Sample Pages from Crazy for Kanji
At the beginning of every chapter in Crazy for Kanji, you’ll find a discussion of a particular theme. After that you’ll see several types of “exhibits” relating to the chapter theme. These exhibits (which range from light factoids to in-depth analyses) have names such as “Thematic Explorations,” “Spectacular Shapes,” “Just the Facts,” and “Game.”
People at every level of kanji mastery can get something out of the book; newbies can certainly acquire the basics they need, while even native speakers will learn new things and find challenges. Most pages featured below require no prior knowledge of kanji, with the exception of the game. The links are all to PDFs.
Table of Contents (4 pp., so be sure to scroll down)
From the Preface: “Thematic Explorations: Place Names of Note” and “Spectacular Shapes: Busy Bodies and Real Lookers”
From the Introduction: “Just the Facts: Stroke Order”
From the main text of Chapter One: a section called “Importing a Writing System” (which starts partway down p. 36 and continues onto p. 37, so scroll down)
From Chapter Two: “Thematic Explorations: Just Add Water”
From Chapter Five: “Just the Facts: Kanji Sound Effects in Manga”
From Chapter Five: “Game: Kanji Word Find”
From Chapter Seven: “Thematic Explorations: Parallel Features”
Feel free to post any comments or questions below!
February 23rd, 2009 at 3:22 am
Yikes! There’s an error in one of the sample pages. How embarrassing! The stroke order for 良 (yo•i: good) is incorrect. To see the proper stroke order, one option is to consult Jim Breen’s dictionary; he has animated stroke order diagrams.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C
To see his SOD, you have to go to the bottom of the search results and select “Examine the kanji in a selected compound.” When you get to that page, click SOD.
Anyway, sorry for the mistake, and hope that’s the only one lurking in the book (aside from the two small formatting mistakes I’ve already found!).
September 26th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Why does a book about the Kanji, who’s readers have obviously mastered the Kana, use Ramaji? and even worse, uses nonsensical explanations like this “(Kun more or less rhymes with “noon” and means “teachings.”)” - noon, really?
Is the whole book written with this strange imagery;
“And because they come with no parts sticking out,
grammatically speaking, on-yomi can fit together in a
neat, modular way. Whereas kun-yomi are like spiky
snowflakes that would jab each other if you tried to
unite them, on-yomi are more like hexagons that lie
alongside one another with smooth joints.”
Ignoring the fact that a new paragraph has been started with the word AND, what does any of that mean?
I really want a good Kanji book that is more than mindless drill exercises, so this book sounded good. However, going off some of these sample pages it seems to be written in some sort of cryptic pixy dialect. No doubt the content is there, but its too far buried within the mountains of foggy images, slobbery similes and emotional ramblings.
September 28th, 2009 at 8:20 am
I will respond to this simply by addressing one point that has arisen several times: why did I use romaji in the book (and in the blog), rather than hiragana?
I explained that in this comment: http://blogs.japanesepod101.com/blog/2008/03/14/reaping-the-fruits-of-ones-labor-part-6/#comment-98847
Brief summary of the point I made there: I am not only writing for those who know Japanese. Anyone can find kanji fascinating, and that has indeed been the case for friends and relatives who have read my book and blog. If I had used kana, that would have excluded them, and I wanted to be as inclusive as possible.
December 11th, 2009 at 7:59 am
More importantly, are all the joyou kanji taught in this book? I already know the first 1000 and i’m looking to learn the last thousand.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:02 am
You will not find a complete set of the Joyo kanji in the book. Many of the Joyo kanji appear. Many rare kanji also appear. The book isn’t a systematic method to learn each character, as, for instance, Heisig’s book is. Rather, Crazy for Kanji presents a map to help people understand how kanji work as a whole and to grasp what’s happening inside individual characters, giving them meaning and sound.
December 31st, 2009 at 3:19 am
Though, I’m finding the book better than most I browsed through. What it is definitely lacking is an index. Sorry for the complaint.
January 6th, 2010 at 9:24 am
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, we planned all along to have an index, but at the last moment it seemed better to get the book out into the world than to cause further delays by creating an index. We also felt that the extremely detailed Table of Contents would suffice. I agree, though, that an index would be helpful. I probably know the book better than anyone, and even so, there are times when I struggle for a while to locate something I need. Perhaps a future edition could have an index!