What I haven’t mention yet is that each word I pick is a word I just learned personally. Usually, I pick a word from my dictionary history, which has things I looked up recently while reading books or listening to podcasts and then search around for something online that uses that word. It’s actually more for myself than anything as it allows me to review a word I just learned in a different context. At first, it annoyed me that I couldn’t just add a bunch and schedule them to appear later on twitter. But it’s actually helping me to memorize the word because it may be a few days after I learned it that I actually post it. As fans of SRS know, it’s best to not think about a word for a while before conjuring it up again.

If you’d like to try your own WOTD on twitter, post a link to your account in the comments so I can follow you. Don’t just post the word though (which is same as looking it up in the dictionary). Try to find a sentence that uses the word and post a link to the source.

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http://itunes.apple.com/jp/podcast/id291600295?l=en

When I was in middle-school, all I remember doing was fooling around and play games. Not to mention trying to survive through middle-school.

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I already learned a new word: 「長蛇」. I had no idea that the on-yomi of 「へび」 is 「ダ」. I love how Japanese TV shows emphasize things said by showing it in large text on the screen. Makes it real easy to learn new words.

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I also got the Android app to get these ebooks from 「青空文庫」. Unfortunately, the mobile version doesn’t seem to have the handy furigana text, which is too bad because this is fairly challenging reading even with the modern kana and kanji conversions (such as いう instead of いふ). There’s tons of Kanji I’m not familiar with, too many to list here but here’s an interesting sentence:

吾輩の尊敬する筋向（すじむこう）の白君などは逢（あ）う度毎（たびごと）に人間ほど不人情なものはないと言っておらるる。

Apparently, 言っておらるる is the equivalent to 言っておられる. I’m not too far into the story yet but I’m enjoying it so far. I like cats and this book doesn’t seem as depressing as 「こころ」. I’ve got a couple novels I’m going through now so this will probably be my last blog post on what I’m reading for a while. But I think I’ve introduced a number of resources with tons of reading material so please share interesting things you’ve read or are reading in the comments!

Difficult: 4.5/5 (with 新字新仮名)
My Rating: Will update later

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I bought the latest volume: 「涼宮ハルヒの驚愕」, which has finally come out after 4 years of delay. So actually, I’m going to be reading the previous book again just so I can remember the story. To give you a taste of what the books are like, here’s the first sentence from the first volume. The sentence is so wordy it’s also the first paragraph. So that should give you an idea of the writing style.

サンタクロースをいつまで信じていたかなんてことは、たわいもない世間話にもならないくらいのどうでもいい話だが、それでも俺がいつまでサンタなどという想像上の赤服じーさんを信じていたかと言うと、これは確信を持って言えるが、最初から信じてなどいなかった。

The anime starts off the same way as well so you can hear the first couple lines of the book.

If you don’t happen to have a Japanese bookstore handy nearby, it looks like you can order it online. I haven’t tried ordering from the site myself so that’s for you to try.

I personally really enjoy the books. It has a nonlinear narrative, which I always like (my favorite novel is Catch-22) and it’s further complicated by the time traveling bits. Plus, with 11 books in the series so far (last one is split in 2), there’s plenty of reading material!

Difficulty: 4/5
My rating: 5/5

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I’ve been trying to find some interesting short stories on this online literature magazine called 「破滅波」. I just learned a new expression today: 「音を上げる」 and here 「音」 is read as 「ね」 not 「おと」. It’s from a story called 「僕はガードマン」:

ガードマンという仕事は肉体的にも精神的にもとても疲れる。アルバイト情報誌で時給の高さに惹かれてやってはみたものの、あまりの過酷さに音を上げる毎日だった。

Unfortunately, it’s in Flash so I’ve been using the IME drawing pad to look up Kanji.

One word I thought might be tricky is on page 8:

これは対応を誤ると大事になる。

Here, a group of yakuza is approaching the guardman. By context, 「大事」 doesn’t mean “important” and instead should mean “a big matter” so it should be read as 「おおごと」 and not 「だいじ」.

It’s a fairly short story in an ordinary everyday life setting about how the supposed best people in society act in the worst way and vice-versa.

New Kanji (for me): 憤懣
Category: Everyday life observations
Difficulty: 3/5
My rating: 3/5 stars

Feel free to share any interesting reading you’ve come across.

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「こういうことは、日本語でどう表現しますか？」日本語を勉強するには、それが一番重要な質問だと思う。自分の思いを表現しようとして、どのように言えばいいかわからない時、日本語が出来る人からすぐに教えてもらう。これこそが、日本語能力が上達している時だ。しかし、一般的な日本語の授業では、そういう質問をする機会がほとんどない。（まったくないと言ってもいいぐらい。）なぜなら、授業では習っている表現や単語があらかじめ決まっているからだ。「こんなことを教えるから、それを練習する」というやり方だ。

「ケーキは好きです？」と生徒に聞いたら、答えはほぼ決まっている。「はい、好きです」と「いいえ、好きじゃありません」と答えるしかない。クラスでは複数の人がいるから、もっと自由な答えをする時間もない。そうやって練習してきた生徒は始めて本当の会話で自分の思いを浮かべようとしたら、何も出てこない。適切な表現と単語と文法を知っていても、どれを使えばいいかわからない。授業では、そういう練習を全くしないからだ。

だから、私のレッスンではもっと自由に話をしてもらうようにしている。「ケーキは小さいころ好きだったけど、大人になってからは甘すぎてあんまり好きじゃない。でも、日本に行った時、そんなに甘くないケーキがあると知って、また好きになったよ。また日本に行って、ショートケーキを食べたいな。私が住んでいるところの駅の近くにすごいおいしいケーキ屋さんがあった。そういえば、その隣のパン屋さんのメロンパンもおいしかったな！」と、そのような話を聞きだせるようにレッスンを構成している。

そのためには、常に会話が盛り上がれるような話題を考えている。それは、もちろん生徒によって違うから、やっぱり個別レッスンにしてよかったと思う。

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Today, I learned a new word: 【準える】

I’m always surprised to see a completely new word based on a Kanji that I’ve probably known for well over 6 years. 「準備」 was probably one of the first few words I learned with Kanji (it helped that the same word in Korean sounds identical). I later picked up other words such as 「基準」、「水準」、「標準」、and 「準決勝」. Later on, I even picked up more advanced vocabulary such as 「準じる」 and the older style: 「準ずる」. And now, after over 8 years since I started studying Japanese, I just learned a completely different word based on the same Kanji.

Another similar example happened to me several years ago with 「集う」, which as far as I can tell is virtually identical to 「集まる」 except used like almost never. At that time, I came upon the word at a local community event at 「川口市」 called 「新年の集い」.

The moral of the story is: don’t worry about learning everything about a given Kanji at once. Relax, give it time, and learn things in context as you go. And whatever you do, DO NOT try to remember all the readings at once. You’ll eventually get to all the various readings and associated vocabulary in time. It might take over 8 years but hey, I’ve been using Japanese happily all these years without knowing 「準える」 precisely because it’s so rare to see it used anywhere.

As an interesting aside, 「なずらえる」 seems to have 3 possible kanji: 「準える・准える・擬える」 but the 「なぞらえる」 reading seems to only accept 「準える」. Probably a modern upgrade, as indicated by older usage of 「ず」 (similar to 「生ずる」、「準ずる」、etc).

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2005年2月に国語分科会が「情報化時代に対応するために常用漢字のあり方を検討すべき」であるとした報告書を文化審議会に提出した。これを受けて、同年3月、中山文部科学相は常用漢字表の見直しの検討などを文化審議会に諮問した。同年9月から文化審議会・国語分科会の漢字小委員会が常用漢字見直しの審議に入った。
- Wikipedia

Three years later, there was news as recently as last month of a tentative list to be released in February of 2009. The new list is currently said to have removed 5 kanji and added 188 new ones, bringing the new total from 1945 to 2128 characters.

文化審議会国語分科会の漢字小委員会は１５日、常用漢字表に新たに入れる可能性の高い漢字１８８字からなる字種候補案を承認した。話題になった「俺（おれ）」も含まれる。今後、音訓を決める段階や、来年２月に作成される新常用漢字表（仮称）試案を修正する段階で、この追加字種の数は若干変わる可能性もあるが、ほぼ固まった。

現行の常用漢字表からはずす可能性が高いのは銑・錘・勺・匁・脹。１９４５字からなる常用漢字表からこの５字をはずし、新たに１８８字を追加すれば、新常用漢字表は２１２８字となる。
- 朝日（２００８年7月15日）

The new additions apparently also include the “controversial” character 「俺」. Personally, it seems crazy to not include it based on how often it’s used. And what is so controversial about 「俺」 anyway especially considering the fact that they’re adding kanji like 「勃」 and 「淫」? That’s just my opinion in any case and I think the difficulty they are having in determining the criteria for what goes in the list is indicative of fundamental problems with the whole idea behind the list in the first place.

Never let the 常用漢字表 tell you which kanji to learn or not learn

What is the purpose of the 常用漢字表 anyway? To tell you which kanji to learn? So I’m supposed to learn 「斤」, some obscure unit of measurement but not the kanji for the word “who” （誰）? That makes perfect sense, right?!

Also, why did they even have the removed characters （銑・錘・勺・匁・脹） in the first place? Was “pig iron” commonly used at some point in time? I mean, the list came out the year I was born and I don’t think I’m THAT old. And why haven’t they removed stuff like 畝 or 逓 yet? I don’t think they come even close to falling in the category of “common usage” no matter how you define it.

And now, almost 30 years later they’re finally going to add kanji for words like “smell” （匂い）, “loose” （緩い）, “nail” （爪）, and “butt” （お尻） in 2010? What kind of crap list were we using all these years?

The list burned me personally when I bought my first kanji dictionary. It only had the 常用漢字 because after all, that’s all we need to know, right? Well, one of the FIRST words I encountered in my self-study was 「瞳」 and guess what, it’s not in the list! If I had known better, I would have never wasted money on anything that only covered the 常用漢字.

Thankfully, I later found an online dictionary that didn’t use the 常用漢字表 as an excuse to be lazy and saved me from quitting Japanese in frustration. For comparison, the 漢字源 in my Canon G90 has 13,112 characters, almost 16x what my first crap dictionary had.

Don’t fall into the trap of learning from a list

In my opinion, the worst problem with the list is that it fools innocent learners such as you and I into thinking we should use it somehow in our studies. The thinking goes, “Hey here’s a list of (supposedly) common kanji. I should make up some index cards and memorize them one by one.”

However, what many beginners don’t realize is that you have to be some kind of super-genius to memorize 1945 characters with absolutely no context. Even if you DID somehow manage to memorize them all, you’re not learning any real words, you have no idea which readings are used and when, and you have no sense of when and how it’s used. Where’s the reading material, vocabulary, and conversation practice? It’s like putting the cart before the horse AND sitting in the seat backwards.

The first character on the list is 「亜」 for crying out loud! For all you know, that’s the most useful character in the world when in fact I have never used it in all my years of study. Do YOU write 「アジア」 and 「アメリカ」 as 「亜細亜」 and 「亜米利加」? I sure hope not! I thought for a second that maybe it’s used in the word 「唖然」 but no, not even! If anything, 「唖」 belongs in the list much more than 「亜」 if you ask me. Obviously, they never consulted me (I was -2 months old at the time) and no, it’s not in the list.

Conclusion

I don’t know, maybe the list has some good uses for educators, policy makers, publishers, and whatnot. It’s certainly better to have an improved version over the crappy one we have now. But I can’t help but think it was overused throughout the years and caused more harm than good for people learning Japanese. Personally, I think we would have been better off without the damn list in the first place.

The bottom line is whatever new list they come up with and no matter how “good” it is (whatever that means), we should always think of it as a guide and never forget to use good ol’ common sense.

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Stroke order is one of those things that might seem difficult at first but actually comes quite naturally with a bit of practice. You just have to make sure you learn the the correct order of the most important radicals such as 口 and 田. You should also pay careful attention to radicals like 厂 that have more stroke orders than you would think. (Hint: it’s more than 1.)

Once you learn the stroke order for the most common radicals, you can figure out the rest for most kanji by yourself with general principles like the following.

1. Stroke orders generally go from top to bottom and left to right (from the top-left corner to bottom-right corner).
2. Vertical lines that go straight through are written last as opposed to those that connect (十 vs 土）.
3. Stuff that encloses something else gets drawn first but closed last （回 and 団）.

When in doubt or for weird kanji like 必, you can always check the stroke order on the WWWJDIC by looking up the kanji and clicking on the SOD link. You’ll get a nice animated gif like this one.

However, the problem with these animations is that it only gives you the order and not the direction of each stroke. If you’re confused about stroke direction, another site you might want to try is gahoh, which has animated .mov files with the direction and order. Here’s one for 必.

Their collection isn’t as complete as the WWWJDIC but it is useful for odd or crazy and complicated kanji like 龜. The request page in particular has some of the odder and trickier kanji like 凸、凹、飛、 and 卵 so you might want to check it out and double-check your stroke order.

So how useful is it to learn the proper stroke order of 龜? Not very but hey it’s fun times for everybody, right? Right? Hello? ………anybody?

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