レッスン ３

Question 1

旧

Answer 1

olden times

• “A walking stick is needed for days of olden times, since days, too, get old - at least insofar as we refer to them as the ““good old days.”” The main thing here is to think of ““good old days”” when you hear the key word olden times. The rest will take care of itself.”

Question 2

自

Answer 2

oneself

• “You can think of this kanji as a stylized pictograph of the nose, that little drop that Mother Nature set between your eyes. The Japanese refer to themselves by pointing a finger at their nose - giving us an easy way to remember the kanji for oneself.”
• The same meaning of oneself can be kept when this kanji is used as a primitive element, but you will generally find it better to give it the meaning of nose or nostrils, both because it accords with the story above and because it is the first part of the kanji for nose (Frame 733).”

Question 3

白

Answer 3

white

• “The color white is a mixture of all the primary colors, both for pigments and for light, as we see when a prism breaks up the rays of the sun. Hence, a single drop of sun spells white.”
• As a primitive, this character can either retain its meaning of white or take the more graphic meaning of a white bird or dove. This latter stems from the fact that it appears at the top of the kanji for bird, which we shall get to later (Frame 2091).”

Question 4

百

Answer 4

hundred

• The Japanese refer to a person’s 99th birthday as a white year because white is the kanji you are left with if you subtract one from a hundred.
• 100 turned sideways.

Question 5

中

Answer 5

in

• The elements here are a walking stick and a mouth. Remember the trouble your mother had getting medicine in your mouth? Chances are it crossed her mind more than once to grab something handy, like your grandfather’s walking stick, to pry open your jaws while she performed her duty. Keep the image of getting something in from the outside, and the otherwise abstract sense of this key word should be a lot easier than trying to spoon castor oil into a baby’s mouth.

Question 6

千

Answer 6

thousand

• This kanji is almost too simple to pull apart, but for the sake of practice, have a look at the drop above and the ten below. Now put the elements together by thinking of squeezing two more zeros out of an eyedropper alongside the number ten to make it a thousand.
• It takes many drops of ten to get to a thousand.

Question 7

舌

Answer 7

tongue

• The primitive for mouth and the character for thousand naturally form the idea of tongue if one thinks of a thousand mouths able to speak the same language, or as we say, “sharing a common tongue.” It is easy to see the connection between the idiom and the kanji if you take its image literally: a single tongue being passed around from mouth to mouth.

Question 8

升

Answer 8

measuring box

• This is the character for the little wooden box that the Japanese use for measuring things, as well as for drinking saké out of. Simply imagine the outside as spiked with a thousand sharp needles, and the quaint little measuring box becomes a drinker’s nightmare! Be very careful when you write this character not to confuse it with the writing of thousand. The reason for the difference gives us a chance to clarify another general principle of writing that supersedes the one we mentioned in frame 4: when a single stroke runs vertically through the middle of a character, it is written last.
• It is a thousand or ten? I need my measuring box.

Question 9

昇

Answer 9

rise up

• Our image here is made up of two primitive elements: a sun and a measuring box. Just as the sun can be seen rising up in the morning from - where else - the Land of the Rising Sun, this kanji has the sun rising up out of a Japanese measuring box - the “measuring box of the rising-up sun.”
• “This kanji does not mean ““get up”” or ““awake.”” It means rising, like the rising of a salary, or a promotion. STORY: You know that your salary has RISEN UP when your MEASURING BOX has enough dollar bills in it to reach the SUN.”

Question 10

丸

Answer 10

round

• We speak of “round numbers,” or “rounding a number off,” meaning to add an insignificant amount to bring it to the nearest 10. For instance, if you add just a wee bit, the tiniest drop, to nine, you end up with a round number.
• As a primitive, this element takes the meaning of a fat man. Think of a grotesquely fat man whose paunch so covers the plate that he is always getting hit by the pitch. Hence a round baseball player becomes a fat man.

Question 11

寸

Answer 11

measurement

• This kanji actually stood for a small measurement used prior to the metric system, a bit over an inch in length, and from there acquired the sense of measurement. In the old system, it was one-tenth of a shaku (whose kanji we shall meet in frame 1151). The picture, appropriately, represents one drop of a ten (with a hook!).
• As a primitive, we shall use this to mean glue or glued to. There is no need to devise a story to remember this, since the primitive will appear so often you would have to struggle hard NOT to remember it.

Question 12

専

Answer 12

specialty

• Ten . . . rice fields . . . glue. That is how one would read the primitive elements of this kanji from top to bottom. Now if we make a simple sentence out of these elements, we get: “Ten rice fields glued together.” A specialty, of course, refers to one’s special “field” of endeavor or competence. In fact, few people remain content with a single specialty and usually extend themselves in other fields as well. This is how we come to get the picture of ten fields glued together to represent a specialty.
• 10 brains glued together allows you to specialize in any specialty that you want. Imagine each brain having its own specialty.

Question 13

博

Answer 13

Dr.

• At the left we have the needle; at the right, the kanji for specialty, plus an extra drop at the top. Think of a Dr. who is a specialist with a needle (an acupuncturist) and let the drop at the top represent the period at the end of Dr. In principle we are trying to avoid this kind of device, which plays on abstract grammatical conventions; but I think you will agree, after you have had occasion to use the right side of this kanji in forming other kanji, that the exception is merited in this case
• The primitive form of this kanji eliminates the needle on the left and gets the meaning of an acupuncturist..

Question 14

占

Answer 14

fortune-telling

• This is one of those kanji that is a real joy of simplicity: a divining rod with a mouth - which translate directly into fortune-telling. Note how the movement from top to bottom (the movement in which the kanji are written) is also the order of the elements which make up our story and of the key word itself: first divining rod, then mouth. This will not always be possible, but where it is, memory has almost no work at all to do.
• A great number of people who do fortune-telling are ““almost old””

Question 15

上

Answer 15

above

• The two directions, above and below, are usually pointed at with the finger. But the characters do not follow that custom, so we have to choose something else, easily remembered. The primitives show a magic wand standing above a floor - “magically,” you might say. Anyway, go right on to the next frame, since the two belong together and are best remembered as a unit, just as the words above and below suggest each other.

Question 16

下

Answer 16

below

• Here we see our famous miraculous magic wand hanging, all on its own, below the ceiling, as you probably already guessed would happen. In addition to giving us two new kanji, the two shapes given in this and the preceding frame also serve to fix the use of the primitives for ceiling and floor, by drawing our attention successively to the line standing above and below the primitive element to which it is related.

Question 17

卓

Answer 17

eminent

• The word eminent suggests a famous or well-known person. So all you need to do - given the primitives of a magic wand and a sunflower - is to think of the world’s most eminent magician as one who uses a sunflower for a magic wand (like a flower-child who goes around turning the world into peace and love).
• The eminent sunflower is the one that stands above the others.

Question 18

朝

Answer 18

morning

• On the right we see the moon fading off into the first light of morning, and to the left, the mist that falls to give nature a shower to prepare it for the coming heat. If you can think of the moon tilting over to spill mist on your garden, you should have no trouble remembering which of all the elements in this story are to serve as primitives for constructing the character.
• “Morning has come “ten” hours “early”!!! The “moon” is still in the sky!”