Showing posts with label kanji mnemonics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kanji mnemonics. Show all posts

Saturday, December 12, 2015

kanji KUN yomi singletons versus ON DOKU in Henshall book

I am distracted just now looking at kanji KUN yomi singletons versus ON DOKU in the old Henshall book.

By "singleton" I mean a reading that is unique for that book. In the case of KUN yomi, there are a great many in Henshall.

There are some errors and some oddities. The errors in the index are annoying!



Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Fumio, Kate and KLC kanji 100 to 103 (inclusive)

The KLC kanji 100 to 103 (inclusive) are ( from my CVS file )

100,父,father
101,文,writings (learning ; culture) ; letter (script)
102,交,intercourse (association) ; cross (intersect ; interchange)
103,校,school ; proofread

Now I think of 交 as mix, but you might think of a college mixer as a place fostering social intercourse in the otherwise shy or bashful.  First, write your name on a name tag and stick it on your breast. That is what Kate did, and it was the first step towards her meeting Fumio*.

*Any resemblance to Kate Millet (sic) and the late Fumio Yoshimura is unintended and purely a matter of chance through free association. At a mixer, we associate freely …

Fumio was well aware that his father 〔 父 〕 had misgivings about American college girls, but Kate was a young woman (and this story is not about the older Yoshimura père's fantasies … anymore that it is about mine.)

And those nice parens btw are from my MIT Curl browser applet ( now Tokyo's SCSK Curl programming language ) at kanji.aule-browser.com ( Psst! Their RTE browser plugin for Surge is VERY safe and has been quietly used in VERY big corporations for years to track risk safely on the laptops of auditors and managers in very big global enterprises. Always read the fine-print on non-disclosure and non-compete paperwork BEFORE signing, btw.)

His father had written him a letter the day he flew out of Narita reminding him that he was sent to the USA to focus on school 〔 校 〕 and not, you know, intercourse.




Love letter and kanji 0101 of the KLC


Kanji 101 of the KLC book* is 文 as in my CVS entry for

101,文,writings (learning ; culture) ; letter (script)

but do you know what a SINGLETON is ?

Regardless, this is a kun-yomi singleton in most textbooks : the 訓読み for 文 is ふみ.

But where does such a reading occur ? According to Denshi Jisho it is in 恋文 or love letter as in こいぶみ — which means that our singleton in real life is not ふみ but ぶみ !

So ... if your hiragana is rusty, spend a day or two on that and come back for our story ... it all starts with a love letter.

*Andrew Scott Conning, The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course [KLC]