Joy o’ Kanji

I’m embarking on a massive kanji project, writing essays about each of the Joyo kanji (that is, the characters used in daily life in Japan). When this project goes live (sometime in 2010), readers will be able to download these essays on PDFs for an amazingly low price.

In a sense, these essays are profiles. After all, kanji are every bit as complex and inconsistent as humans! With playful text, an ample supply of compounds and sample sentences, fun quizzes, comprehensive information about every aspect of a character’s yomi (readings) and etymology, stroke order diagrams, and photos of kanji in signs, these essays will reveal the personalities of each kanji and help readers understand them deeply. That is, the essays will demonstrate the character of the characters or the kanji (感じ) of the kanji (漢字) as nothing ever has.

With 2,136 kanji in the Joyo set (if the Japanese authorities expand the list, as they’re thinking of doing), this project will be like running a marathon every week for many years, except I hope it’s more pleasant than that would seem to be!

I’ve made an unconventional decision to start with the kanji that Japanese students study in junior high school. I’ve done this for several reasons:

• It’s easier to write about kanji that appear in fewer compounds and that have fewer meanings and yomi. That’s generally true of the “junior high school” kanji, as compared with the gakushu characters (the ones learned up through 6th grade).

• I know more gakushu kanji than junior high school kanji, so I thought it would be more interesting for me to start with the set where there’s more to learn.

• Many gakushu kanji are quite easy to learn. They may be pictographic (e.g., 雨, “rain”), they may appear everywhere (e.g., 人, “person”), and beginning kanji books and classes tend to start with this simpler set. I think all of us can benefit if I start with less well-known material, particularly because it’s much harder to find resources that teach you about the more advanced characters.

Incidentally, I’m gearing Joy o’ Kanji to readers with a bit of experience in learning Japanese and kanji. For example, I’ll provide yomi in hiragana, not romaji.

Even for such readers, though, the very idea of the junior high school kanji may seem frightening. Indeed there are some pretty hairy-looking characters, such as 騰 (to rise, leap) and 縫 (to sew).

However, I’ve been amazed to see that the following common kanji are also in this set: 彼 (he) and 又 (again). Some are quite graphically simple, such as 双 (pair), 了 (to finish), and 束 (bundle).

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that young Japanese children study some kanji that seem much less familiar, including these three from 5th grade: 蚕 (silkworm), 衆 (multitude), and 徳 (virtue).

I can’t say I understand how the authorities have assigned the characters to different grade levels, but it doesn’t matter. I’m excited to learn the whole Joyo set!

My kanji writing has taken two other forms:

1. My book Crazy for Kanji: A Student’s Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters came out from Stone Bridge Press in 2009.

2. From 2007 through 2010 I wrote “Kanji Curiosity,” a weekly blog about kanji, for www.japanesepod101.com.

These three projects complement each other well. The book is about the whole system of kanji. “Kanji Curiosity” focused on the wonderful ways in which characters meet up in compounds (words with two or more characters). And the Joy o’ Kanji essays spotlight one kanji at a time.

Joy o’ Kanji brings together an international team, with two proofreaders in Japan, a graphic designer in Indonesia, a British web designer in Japan, two globe-trotting photographers, and consultants who are Argentinian, Spanish, and American. Clearly, kanji fascinates people all over the world.

Stay tuned for the launch! If you’d like to be on a mailing list so that I can notify you when the site is up and running, please feel free to email me. And if you’d like to win credits toward PDFs by contributing photos of kanji or by providing small amounts of administrative assistance, that’s also a great reason to get in touch. I look forward to hearing from you.