Read Japanese Today: Amazon.ca: Len Welsh: Books

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17 Reviews

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4.8 out of 5 stars (17 customer reviews)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Reads like a story, May 28 2003

By

T. Collins "mrtcollins" (NoVA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Read Japanese Today (Paperback)

As advertised, this book is an excellent introduction to about 300 common kanji. Walsh wrote the book with a flow that allows you to read it like a story. The characters are explained in terms of the evolution from ancient Chinese drawings to modern kanji. Walsh also gives the various pronunciations of each, as well as examples of how you will see them in context.

My primary criticism is the lack of an index or headings. Walsh will say, "the following are based on animals," where a heading would be more functional. Along with the lack of an index, the book cannot easily be used as a quick reference.

However, I highly recommend this for anyone interested in the basics of kanji. It is an excellent first step before moving on to more advanced study.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic, essential little book for Japanese learners, Feb 2 2003

By

J. W. Ulm "Avid reader/author" (Brookline) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Read Japanese Today (Paperback)

The formidable hieroglyphic writing system used by Japanese is perhaps the most intimidating challenge, among many, for native English speakers. Adopted from the ancient Chinese script in the 3rd century, the Japanese written word can seem indecipherable at first glance, like a modern Rosetta Stone. But Len Walsh actually makes sense of it in this splendid little book. He organizes each character group into categories like tools, animals, derivatives of the hand, money, and the like. He shows how the Chinese script began with approximations of basic, concrete objects in nature-- the hand, the sun, the mouth, the eye, the horse, the dog, and so on-- and then began to encompass abstract concepts via metaphors, stories, and incidents involving the concrete ones. You see how the basic characters, squared off and standardized to allow for easy writing, are incorporated as radicals into more complex ones, and how compounds are formed to represent basic concepts. And since you'll learn this history, you'll learn how to glean the meaning of a character based on its constituents. You learn, for example, how the character for "mura" ("village") came about, uniting the radicals for "tree" and "law" (the latter itself a metaphorical extension of a character for "measure"), with the village symbolizing a social structure that brought law out of the tree-lined jungle. You'll learn how the character for "name" (Japanese "na" or "mei") arose from a combination of "evening" and "mouth"-- stemming from an ancient Chinese practice of sentries demanding the names of passersby at night. Thus you not only learn the characters themselves, but gain an insight into ancient Chinese and Japanese culture.

Each character is not only drawn out and linked to a word in English; its reading (pronunciation) in Japanese is given as well. Japanese characters generally have multiple readings, which vary depending on whether the character is used as a standalone word in a sentence, or one character in a compound that represents another word (e.g. a stone being "ishi" by itself and "seki"-- as in "sekiyu," petroleum-- in compounds). The standalone reading is usually native Japanese, while the reading in compounds is quite frequently borrowed from the equivalent Chinese word-- although just as French-derived English words, derived usually from Old/Middle French, differ from modern French, the modern Chinese equivalent will often vary somewhat from the Japanese. Walsh illustrates the history of the characters based on the Shuo Wen Chie Tsu, the classic source from the 2nd Century A.D. explicating the origin of the Chinese characters. Walsh's own drawings are lucid and comprehensible, and the story of many characters' origins often quite humorous (still trying to figure out how "mono," meaning "thing," arose from the combination of a cow and an elephant). In any case, you should pick up this book even if you intend only to learn spoken Japanese. You'll acquire a feel for how the vast majority of Japanese words were assembled from simpler compounds, and you'll sense the logic of the design. A very highly recommended book.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book on Kanji .The book to start ., April 4 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Read Japanese Today (Paperback)

Terrific introduction in a very difficult ,painstaking subject.Don't get fooled by the small size .This book is a gem. You still need larger books to supplement , but this is the work to start with . Many thanks to the author .Took out the intimidation of learning Japanese .

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars terrific, whimsical little guide
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... Read more

Published on Feb 2 2002 by Bruce D. Wilner

5.0 out of 5 stars Learn to recognise 200 kanji without really trying
As a first kanji book, this is excellent; it got me hooked on learning kanji. It's short but straight to the point, and very easy to read. Read more

Published on Jun 12 2001 by Bennett McElwee