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Students who have learned to read and write the basic 2,000 characters run into the same difficulty that ordinary university students in Japan face: the government-approved list of basic educational kanji are not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialization requires supplementary kanji of its own, a large number of these kanji overlap. With that in mind, the same methods employed in volumes 1 and 2 of Remembering the Kanji have been applied to 1,000 additional characters determined as useful for upper-level proficiency and the results published as volume 3 in the series.
To identify the extra 1,000 characters, frequency lists were researched and cross-checked against a number of standard Japanese kanji dictionaries. Separate parts of the book are devoted to learning the writing and the reading of these characters. The writing requires only a handful of new “primitive elements.” A few are introduced as compound primitives, as “measure words,” or as alternative forms for standard kanji. The majority of the kanji, 735 in all, are organized according to the elements introduced in volume 1. For the reading, about twenty-five percent of the new kanji fall into “pure groups” that use a single “signal primitive” to identify the main Chinese reading. Another thirty-percent of the new kanji belong to groups with one exception or to mixed groups in which the signal primitives have two readings. The remaining 306 characters are organized first according to readings that can be intuited from the meaning or dominant primitive element, and then according to useful compound terms.
The six Indexes include hand-drawn samples of the new characters introduced and cumulative lists of the key word and primitive meaning, and of the Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, that appear in all 3 volumes of the series.
If you are one of those tens of thousands of students of Japanese who have used Remembering the Kanji and are aiming to increase their knowledge of the kanji, and hence their vocabulary, this book could be just what you are looking for.
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James W.HEISIG
is a permanent research fellow of the Nanzan
Institute for Religion & Culture.
Tanya SIENKO
has a doctorate in physics and a master’s in medieval law. In 1991 she moved to Japan and spent the next ten years working for the Japanese government and Japanese industry. After a period at the Warburg Institute in London, she returned to the U.S. and now works as an entrepreneur. She is principal editor of Molecular Computing (MIT Press, 2005) and is currently authoring a book on investing in nanotechnology.
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The Introduction of this book is available for downloading and reading with Adobe Acrobat.
© James W. Heisig For personal use only. This material may not be distributed
without written permission of the publisher and copyright holder. |
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