Kanji Galore

Today is a special bonus lesson. I was supposed to take the day off, but instead I'm sick at home so I'll give you a lesson instead. Don't worry, I'll take it easy on you.

So have you seen the next text? Pretty intimidating, isn't it. I'll write it out for you.

解(かい)(kai)離(り)(ri)性(せい)(sei)同(どう)(dou)一(いつ)(itsu)性(せい)(sei)障(しょう)(shou)害(がい)(gai)
Dissociative Identity Disorder

Thank goodness the english is in the book because this word isn't in most dictionaries. It looks pretty complicated too... How would we tackle it if the english wasn't there?

Luckily, with respect to compound words, Japanese works just like English. It goes left to right. In English, if I said "Batmobile" you can figure it out by going left to right and picking out "sub words" to get the meaning. In this case "bat" and "mobile" (i.e. car for bats -- or batman). Japanese works exactly the same way.

So let's begin. What you want to do is take the largest "sub word" on the left hand side that's in your dictionary. Many electronic dictionaries do that for you if you just type in the whole word (we'll discuss online dictionaries sometime in the future -- for now, just follow along with the discussion). For my dictionary that "sub word" is 解離 （かいり）(kairi). This word means "dissociation". It's not a common word, but it's in my dictionary. So far so good.

The next bit is difficult because there is no good kanji compound in my dictionary for it. But lets have a look. 性（せい） means "gender, nature". 同（どう） (dou) means "same". 一（いつ）means "one" (although it is often read いち(ichi)). Finally we get 性（せい） again. Before I go into details about meaning, it's important to understand that since I am looking up individual kanji, I need to look up the meaning of the kanji and not the meaning of any words with the same kanji. If you don't keep in mind that kanji are not words you can run into troubles.

For instance, 性（せい） as a word means only gender. As a kanji character it has the meaning of both gender and nature. That's because the kanji character is used in multiple contexts, while the word is not. This is a very important distinction.

So let's get on with deciphering this word. 性同一性（せいどういつせい）(seidouitsusei) literally means "nature same, one nature". Hmm... it's not totally obvious, but we could probably figure it out if we had to.

Now the last bit. 障害（しょうがい） (shougai). This means something like "malfunction". So the whole thing together is "dissociation - nature same, one nature - malfunction". So we can reason that the word means something like "A malfunction where one's nature is dissociated" and get a pretty good idea of the word. It really isn't so complicated once you get down to it.

The other thing we can do, apart from reasoning things out, is to look in a better dictionary. As it turns out, one of the popular online dictionaries has this word and another one as well: 性同一性障害（せいどういつせいしょうがい） (seidouitsuseishougai) which means "sexual identity disorder". Apart from the PC-ness of such a disorder this gives us a better understanding of what 性同一性 means.

I hope this discussion gives you a bit of insight into how kanji works. I also hope it gives you some insight into why kanji is useful. Would you rather read 解離性同一性障害, かいりせいどういつせいしょうがい or kairiseidouitsuseishougai? Assuming one knew the characters, the kanji would be pretty easy to recognize. The latter two (especially the romaji) would be headache inducing...

Well, in addition to doing some kanji learning, we got to practice a whole whack of hiragana. How many new ones did we get? Only 3!!! In a list of 16 characters, there are only 3 new ones. I hate to go on about it, but it shows how, with minimal effort, you are learning these characters very quickly. Remember to practice every day and they will soon become second nature.

Two of these characters need special attention when watching the writing animations as they have the diacritical marks. The last one also needs attention because the "mincho" font that you are probably viewing it in is different than the way you write it. Remember when I said that it is important to understand how to draw the character to be able to read? Here is a great example.

In the manga, the character looks like . You can see how in this font, the first stroke carries on into the second stroke. But when you write it, you should make 2 independent strokes. As you write the character with your finger, imagine that you just barely drag your brush from the bottom of the first stroke to the top of the second stroke. Can you imagine how it would look like it does in the manga?

This is why you can't easily learn how to read Japanese characters without learning how to write them. Once you know how to write it, it's obvious what character it is - because you aren't memorizing the shape, but the actions used to write it. This is something that held me back from reading hand written characters for years. This manga doesn't have much hand written text, but many others do. Make sure you practice by drawing!!!

Well, I'm not going to get you to memorize 解離性同一性障害. There's no point. You could read a hundred manga and you probably wouldn't run into it again. If you do, you can look it up in a dictionary. But there is a word embedded in there that is common and useful.

Today's Mnemosyne file. Only 4 new entries, bringing us to 46 in total. As I said, it's a short bonus day. There isn't even any grammar or additional reading today. Make sure you read the reading assigned last time, though. It will give some good insight for the future.

That's it for today. I will be taking one day off (for real this time) and then give you a big lesson next time.