Read Japanese today [Paperback]

Len Welsh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 1989

Clearly shows how Japanese characters evolved, allowing readers to master the 300 most common kanji.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Len Walsh has studied and taught Japanese in both the United States and Japan.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing (December 15, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804804966
• ISBN-13: 978-0804804967
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #868,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolute must-have! (and cheap, too), February 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Read Japanese today (Paperback)

Anyone learning or considering learning Japanese should read this book ASAP, even before looking at the kana or a grammar text (before considering books for these things, search out "The Quick and Dirty Guide to Japanese" and a good free kana drill program, if you want to save yourself time and money). The kanji are easy to memorize, given explanations of what they are supposed to look like. After reading it, kanji won't look like bizarre unreadable symbols, but familiar pictures of common things.

Those pictures will make learning spoken vocabulary far easier than trying to learn spoken Japanese without the writing.

Once you have it, take a whole day and read it through like a novel - twice if you have time. After that, you will be shocked at how much you retain. The title is not an exaggeration; after one day, you can be reading Japanese (though you'll need to learn the kana; this book has a simple section on that too).

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get this book!!!!, August 26, 2000

By 

Michelle Vetter (Alpharetta, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Read Japanese today (Paperback)

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!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic, essential little book for Japanese learners, February 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.