迫 To urge someone to do something,you make the way as appealing as possible, perhaps even whitewashing it a bit. [8] 晟 晥 283 escape 逃 When escaping from something or someone, one always feels as if one is not going fast enough, like a turtle on an expressway. (Since the turtle is on the road and not on the left,it can keep its full kanji shape as given in frame 235.) [9] 景 晴 284 environs 辺 To...