Read Japanese Today: A New Approach to Mastering Written Japanese (Paperback)

Japanese kanji can be formidable — thousands of characters and tens of thousands of compounds, it seems, must be mastered in order to begin reading this wonderful language. Read Japanese Today takes a unique approach to teaching kanji: it reveals Japanese writing as a simple, fascinating pictographic system. Hundreds of examples show the evolution of Chinese characters from realistic drawings of the object they represent to more abstracted signs. The author playfully explains combinations of these pictographs into hundreds more compounds — allowing the reader to master the 300 most common and useful characters while having fun with Japanese!

By Len Walsh