Section 77 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 November 22 Saturday.
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After a long layoff, a break of maybe a couple of years, I've resumed the study of kanji. I'm tired of being more or less illiterate. I want to be able to read a Japanese newspaper or go into the library and borrow any of the tens of thousands of books on display, rather than being restricted to the small selection of English books ... there's a limit to how often I want to read yet one more inventive American novel about Americans killing other Americans.

The problem, as always, is time. I don't really have the time to put together a systematic study program. A few weeks ago, though, I grabbed a pack of kanji cards from my big heap of Japanese language resources, and ever since I've been carrying them around with me and studying them on the train and so on.

When I'm teaching English, I never recommend any of my students to study by memorizing lists of words. That's a pretty primitive way to study. It's far better to learn words in context, because it's really only in context that words have meanings.

However, any study method is better than none, and I figured that if I memorized the words then, sooner or later, I would see them popping up in context in the Japanese world around me. And, sure enough, this has been what's happening, at least to a limited extent.

Last weekend, for example, I went by bus to a big park in Yokohama, the name of which ("Mitsuike Kōen," I think) translates as something like "Three Pond Park". (A nice big park with autumn leaves, miniature lakes, ducks, crows and so forth.)

At the park I saw a sign which was easy to interpret, "Tsuri Kinshi" - "No Fishing." The word "tsuri" means "fishing" and the sign "kinshi," meaning "forbidden," is all over the place. The "kin" kanji pops up in other combinations such as "kin'en," "No Smoking."

(The reason why no fishing is permitted is pretty obvious. There are the most enormously huge ornamental carp swimming in the pond waters.)

A little later, however, I hit upon a variant sign. I understood the message, all right - "NO FIRES!" - but I didn't understand the meaning of the "gen" kanji in the combination "genkin."

At least the kanji had furigana - usually they don't, and, absent the furigana, I wouldn't even have known the pronunciation of "gen."

Presumably "kaki" meant "fire" (I checked with a dictionary just now, and it does) and presumably "genkin" meant "forbidden." After all, as mentioned above, "kinshi" means "forbidden" and "kin'en" means "NO SMOKING".

But the meaning of "gen" I couldn't figure out. It ended up being one of the dozens of vocabulary items that I didn't have time to look up in the dictionary.

That was last weekend. I went through the working week none the wiser about "gen" until Friday. I was working methodically through my kanji cards and I came upon a "gen" which looked suspiciously familiar, and on checking the kanji card against my photograph of the park sign I found I had a match.

The mystery item is "gen" meaning "strict":-

  "gen" = strict

.... and the kanji card informed me that "genkin" means "strictly prohibited."

And not only did I have the meaning from my rote memorization work, but, from my experience of the living world of Japan, I had a context.

I had a similar study/context hookup during the week. I was studying the kanji "yū," meaning "superior" or "gentle" or "actor":-

  "yū" = superior

It makes the combination "yūsen," meaning "priority," which seemed a big vague and devoid of connection to practical reality.

  "yūsen" = "PRIORITY"

Then I happened to be sitting on a train (the Shōnan Monorail, as it happens) and I suddenly noticed a kanji combination which I read as "yūsen seki," meaning "priority seat" - somewhere in Japan I'd noticed English signs labeling certain seats as "priority seats," these being the seats you are supposed to yield to the old, the infirm and the pregnant.

I didn't photograph the sign (I didn't have my camera with me) but here is the kanji combination:-

  "yūsen seki" = "PRIORITY SEAT"

I'd never before internalized the Japanese for this kanji combination, but, because seeing the real sign in real life merged so perfectly with my rote memorization (I had the "yū" kanji card with me when I saw the "yūsen seki" sign) the item stuck.

And, Friday, when I was sitting on a different train, listening absent-mindedly to the conductor, I heard him say something about "yūsen seki" ... and, though I didn't understand what he said about these priority seats, I at least knew what his topic was. (Logically, he must have been admonishing us - politely, of course - to yield these seats when appropriate.)

However, I'm not leaving my kanji study completely at the mercy of such chance occurrences.

To make sure I process a reasonable amount of written Japanese each week - and I think it is important to process quite a bit of reading material if you want to make progress in literacy - I've taken to reading Japanese newspapers.

My selection is pretty random, depending on the kindness of the strangers who leave their newspapers in the overhead racks of trains for me to pick up later and read at my leisure. (The railway companies would rather you took your newspapers with you, thank you very much, but social discipline is less than perfect in this area.)

Thursday, I picked up a copy of the formidably difficult Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a newspaper largely given over to economics.

I won't pretend to have to understood more than a small fraction of what I read, but I did glean a bit of data from an article on hyakuen shops - the "hundred yen shops" where any item can be had for "hyakuen," i.e. a hundred yen. (Then add five yen for sales tax.)

If I got the gist of the article (and I think there's a sporting chance that perhaps I did) then, in today's deflationary Japan, a growing trend is the opening of 300 yen shops, 500 yen shops, a thousand yen shops and so forth ... shops where each item is at a fixed price.

Or maybe the same shops are carrying selections of fixed price items in more than one price range, because an accompanying photograph seems to show one set of items priced at a thousand yen and a neighboring set of items priced at a hundred yen.

Also in the paper, a big ad for Beaujolais Nouveau. This is the season when the Beaujolais Nouveau arrives in Japan (by air, I think) and quite a surprising number of people make quite a surprising fuss about it. And why? I can't figure it out. My guess is that the whole Beaujolais Nouveau phenomenon appeals to the Japanese liking for ceremony.

In New Zealand we don't make this kind of fuss about French wine. In fact, I don't think I even heard the words "Beaujolais Nouveau" before I came to Japan.

So that's my kanji study method: combining rote memorization with my observations of the real world as it comes at me in the form of park signs and signs in railway cars. And reading newspapers. And watching kanji appearing and vanishing again on the TV screen, bringing news about train delays, earthquakes, tsunami warnings and so forth.

It's only my literacy that needs this kind of conscious effort. My listening and speaking are coming along slowly but surely ... I generally only watch Japanese-language TV, so I'm getting hour after hour of immersion. And I find sufficient occasions to give my spoken Japanese a workout.

I don't know how long it will take me to become properly literate in Japanese, but, as it is, I can often limp through a simple newspaper article, extracting at least some of the core of the meaning ... so I'm not too pessimistic.

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