|
Welcome to Japanese for GCSE and JLPT 4 exams. Here you will find resources to explore the language and aspects about Japan of particular interest to English Speakers taking the JLPT level 4 or GCSE Japanese exam. The site is still hatching ( 04 Jan’07), why not bookmark now and check us out again.
Don’t forget to download my free book, its got more than you would normally pay a lot for, together with allied package pre-launch early-bird specials (Use ‘Bookmarks’ to navigate chapters in browser or adobe reader). If you like the book perhaps you might give it or the site a mention on the net. The next best things (after my books of course!) are here at Fuji Fair which may be one of the UK’s most active markets for Japanese language learning with piles of hot offers on study packs and mountains of books and courses (mostly cleared through Amazon).
Some reasons for learning kanji
- Kanji, or Hanzi as it is pronounced in China, is probably the world’s favourite writing, with around a fifth of all people able to read it to some extent
- Kanji is old; its around 4000 years since the first basic characters began to take shape, that means the earliest tortoise shell writing belongs to an age that looked as old to a Roman as the Roman times look to us. This gives us a window into a time when we in the British Isles were emerging from the Neolithic age.
- You can meet simple words you have never seen before, written in a range of Eastern languages and actually have a fair chance of knowing what they mean
- To those who think they need to know thousands of kanji, remember the 500 most frequently used kanji accounts for 79% of newspaper kanji (Hayashi, 1982).
- Kanji will help you break a long sentence into smaller grammatical units; if you read Japanese in hiragana, the lack of gaps between words can make it difficult to identify which are the verbs, nouns, particles and so on. Kanji clarifies the nouns or stems of verbs and adjectives.
- Kanji differentiates the numerous homonyms in Japanese from one another.
- Kanji is more than mere letters; the characters are imbued with meaning so it can be considered as vocabulary, which is learned progressively over a long period of time as you do in English
Reason for not learning kanji
- Because it’s easy, at least not without the book.
|
