The Kodansha KLC kanji novella : "Love Letter"

The Kodansha KLC kanji are 2300 Japanese characters found in Andrew Scott Conning's excellent book "The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course" which can usefully be paired with the new 2nd edition of the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary by Jack Halpern.

The Conning book is very well conceived as a kanji program ( although I disagree with his view on the phonetic side of learning ) and each entry is tied to an entry in the Halpern book.

Each Halpern entry has the Unicode value (essential for the internet) and other links in addition to the stroke code as well as explicit ON-yomi and kun-yomi compound kanji words or jukugo.

I still like to use these two books with the Kodansha Essential Kanji and with Henshall Remembering the Kanji for etymologies. None of these is an alternative to a good course in Japanese such as Minna No Nihongo or the Genki books or Japanese for Busy People (kana editions.)

This blog is a sequence of POSTs which will form the textual basis of an e-book graphical novel in the MIT Curl web programming language from www.curl.com ( now Tokyo's CSK Curl at www.curlap.com )

The graphical novel will use my phonetic innovations and will come in both a beginner's intro version and an intermediate version.

The writing is limited by the need to map to the KLC kanji in the order in which the Conning book presents them. The material is intended for young adults.  It you are naturally a bit prudish or find the material prurient, I do have another literary approach using the haiku of Bashō, Buson, Issa and Shiki with additional tanka to cover roughly the same basic kanji with mnemonics.

The point of the fictional story-line is to have a clear feeling of WHERE in the KLC book you worked on a kanji and what was the context. At the moment I am releasing the POSTs for the first 100 KLC kanji with 101 as the kanji which starts the Love Letter novella.

The text is intended for English speakers who have already mastered hiragana script as a first step to learning the kanji required to read in Japanese.  If you have made yourself write out the hiragana script once or twice a day for about a week AFTER you were first able to do so without errors, then you should have mastered the script.

There is no getting away from or around the hard work of learning to read and write Japanese, but there can be fun and or enrichment. Whether you use adult amusement or playful and serious kanji or both, I hope you most often enjoy the work and delight in the results.

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