Japanese characters, called kanji, often intimidate potential students of the language with their complex and mysterious appearance. Read Japanese Today is a comprehensible and storylike approach to an often difficult language. Intended for people on the go, this book will teach you to recognize and read the 400 most commonly used Japanese kanji characters.Completely revised and expanded and featuring 25 percent more kanji than previous editions, Read Japanese Today is a fun way to demystify the beautiful language of Japan.
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I’ve read and reread this work since buying it many years ago. It came in handy when we traveled to Japan: I actually understood much of what I was looking at–at least on signage–while the overwhelming majority of tourists stared dumfounded. A word of advice: I would look into Chinese first–please check out Diane Wolff’s marvelous “Chinese for Beginners”–inasmuch as Japanese writing was built on top of Chinese. You’ll get much more out of Walsh if you read Wolff first. Also, don’t think for a moment that, just because you recognize a kanji, you know the meaning of the phrase in which it appears. We learned the hard way that the Japanese mind combines characters and components of characters in _very_ peculiar ways–it was often quite a surprise when a native told us what that sign over there actually meant after we told him what we ambitious gaijin thought it meant! Walsh’s book cannot possibly equip you in only a couple of hundred pages to understand why “lawful-language” means “French,” or why “self-move-concentrate-mind” means “Caution: automatic door”–or why “water” means “Wednesday” on that poster! Also, bear in mind that some of Walsh’s explanations for the derivation of various kanji are suspect. That doesn’t really matter, of course, if his mnemonic helps you remember it–as long as you’re not a philologist. Take it for what it’s worth, and enjoy your heart out!
If you want to learn to read kanji, there’s no faster or easier way to pick up the basics than reading this book. When Walsh promises you’ll be able to read basic Japanese after “Read Japanese Today”, he’s not kidding. And the way it’s written, you read it like you would fiction or easy non-ficiton and you pick up the Japanese characters without even realizing it!