In
Japanese, there are three syllabaries. There is the angular alphabet,
Katakana and the cursive alphabet,
Hiragana. These two are very easy to use; each character represents a syllable, and, to write out a word, you simply write down the characters that match the spoken syllables.
Sigh. And then there's
Kanji. Kanji are a gigantic set of
ideograms imported from
China by the
Japanese. They are
legion. To simply read a newspaper (which, I've been told, many Japanese highschoolers can not do), one must know about two thousand
Kanji.
That's why having and being able to use a
Kanji dictionary is very handy. Sure, it's slow and painstaking, and sure, they are really expensive, but it really is the only way to go when you're starting out and can't recognize the primitives.
Let me say this right off-the way
Kanji dictionaries are organized is crazy. Really crazy. Like "what the hell?!" crazy. I mean, think about it-they'd have to be in order to logically index thousands and thousands and thousands of characters, each of which can be composed many different strokes.
I've seen a few variations on the way they are indexed, however the most common method is to do it by a
Kanji's radical. A
radical is like a primitive or prototype stroke (or set of strokes) by which a
Kanji is indexed. Recognizing a
radical can be tough because they are composed of multiple strokes, and therefore it is hard to tell what is
radical and what's not. Most
Kanji dictionaries have a grid or something somewhere in them that shows all of the
radicals.
Once you're able to distinguish
radicals, you have to move on to find by which one the character is indexed. There are
many steps, of which I will list a few here (these are paraphrased from
The Original Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary by Andrew N. Nelson). You follow the steps in order, and the first radical to answer one of them is the one you're looking for:
- Is all the character a radical?
- Does one radical enclose the entire character?
- Is there a radical on the left?
- Is there a radical on the right?
And so forth. Once the character's
radical is found, you count the number of strokes in it. Once this is done, the dictionary will generally have some kind of method to correlate the number of strokes in a character's
radical with the number of strokes in the non-
radical part of the character. This will lead to a section that has a list of full characters and character definitions that have the
radical you found coupled with another part that has the number of strokes in the non-
radical part of your character. You then read through there until you find the right one.
I told you it was crazy.