Books on kanji origins/structure?

[Nora Stevens Heath]

My teenager is interested in kanji; I enjoy pointing out the radicals that make up (for example) sumo rikishi shikona and discussing how the various parts of each kanji inform both its meaning and its pronunciation.

Can someone recommend a good book aimed at teaching this kind of thing to native Japanese speakers?  It's less important that the book teach kanji themselves, but rather discuss the origin/makeup of the characters for the layperson interested in the language.  I used Kanji Pict-O-Graphix once upon a time, but a lot of those overlay novel pictures onto radicals instead of the other way around, for the purposes of memorizing the characters.  I was gifted a little booklet called おもしろ漢字雑学辞典 once upon a time--a 100円ショップ special--that only whet my appetite.  I did check a reasonably good bookstore in Kyoto recently, but to no avail.

Thanks--
Nora

--

Nora Stevens Heath <no...@fumizuki.com>
J-E translations: http://www.fumizuki.com/

[Hadamitzky Wolfgang]

My favorite:

From the Introduction: "The focus of this book is on giving etymologies ..."

Wolfgang

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[Dan Lucas]

I regret that I have no suggestions, but I am following with interest.

I had a nice little kanwa jiten when I was at university, probably while I was in Kanazawa, so maybe 1990-1991?

I think it was aimed at chugakusei. It had droll stick-figure illustrations from an apparently well-known artist whose work I have seen in many places but whose name I cannot recall.

It made use of fonts of different colour to highlight important points and parts of kanji, and was easier to use than others available at the time (I bought it in a bookshop and was able to compare several competing publications). The covers were a strange orangey-brown, and plasticised in some way to make them durable, so the lists of radicals and so on inside the covers held up well to damage.

I had assumed it was still in a box somewhere and I only recently realised I had lost it when casting around for something to show/lend to my own teen, who is also interested in kanji.

So I too would be interested in the kind of book described by Nora.

Regards

Dan Lucas

[Dan Lucas]

Wolfgang, this looks good, I have just ordered it from Amazon in the UK. 

In passing I wanted to thank you for "Kanji & Kana". I used it for my undergraduate course at SOAS in the late 1980s/early 1990s and it was about the only one of my textbooks that I got on well with - certainly a lot easier to deal with than the Nelson of the time. I would be the first to acknowledge that my knowledge of kanji is nothing special, especially outside the joyo kanji, but what I have I owe mostly to your publication.

Apologies to Nora for the thread derail!

Dan Lucas

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[Oroszlany Balazs]

My suggestions:

The Kanji Code by Natalie J Hamilton. - this is more for English speakers, a great book on radicals and pronunciation groups. It is really cheap as an e-book, and fun to read.

Also, the following resources from professor 善如寺俊幸 :

漢字系統樹で学ぶ　漢字イメージトレーニング500　- this is a radical-based kanji learning textbook, again, maybe not for a native speaker (although the book is monolingual, without any language).

More interesting is his kanji poster (漢字系統樹表2800), and the related ebook (漢字系統樹表2800解字). The former works both as a learning tool and a visually stunning room decoration, the later is a dense digital volume that discusses each and every radical and kanji. (If you check it out on amazon, for example, then the physical version is the poster, the ebook is the  approx. 500 hundred pages long reference tome. With around 1000 jens for each, these are also very affordable.

Best regards,
Balazs Oroszlany

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[Jon Johanning]

This is off-topic if you're interested in books in Japanese, obviously, but The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press, 1984) certainly goes back to the origins of kanji in their native land, and he also spends a lot of time on their structures. The author attacks 6 myths about kanji in what looks to me like a very authoritative discussion, but I don't know enough about the subject to say if he's right or wrong.

Jon Johanning

zenn...@icloud.com

[Natalie Hamilton]

Thank you Balazs for the kind recommendation of my book The Kanji Code. I would just like to point out that the focus of the book is more on the phonetic side of kanj, and that the main radicals that appear are phonetic components. 

Noriko K. Williams' blogs and books on kanji origins are also accessible and interesting: https://kanjiportraits.wordpress.com/about-author/

My next recommendation is a hardcore linguistic book that I just thought was pretty cool if anyone is interested: https://www.routledge.com/The-Grammar-of-Chinese-Characters-Productive-Knowledge-of-Formal-Patterns/Myers/p/book/9781032092829

Natalie Hamilton

--

[Dale Ponte]

This one is phenomenal:

https://www.amazon.com/Keys-Chinese-Characters-Shizuka-Shirakawa/dp/1503036308/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ZLHQGC21H8N6&keywords=shirakawa+shizuka&qid=1679533281&s=books&sprefix=shirakawa+shizuka%2Cstripbooks%2C203&sr=1-1&asin=1503036308&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Dale

[Wolfgang Hadamitzky]

Dan, thank you for your kind remarks on "Kanji & Kana".

If interested in the question Nora raised:"... how the various parts of each kanji inform both its meaning and its pronunciation.", you may find an answer partly in the Index by Readings, in which kanji with the same on reading are divided into groups each having the same pronunciation-indicating component. Example: 己 忌 起 紀 記. Comparing the meanings of these kanji may give a clue whether or how phonetic elements also contribute to the meaning of a kanji.

Wolfgang Hadamiitzky

Am 22.03.2023 um 17:20 schrieb Dan Lucas <dan....@carninglipartners.com>:

Wolfgang, this looks good, I have just ordered it from Amazon in the UK. 

In passing I wanted to thank you for "Kanji & Kana". I used it for my undergraduate course at SOAS in the late 1980s/early 1990s and it was about the only one of my textbooks that I got on well with - certainly a lot easier to deal with than the Nelson of the time. I would be the first to acknowledge that my knowledge of kanji is nothing special, especially outside the joyo kanji, but what I have I owe mostly to your publication.

Apologies to Nora for the thread derail!

Dan Lucas

On Wed, 22 Mar 2023, at 15:47, Hadamitzky Wolfgang wrote:

My favorite:

<9784805311707.website__14694.1567540675.240.309.jpg>

The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji(9784805311707) tuttlepublishing.com

From the Introduction: "The focus of this book is on giving etymologies ..."

Wolfgang

Am 22.03.2023 um 16:32 schrieb Nora Stevens Heath <fumi...@gmail.com>:

My teenager is interested in kanji; I enjoy pointing out the radicals that make up (for example) sumo rikishi shikona and discussing how the various parts of each kanji inform both its meaning and its pronunciation.

Can someone recommend a good book aimed at teaching this kind of thing to native Japanese speakers?  It's less important that the book teach kanji themselves, but rather discuss the origin/makeup of the characters for the layperson interested in the language.  I used Kanji Pict-O-Graphix once upon a time, but a lot of those overlay novel pictures onto radicals instead of the other way around, for the purposes of memorizing the characters.  I was gifted a little booklet called おもしろ漢字雑学辞典 once upon a time--a 100円ショップ special--that only whet my appetite.  I did check a reasonably good bookstore in Kyoto recently, but to no avail.

Thanks--

Nora

--

Nora Stevens Heath <no...@fumizuki.com>

J-E translations: http://www.fumizuki.com/

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[Nora Stevens Heath]

Thanks to everyone for all the great suggestions!  It looks like some of these will be helpful now, in my son's detached-linguistic-interest phase, and some will be helpful later, as he starts to learn and use kanji himself.  (Neither he nor my husband are Japanese speakers, though my son knows a little and is interested in learning more; both, however, understand a little Japanese just by virtue of living with me.)  I look forward to our discussions of kanji built on the solid scholarship of one or more of these gems.

Thanks again--

Nora

[Stephen A. Carter]

On 2023/03/23 0:32, Nora Stevens Heath wrote:
> My teenager is interested in kanji; I enjoy pointing out the radicals
> that make up (for example) sumo rikishi shikona and discussing how the
> various parts of each kanji inform both its meaning and its pronunciation.

It's old, dry, and technical, but Bernhard Karlgren's "Analytic
Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese" contains comprehensive phonetic
analyses of around 6,000 kanji.

This book is the only dictionary I've ever read cover to cover. Twice.

--
Stephen A. Carter, C. Tran.
sca...@hticn.com
Nagoya, Japan

[Tom Gally]

Wolfgang,

Kanji & Kana was also my go-to reference when I was learning Japanese forty years ago. I remember buying it at Maruzen in Nihonbashi soon after I arrived in Japan.

Many belated thanks.

Tom Gally

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[Hadamitzky Wolfgang]

Tom,

I'm very fortunate that K&K came out at a turbulent time, when interest in the Japanese language began growing worldwide, but the range of resources was still fairly limited. And I was lucky to get Mark Spahn as a co-authorr.

Around the same time I  acquired the 1974 published GG4, whose fifths edition, in which you were instrumental, still serves me well to this day.

Wolfgang Hadamitzky

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[Tom Gally]

Wolfgang,

Thanks for remembering my participation in the editing of GG5. (For younger readers: That’s the fifth edition of the Green Goddess, as Kenkyusha’s big Japanese-English dictionary used to be called here on Honyaku.)

I recently had to pack up all of the books in my university office for shipping back home, as I'm now sixty-five and will retire from that position at the end of this month. Among the books were perhaps a hundred dictionaries. They evoked mixed feelings. On the one hand, I still enjoy reading and using dictionaries, and I am glad to have been able to help with the editing of several. On the other hand, the need for dictionaries, at least for major languages like Japanese and English, seems to be disappearing. Search engines, Wikipedia, and the like had already eliminated the need for most specialized dictionaries, and now LLMs seem likely to take over most of the remaining uses.

Although LLMs should make it much easier to compile dictionaries, as Gilles-Maurice de Schryver and David Joffe showed in a recent talk [1], LLMs’ ability to identify the meanings of words in context and to create example sentences also gives them a huge advantage over traditional static dictionaries.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEorw0yefAs

Tom Gally

Yokohama, Japan

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[JimBreen]

Tom, I remember being most impressed by your dictionary collection when I visited you in Yokohama in 2001. Yes, these days one doesn't use printed dictionaries as much, although I find I still need to go to printed kanwas.

I use GG5 and others in that stable a lot via the KOD site. It's very convenient. I also extracted the GG5 contents as a text file from the EB edition, which means I can search for passages in the many example sentences; something that is not possible in the online interface.

I watched the seminar with Gilles-Maurice and David. Very interesting. 

Jim