Remembering the Kanji 1 A Complete Course on How Not To Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters, Języki ...

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Remembering the Kanji
vol. I
A complete course on how not to forget
the meaning and writing
of Japanese characters
James W. Heisig
fourth edition
japan publications trading co., ltd.
©1977 by James W. Heisig
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Japan Publications Trading Co., Ltd.
1–2–1 Sarugaku-chõ, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 101–0064 Japan
First edition: 1977
Second edition: 1985
Third edition, First printing: July 1986
Fifteenth printing: November 1999
Fourth edition, First printing: September 2001
Distributors:
united states: Kodansha America, Inc. through
Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10016
canada: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd., 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham,
Ontario l3r 4t8
united kingdom and europe: Premier Book Marketing Ltd.,
Clarendon House, 52 Cornmarket Street, Oxford ox1 3hj, England
australia and new zealand: Bookwise International, 54 Crittenden Road,
Findon, South Australia 5023, Australia
asia and japan: Japan Publications Trading Co., Ltd.,
1–2–1 Sarugaku-chõ, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 101–0064 Japan
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
isbn 4-88996-075-9
Printed in Japan
Contents
part two:
Plots
(Lessons 13–19) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
part three:
Elements
(Lessons 20–56) . . . . . . . . . . 197
Indexes
i. Kanji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473
ii. Primitive Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491
iii. Kanji Arranged in Order of Strokes . . . . . . . . . 495
 Introduction
The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple
method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in
such a way as to make them both easy to remember. It is intended not only for
the beginner, but also for the more advanced student looking for some relief
to the constant frustration of forgetting how to write the kanji and some way
to systematize what he or she already knows. By showing how to break down
the complexities of the Japanese writing system into its basic elements and sug-
gesting ways to reconstruct meanings from those elements, the method offers
a new perspective from which to learn the kanji.
There are, of course, many things that the pages of this book will
not
do for
you. You will read nothing about how kanji combine to form compounds. Nor
is anything said about the various ways to pronounce the characters. Further-
more, all questions of grammatical usage have been omitted. These are all mat-
ters that need specialized treatment in their own right. Meantime, remember-
ing the meaning and the writing of the kanji—perhaps the single most dif³cult
barrier to learning Japanese—can be greatly simpli³ed if the two are isolated
and studied apart from everything else.
What makes forgetting the kanji so natural is their
lack of connection with
normal patterns of visual memory.
We are used to hills and roads, to the faces
of people and the skylines of cities, to µowers, animals, and the phenomena of
nature. And while only a fraction of what we see is readily recalled, we are
con³dent that, given proper attention, anything we choose to remember, we
can. That con³dence is lacking in the world of the kanji. The closest approxi-
mation to the kind of memory patterns required by the kanji is to be seen in
the various alphabets and number-systems we know. The difference is that
while these symbols are very few and often sound-related, the kanji number in
the thousands and have no consistent phonetic value. Nonetheless, traditional
methods for learning the characters have been the same as those for learning
alphabets: drill the shapes one by one, again and again, year after year. What-
ever ascetical value there is in such an exercise, the more ef³cient way would
be to relate the characters to something other than their sounds in the ³rst
place, and so to break ties with the visual memory we rely on for learning our
alphabets.
2
introduction
The origins of the Japanese writing system can be traced back to ancient
China and the eighteenth century before the Christian era. In the form in
which we ³nd Chinese writing codi³ed some 1,000 years later, it was made up
largely of pictographic, detailed glyphs. These were further transformed and
stylized down through the centuries, so that by the time the Japanese were
introduced to the kanji by Buddhist monks from Korea and started experi-
menting with ways to adapt the Chinese writing system to their own language
(about the fourth to seventh centuries of our era), they were already dealing
with far more ideographic and abstract forms. The Japanese made their own
contributions and changes in time, as was to be expected. And like every mod-
ern Oriental culture that uses the kanji, they continue to do so, though now
more in matters of usage than form.
So fascinating is this story that many have encouraged the study of etymol-
ogy as a way to remember the kanji. Unfortunately, the student quickly learns
the many disadvantages of such an approach. As charming as it is to see the
ancient drawing of a woman etched behind its respective kanji, or to discover
the rudimentary form of a hand or a tree or a house, when the character itself
is removed, the clear visual memory of the familiar object is precious little help
for recalling how to write it. Proper etymological studies are most helpful
after
one has learned the general-use kanji. Before that, they only add to one’s mem-
ory problems. We need a still more radical departure from visual memory.
Let me paint the impasse in another, more graphic, way. Picture yourself
holding a kaleidoscope up to the light as still as possible, trying to ³x in mem-
ory the particular pattern that the play of light and mirrors and colored stones
has created. Chances are you have such an untrained memory for such things
that it will take some time; but let us suppose that you succeed after ten or
³fteen minutes. You close your eyes, trace the pattern in your head, and then
check your image against the original pattern until you are sure you have it
remembered. Then someone passes by and jars your elbow. The pattern is lost,
and in its place a new jumble appears. Immediately your memory begins to
scramble. You set the kaleidoscope aside, sit down, and try to draw what you
had just memorized, but to no avail. There is simply nothing left in memory
to grab hold of. The kanji are like that. One can sit at one’s desk and drill a half
dozen characters for an hour or two, only to discover on the morrow that
when something similar is seen, the former memory is erased or hopelessly
confused by the new information.
Now the odd thing is not that this occurs, but rather that, instead of openly
admitting one’s distrust of purely visual memory, one accuses oneself of a poor
memory or lack of discipline and keeps on following the same routine. Thus,
by placing the blame on a poor visual memory, one overlooks the possibility of
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