How to read Japanese
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Published by the Charles E. Tuttle Company, inc.
of Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan
with editorial offices at
Suido 1 -chome, 2-6, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo
Copyright in Japan, 1969, by Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 69-12078
International Standard Book No. 0-8048-0496-6
First printing, 1969
Thirty-ninth printing, 1989
Printed in Japan
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
SECTION ONE • INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . . . . 7
What is Japanese writing?
How the characters were constructed
How Japan borrowed the
characters from China
How to use this book
SECTION TWO • TEXT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
300 characters, each pre-
sented with its pictorial or-
igin, modern meaning, main
pronunciations and several
examples of how it is used
APPENDIX I • Some simplified characters . . . . . . . . .153
APPENDIX II • The KANA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -155
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Professors Takahashi Makoto, Uehara Akira
and Liu Kang-Shih for their assistance in preparing this man-
uscript, and to Boye De Mente and Frank Hudachek for their
invaluable editorial suggestions. I also wish to thank the Asia
House for the research grant which made this book possible.
Tokyo, Japan
1966
SECTION ONE
WHAT IS JAPANESE WRITING?
The Japanese write their l a n g u a g e with ideograms
they borrowed from China nearly two thousand y e a r s
ago. Some two thousand years b e f o r e that, the an-
cient Chinese had formed these ideograms, or char-
a c t e r s , from pictures of things they knew. To them
the sun had looked like this, so this became
their w r i t t e n w o r d for sun. T h i s f o r m w a s g r a d u a l l y
squared off and simplified to make it e a s i e r to write,
c h a n g i n g its shape to. T h i s is s t i l l the way the
word sun is w r i t t e n in both C h i n a and J a p a n today.
The a n c i e n t Chinese f i r s t drew a t r e e like this.
This w a s also g r a d u a l l y simplified and s q u a r e d to,
which became the w r i t t e n w o r d f o r tree.
To f o r m t h e word for root or origin t h e C h i n e s e just
drew in m o r e r o o t s at the bottom of t h e t r e e to em-
phasize this portion of the picture , then squared
and s i m p l i f i e d the c h a r a c t e r to. T h i s became
the w r i t t e n word for root or origin.
When t h e c h a r a c t e r s for sun a n d origin
a r e put t o g e t h e r in a c o m p o u n d t h e y f o r m t h e w r i t t e n
word J a p a n , which means l i t e r a l l y o r i g i n -
of-the-sun.
A picture of the sun in the east at s u n r i s e coming
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up behind a tree forms the written word for east
A picture of the stone lantern that guarded
each ancient Chinese capital squared off and
simplified to abstract form forms the written
word for capital. These two characters put together
in a compound form the written word
Eastern-capital,
The characters may look mysterious and impene-
trable at first approach, but as these examples show,
they are not difficult at all to understand. The c h a r -
acters are not just random strokes: each one is a pic-
ture, and has a meaning based on the content of the
picture.
The Japanese w r i t t e n language contains a number
of these c h a r a c t e r s , but fortunately not as many as
Westerners often assume. To graduate from gram-
mar school a student must know 881 c h a r a c t e r s . At
this point he is considered literate. A high school
g r a d u a t e must know 1,850. To read college t e x t -
books about three thousand c h a r a c t e r s are necessary.
A I I these thousands of c h a r a c t e r s , however, a r e
built up from less than 300 elements, or pictures,
many of w h i c h a r e seldom used. Once you learn the
most f r e q u e n t l y used elements you w i l l not only know
a number of the common c h a r a c t e r s , since some of
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the elements are characters themselves, but will be
able to learn all the characters simply by recom-
bining the elements in different patterns.
Obviously some of the characters are used much
more frequently than others. The objective of this
book is to teach you to recognize and understand
the basic meaning of 300 of the most common and
useful characters, after only a few hours study.
Through associations with Japanese proper names
like Ginza, Tokyo, and Mikimoto, and with other Japa-
nese words you already know, like kimono and tycoon,
you will also be able to remember the pronunciations
of many of these 300 characters w i t h very little effort.
For full comprehension of the Japanese language,
spoken or written, a knowledge of grammar is of
course absolutely necessary. T h e r e are already
enough adequate texts on Japanese grammar availa-
ble to anyone who has the time and desire to learn,
so this book is limited to teaching only how to read
and understand the characters, and how the c h a r a c -
ters are used in the Japanese language.
The existing systems for teaching c h a r a c t e r s ,
whether to Japanese school children in their own
school systems or to foreigners interested in the lan-
guage, make the student learn by rote. Such things as
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stroke order, penmanship, and the number of strokes
in each character are stressed. The characters are
usually taught in the order they appear in whichever
reading text the instructor follows. There is no effort
to explain the relationship between the characters,
whereas this is really the key to the simplicity of learn-
ing them.
It is possible to learn through rote memory, but at
great expense in time and effort. The shortcut is to
learn the meanings of the interchangeable parts,
rather than simply try to memorize a square full of
lines and dots. The c h a r a c t e r for the word listen
becomes much less formidable when you see that
is a picture of a gate and that is a picture
of an ear eavesdropping at the gate.
READ JAPANESE TODAY uses this shortcut-the
principle that the characters are composed of inter-
changeable parts and that if you learn the meaning of
the parts it will help you learn the meaning of the
whole. Each part was drawn by the Chinese from
pictures of actual objects, just as the Egyptian hiero-
glyphics w e r e in our own western culture. All you
have to do is look behind the character and see the
picture the Chinese used as a model. This will show
the meaning of the character.
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HOW THE CHARACTERS WERE CONSTRUCTED
The earliest writing in both the East and the West
was done with pictures. To write down the "word"
for cow or mountain or eye, both the Chinese and
those in early western cultures drew a picture of a
cow, a mountain, or an eye. To the Chinese these pic-
tures were and To the early West-
erners—the Sumerians, the Phonecians, the Egyptians—
they were and These are called
pictographs.
To write words which stood for ideas or actions or
feelings — w o r d s too deep for pictures of single objects
to express — t h e Chinese combined several pictures to
depict a scene which acted out the meaning of the
word. They combined, as we saw above, pictures of
the sun and a tree in a scene to show the
sun rising up behind the tree They used this
scene to stand for the word east— the direction you
must be facing when you see the sun rising up behind
a tree. Other e x a m p l e s , two trees were put side by
side to stand for the word woods; three trees
were put together to stand for the word forest.
Some symbolism became necessary at this point,
however, or some of the scenes would have g r o w n to
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panoramas. Rather than devise a scene showing per-
haps a general backed by his entire army or a father
disciplining his children to stand for the words power
or authority, the Chinese simply used a hand holding a
stick to symbolize this meaning. The Egyptians
used a picture of a whip to symbolize the same thing.
Pleasure was symbolized by a drum in Chinese,
and by a man jumping with joy in the Egyptian
hieroglyphics.
There came a time, however, when the early na-
tions of the Western world decided to give up the
pictograph writing and began to use a phonetic sys-
tem in which each picture stood for a certain sound.
They a r b i t r a r i l y selected some pictures to stand for
the sounds they used in their language, and abandon-
ed all the others. One of the phonetic systems thus
developed was of course the forefather of our alpha-
bet.
The pictograph the Egyptians selected for the
sound of A was cow by this t i m e written
The meaning cow was dropped, and the picture
stood for the pronunciation A and nothing else.
Through several thousand years of change, came
gradually to be written our letter A. (The Chi-
nese pictograph for cow, on the other hand, basical-
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ly has not changed at all, and still means cow.) The
Egyptian pictograph for eye came to be our let-
ter O, and the pictograph for mountain became
our letter S. In fact, all 26 letters of our alphabet are
in one w a y or another direct descendants of this early
picture writing of the West.
The Chinese, however, just went on with the char-
acters. They started with the simple pictographs.
When their ideas became too complicated for these
pictographs to express, they combined several picto-
graphs into a scene and made new c h a r a c t e r s .
The pictographs can be grouped into a few m a j o r
categories. The Chinese took most of them from the
objects they knew best. Many were drawn from man
in different shapes and postures, and from the parts
of the human body. Natural objects such as t r e e s ,
plants, rocks, the sun, birds and animals, were anoth-
er major source. Weapons, which in that era m e a n t
only hand-held weapons like bows and arrows, knives
and axes, also were a source. Other important cate-
gories were houses and buildings, vessels, and a r t i -
cles of clothing.
After the Chinese had invented all the c h a r a c t e r s
they needed at the time, the next step was to s t a n d -
a r d i z e the writing. Over a period of about 2000 y e a r s ,
15
they simplified and re-proportioned the pictures so
they would all be about the same size and fit into a
square. In essence this meant squaring circles,
straightening some lines and eliminating others, and
abbreviating the more complicated portions of the
picture. The shapes of some were changed s l i g h t l y
to make them easier and quicker to w r i t e or to m a k e
them more aesthetic. This process had a tendency
to make t h e f i n a l c h a r a c t e r s a little more a b s t r a c t than
the o r i g i n a l pictures, of course but the form of the
o r i g i n a l p i c t u r e is still c l e a r l y v i s i b l e and w i t h just a
l i t t l e i m a g i n a t i o n the p i c t u r e s and s c e n e s w i l l come
alive.
HOW JAPAN BORROWED THE
CHARACTERS FROM CHINA
U n t i l t h e t h i r d century A.D. s c h o l a r s say the
J a p a n e s e had no w r i t t e n l a n g u a g e at all. How t h e y
w e r e a b l e to get along w i t h o u t a s c r i p t is v e r y d i f f i -
c u l t to i m a g i n e but no one has yet d i s c o v e r e d e v i -
dence of n a t i v e w r i t i n g or a n y b o r r o w e d w r i t t e n l a n
g u a g e p r i o r to t h i s d a t e so w h a t t h e s c h o l a r s s a y
may be so.
In a n y c a s e the J a p a n e s e had a s p o k e n l a n g u a g e
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and when they discovered that their neighbor China
had both a spoken and a written language, they de-
cided to borrow the Chinese writing system. They
took the written characters the Chinese had develop-
ed and attached them to the Japanese spoken words
of corresponding meaning. Where they had no Japa-
nese word, they borrowed the Chinese word and pro-
nunciation as well as the written character.
While the Japanese could use these imported
Chinese c h a r a c t e r s to write the basic roots of w o r d s
they could not use them to write the grammatical
endings because J a p a n e s e g r a m m a r and m o r p h o l o g y
were so different f r o m the Chinese. In Chinese t h e r e
were no grammatical endings to show what part of
speech a word is (corresponding in English to endings
such as -tion, -ish, -ed, and to such a u x i l i a r y w o r d s
as had been, will be, could and would) but in Japa-
nese there were.
At f i r s t the J a p a n e s e tried to use the C h i n e s e
characters to write both the word root and the g r a m -
m a t i c a l ending as well. But after a few hundred y e a r s
they discovered t h i s did not w o r k too well, so they
decided to abbreviate some of the characters into a
phonetic s y s t e m , s i m i l a r to our a l p h a b e t , w h i c h t h e y
could then use to w r i t e the g r a m m a t i c a l e n d i n g s
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They succeeded in this and called the phonetic letters
kana.
The Japanese written language is now composed,
therefore, of word roots (the c h a r a c t e r s ) and gram-
matical endings (the k a n a ) . The word root remains
the same no matter what part of speech the word is:
the same character can be used as the root of the
word whether the word is a noun, adjective, or verb.
This is the same as in English, where, for example,
beaut would be the root, beauty the noun, beautiful
the adjective, and beautify the verb. The Japanese
would use a character for the root beaut, and kana
for the g r a m m a t i c a l endings -y, -iful, and -ify.
The J a p a n e s e formed some words with only one
c h a r a c t e r , plus the g r a m m a t i c a l ending, of course,
and some with two characters Words of one charac-
ter usually represent a more elementary thought than
words of two c h a r a c t e r s . A word may contain three
c h a r a c t e r s , but this is c o m p a r a t i v e l y r a r e . Any of the
c h a r a c t e r s , with few exceptions, can be used either
by themselves or in compounds w i t h other c h a r a c t e r s
to form words. A character can theoretically form a
compound with any other c h a r a c t e r , although of
course not a l l the possible compounds are in use yet.
As the J a p a n e s e need new words they can coin them
18
by combining two appropriate characters into a new
compound.
The pronunciation of a character when it is used
by itself is usually different from its pronunciation in
compounds. A character will generally keep the same
pronunciation in any compound in which it appears,
however. For example, the character is pro-
nounced HIGASHI when it is used by itself. In the
compound and in any other com-
pound in which it is used, it is pronounced
It is quite easy to distinguish the characters from
the kana . The kana are w r i t t e n with at most four
s e p a r a t e lines, or strokes, and usually with only
two or three The Chinese characters, on the other
hand, except for the word one, which is just one h o r i -
z o n t a l line —— , have a minimum of two strokes and
usually many more.
These are kana :
These a r e c h a r a c t e r s :
Since kana will appear at the end of each w o r d to
give it grammar, a Japanese sentence w i l l look like
this:
Japanese books and newspapers, being in s e n -
tence form, are written with both the characters and
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the kana. The language a visitor to Japan will see
in the streets — s h o p names, advertisements, prices,
street and traffic signs, tickets, bills, receipts, station
names, family names, menus—not generally in sen-
tence form, are usually written with the characters
only, however.
To read grammatical writing once you know the
characters, it is only necessary to memorize the kana.
The kana are not difficult and can be learned in a
day or two. It is just a matter of memorizing them as
you memorized the alphabet as a child, and will not
take much more effort. For those readers interested
learning kana, there is a chart on page 156.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
READ JAPANESE TODAY is basically a pictorial
mnemonic method for learning characters. Each char-
acter is presented with its pictorial origin, its modern
meaning, its main pronunciations, and several exam-
ples of how it is used. The examples are selected from
common applications a visitor to Japan will see fre-
quently as he travels about the country.
The stories of the origin of each pictorial element
and character were taken mainly from the SHUO WEN
20
CHIE TSU, published in China about 1800 years ago.
For a few characters, the SHUO WEN lists more than
one theory of origin. This is understandable since
more than two thousand years had passed between
the first invention of the characters and their com-
pilation in the SHUO WEN lexicon and the origins of
some of the characters were bound to become some-
what obscure.
Later etymologists, including some scholars from
Japan, have discovered what they believe to be still
other interpretations of the origin of a few of the char-
acters. Whether the explanations of the genealogies
given by the SHUO WEN CHIE TSU or the later schol-
ars are correct is not important here in any case,
since this book is not a text in etymology but a sim-
plified method for learning the characters. Where
there is a difference of opinion between the scholars,
READ JAPANESE TODAY uses the interpretation
which, the author hopes, will be best mnemonically
for English-speaking people.
The 300 characters introduced in READ JAPA-
NESE TODAY are grouped generally in the same cat-
egories the Chinese used as sources of the picto-
graphs. First come the characters from nature. These
are the easiest to write, probably because they were
21
the first the Chinese invented and are therefore the
most primitive and simple in construction. Next are
the characters developed from parts of the human
face and body. Then come characters drawn from
modes of transportation, and so on.
The pronunciations given in the text for each char-
acter are limited to the most common ones. The kana
which show the grammar of the word are omitted in
the Japanese writing for convenience even though
their equivalent is included in the roman letter trans-
literation. The pronunciation for the character
"to hear," for example, is given in roman letters as
KIKU, whereas the character actually only rep-
resents the Kl sound, the root of the word. The KU
sound, which is the grammatical ending representing
the infinitive form of the verb, must be written in
kana. The infinitive form is the one used in dictiona-
ries so it is used in roman letters here to make it easier
for you to look up these words in dictionaries later.
Japanese pronunciation is comparatively easy.
Just pronounce the vowels as the Italians do—the A
as in car, the E as in bed, the I as in medium, the O
as in go, and the U as in luke—and the consonants
as in English. Sometimes in Japanese the vowels are
long, in which case they will have a line draw over
22
the top of the letter when written in roman letters,
and sometimes they are short. When you speak in
Japanese just drag the long vowels cut for twice the
time as the short. This is often a difficult thing to do.
but it is a very important distinction to make—a
is a watering pot and a is a licensed courtesan,
a is a young girl and a is an orang-
utang. For practical purposes, there is no difference
in the pronunciation of these sets of words except
that in one case the vowel is long and in the other it
is short.
In certain cases consonants are doubled, that is,
a single K becomes KK or a single P becomes PP.
This is a form of abbreviation and indicates that the
letter or two preceding the consonant has been drop-
ped. The double consonant is pronounced by holding
it slightly longer than a single consonant. Like the
long and short vowels, this is an important distinction
to make but one quite easy to effect, and you will
master it with just a little practice.
One other important note on pronouncing Japa-
nese words is that the syllables are about equally
stressed, whereas in English we have some syllables
which are accented. The Japanese say YO- K O - H A -
MA, giving each syllable equal weight, and length,
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