Hillary studies kanji

I find that writing about the kanji helps me to remember them because I’m thinking about them as I write. I can’t imagine writing if I were learning the letters of the alphabet. Making parallels between the alphabet and kanji would be impossible. The only parallel I could think of just now is tracing the origins of words.

Here’s an example: music

The word music goes back to the thirteenth century. Music is from old French, musique, from Latin, musica, and from Greek, mousike techne, meaning the art of the Muses. The Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. The Muses were believed to inspire writers and poets.

Suppose you didn’t know the word music and you read about the etymology of the word. That might help you to remember the word the way this writing helps me to remember the kanji.

Here are three idioms that have to do with music:

Musicology: the study of the science of music
Example: I studied musicology at Boston College.

Elevator music: music that is boring but sometimes soothing
Example: I had to listen to two hours of elevator music while I sat in the dental office.

Music to my ears: good news
Example: What they said was music to my ears.

Somehow, when I talk about the history of the word music, I get a very different feeling as compared with when I talk about the meaning of a character.

That’s what the writer of my book, Fujihiko Kaneda, calls this set of characters, the “speak” group characters. The kanji for speak reminds me of Picasso’s cubism. Here in the four lines and the box I see two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a fluff of hair. Like cubism, the face is not the way a true face looks. The features of the face have been put in a column, a new perspective, so that we may understand what the artist sees. We’re locked into thinking about a face in just one way. Here’s a face with the features in a column. No longer a face, but still a face.

My number one favorite right now is the double character for language. I know the first part of the character is language and the second part is the number five with a mouth. Actually, I don’t know that, but that is my interpretation. Here’s what I think the triple kanji is: speak on the left, five on the top, and mouth on the bottom. Still, why two mouths? I would think one is enough. Maybe language is double talk. Say one thing but think another. Or say part with one mouth but keep part inside with the other mouth.

I think the reason I like this kanji so much is that mine looks beautiful to me. Unlike the character for rain, this character I can write. Of course, if someone who grew up writing the Chinese characters looked at mine, they would probably laugh at my poor calligraphy. I find the character for rain beautiful in the book, but when I try to write it, my character looks pretty bad.

For some people in the states, tattoos are very trendy. People seem to like kanji tattoos. However the kanji tattoos that I’ve seen are done in the style that I’m writing in now. I know I write in the way an elementary school student would write. I don’t see kanji tattoos done in more elegant ways of writing, gyosho or sosho. I see only kaisho.

I wonder about people getting kanji tattoos here in San Francisco. In the spring and summer when arms and necks and hands aren’t covered, I see the kanji. I wonder whether or not the tattoos are correctly drawn. Maybe someone here in San Francisco gets love or peace tattooed on their arm. They think their tattoo is beautiful and lovely; the tattoo gives them a sense of completeness in that the message imprinted on their arm or hand has meaning for them. Maybe someone who speaks Japanese sees their tattoo and notices that the characters are not accurately drawn or the meaning is not what they wanted. I wonder how often this happens.

In the United States, the estimate is that about one person out of every four people has a tattoo. The estimate is that there are about 20,000 tattoo business in the states. San Francisco is a trendy city, so I’m sure there are at least 1,000 places to get tattoos here in the city.

I asked my friend, Fei Yen, to tell me why the person character was so small when two characters were combined to make one kanji. I wonder if three characters are ever combined to make one kanji. I don’t want to even think about a three in one character. My mind is boggled at the complexity of these wiggly lines. The English writing system is so much easier.

Fei Yen is from China, but she has been in San Francisco for about ten years. Fei Yen tells me that the hito-bito character isn’t actually a character. It is more like a prefix. She says sometimes the prefix is part of the meaning of the kanji but sometimes it isn’t.

Still, Fei Yen is from China. She doesn’t know anything about Japanese writing. I wonder if someone from Japan would give me the same information as someone from China.

I have made progress. I now know five kanji. I can pronounce them. I can write them with a pencil, and I could pick them out in a book that had tons of kanji in it.

Still, I can’t yet read anything.

I guess I need to wait a while longer before I can read anything.

My kanji look beautiful!

I’m learning five kanji; they’re the people group characters. I like the way the writer has grouped categories of kanji together. His doing so makes it easy for me to remember the first five characters.

Still, I don’t understand why the person kanji is so wide when it is alone, but when it is with another character, the person kanji is made narrow. I’m assuming that each character set, if that’s what they’re called, has only so much space. A character alone can take up all the space, but two characters need to share the space.

Here’s the problem I’m having: The writer doesn’t explain what I need to know to understand. I see more than ten pages on stroke order, but I don’t see any explanation of what I think are the most basic questions.

I suppose I have to use the textbook as a starting point. Then I need to find other resources to answer my questions. I wonder why the writer goes on and on about stroke order but avoids what I think are the basics that require explanation. Maybe what is basic to me is not even thought about by the writer.

I wasn’t able to find anything about why the characters are smaller when used in combination on the Internet. Even my usual bible didn’t give me a clue.