For the present Alice in Kanji Land is only available from Amazon. This is the US link; the book is also available from Amazon sites in other countries.

 

Alice in Kanji Land gives you a new, fun, and scientific way to learn kanji.

Up until now kanji books have used methods dating back centuries.

Alice in Kanji Land brings kanji learning into the 21st century, teaching kanji in the form of a narrative structurally linked to an SRS deck (included free) that will cement the kanji into your long-term memory with an algorithm based on the brain’s learning process.

Enjoy a sample of Alice in Kanji Land right now.

It also teaches kanji not as abstractions but as part of the organic whole of language, making them easier to grasp and retain.

Using Alice in Kanji Land in conjunction with the deck (about 15 minutes per day) you will not just learn all the kanji needed for JLPT level 5 (all first-grade kanji and a substantial portion of second-grade kanji) together with quite a lot of vocabulary.

You will also learn

• The radicals and underlying construction principles that will make it far easier to learn more kanji in future.
• The ways in which kanji fit together in themselves and the ways in which they align with other kanji and kana to form words.
• The principles behind the ways they are pronounced in different circumstances.

Learning kanji not as abstract isolates but as part of an organic whole turns an exercise in brute-force memorization into something more logical and easily graspable.

And if this all sounds a bit abstract – well, actually it’s fun. This is an Alice book after all…

Kanji as Character and Adventure

The age-old technique of making kanji into story-pictures is brought up to date by integrating it with an Alice in Wonderland storyline that makes encounters with the Kanji memorable and engages the emotional responses as well as intellectual ones (extremely important for memory).

We chose Alice not just because she’s cute. Also because the crazy logic and punning nature of the Alice books is exactly suited to the kind of thinking needed to make kanji mnemonics.

Enjoy a sample of Alice in Kanji Land right now.

Alice Plus SRS

You can read the story without putting too much effort into memorizing the kanji.

Because the Alice in Kanji Land SRS deck will handle memorization for you.

The back of each card has extensive reminders of the story’s mnemonic elements in the notes after the answer. So you can refresh your memory by reminding yourself of the story as often as you need to.

After a while the story will drop into the background and the words will become second nature.

In accordance with our philosophy, there are no “abstract kanji” cards. The front of every card is a real word that has been introduced in the book, incorporating one or more kanji also introduced in the book.

The back of the card gives you the meaning and pronunciation of the word on the front. The word is spoken aloud by the card (well, you know how cards are in Alice) as well as being written.

Below the meaning and definition are notes reminding you of the mnemonic elements of the story. You can use these as much or as little as you need them.

Enjoy a sample of Alice in Kanji Land right now.

Kanji as character and adventure.

A phrase you probably haven’t heard before. But you’ll be hearing it again, as it is a theme of a major new project we have in the works.

Kanji may seem like abstract, difficult old things but actually they really are characters.

ABCD and friends are called characters but they aren’t. They don’t have personalities. They don’t do anything. They just sit on a page and make noises. In fact they don’t even make noises. They just silently indicate what noises they want you to make. Lazy things.

Kanji are entirely different. They are  a whole world of living things – cute, funny, scary, majestic, silly, just the way living things are. They have adventures all the time. Once you get to know some of them, they make sense and become much easier.

As I say, expect more on this fairly soon, and in English. For now, we have a little video to introduce the idea. It is in Japanese, but the main part is a story-picture so it’s easy to follow what is happening even if your Japanese is still little.

It is called “Foreign Doll’s Kanji Adventure”.

Please enjoy it.

As part of our ongoing series of “what’s the difference” kanji close-ups we look at the three ways of writing wakaru, which is usually – but very misleadingly – translated as “understand”.

Please don’t panic. Even at intermediate level you don’t need to “learn” these. But you can get a lot from reading about them and gaining  a deeper understanding of the word wakaru – which is actually one of those “trap words” that makes Japanese less understandable overall if you – ahem – misunderstand it – that is, if you believe the textbooks that tell you it means “understand”.

Video version

So what does it mean? It has several shades of meaning, but let’s start off with the root-meaning, which is to “become clear”. The fundamental  wakaru kanji – 分 – shows a sword dividing something in half. Literally wakaru means that something becomes clearly distinguished from other things* – i.e., understood.

Sanseido dictionary’s first and most basic definition of the word is:

明白になる
Meihaku ni naru
Become clear

Not “understand”. Become clear – which includes “be clear” or “be understood”. In other words (most of the time) the thing being understood is the real subject of the sentence  (not the person doing the understanding as English prefers and the textbooks imply). Therefore the thing being understood is what takes the subject-marker ga-particle

（私は）日本語が分かる
(watashi wa) nihongo ga wakaru
“(in relation to me) Japanese does understandable”

Of course in English we say “I understand Japanese” and that is a valid “loose translation”. But it matters that we know what is really being said because if we don’t we will become very confused about what the ga and wa particles are really doing in this sentence and about the structure of Japanese as a whole.

This is explained more fully in Unlocking Japanese, which shows you how clear and regular the language really is, as opposed to the rather complicated and confusing way the standard Western grammar texts teach it.

All right. So what about the three ways of writing it? They are all pronounced the same and all get the same dictionary definition, regardless of which kanji is used. So does it matter which kanji is used?

Japanese texts that try to give English equivalents say

「分かる」＝know.「解る」＝understand.「判る」＝prove or judge.

However, they are following the Western translations and giving rise to the same misunderstandings. So let’s go a little deeper and see what Japanese texts independent of English tell us.

The first thing wrong with the above definitions is what I have already told you. It is important to realize that they should have said “be known”, “be understood”, “be judged or proved (to be)”.

The second problem is that it is misleading to suggest that 分かる has a separate meaning. You will see 分かる used in all three senses a lot of the time. That is why I don’t advise people who are not intermediate to try learning them. You probably won’t encounter the other two in simpler texts.

What happens – as with the different kanji for kiku (hear) and many others – is that the less common kanji are used in writing to hone the word down to a more exact meaning. Also, if you see either or both of the others used in a text, you can assume that when 分かる is chosen, it is chosen advisedly to give its particular implications. Otherwise, it very often isn’t.

So let’s look at them from the Japanese perspective.

The implication of 判る

判る easy to remember because it is really just 分かる with the sword and the halving arranged horizontally rather than vertically.

This is the kanji used in 判明 hanmei “(with suru) establish or prove”, 判断 handan “judgment” etc.

In a phrase like

犯人がわかる
han’nin ga wakaru
“It has become known (to us) who the criminal is” (in English this might be “We now know who the criminal is”).

Clearly the “judgment” element is present. The “correct” – or better, the precise – form is 判る.

Equally with

身元がわかる
mimoto ga wakaru
“His background has become known (to me/us/them)” (in English probably “I/we/they now know his background”).

The implication is of having been able to form a judgment on something previously unknown – or to put it closer to the Japanese, if somewhat more awkwardly in English – something having become the subject of an accurate judgment or investigation.

Note that the “understander” is not the grammatical subject and is not even visibly present in these statements as she is in English equivalents. We will know who the understander is from an explicit or implicit wa-statement drawn from context. This may sound complicated but it really isn’t at all once you understand it. Japanese six-year-olds use it with ease. Find out how you can too in Unlocking Japanese.

The implication of 解る

If you are intermediate you certainly know this kanji from words like 解く which all have to do with unraveling or untangling. If not, you can remember it as a 牛cow in the 角corner having her matted hair untangled with a 刀sword. Note that the sword-element is common to all three wakarus.

解 appears in words like 解釈 kaishaku “explanation” and 理解 rikai “understand” (this is the word you want when you really want to say “understand”, not wakaru).

So when you say

日本語がわかる
Nihongo ga wakaru
“Japanese is understandable (to me)”

解 is the most exact kanji, though more often than not it will in fact be written 分かる.

Implication of 分かる

As you see, you can’t really judge the special implications of 分かる much of the time, but it does have the implication of “be(come) known” which is not appropriate to either of the others.

To give a simple example of how these kanji can sometimes be useful: if someone asks “what is the oldest a turtle has ever lived?” in Japanese and you answer “わからない wakaranai” there could be a confusion over whether you mean “I don’t know how long a turtle has lived” or “I don’t understand the question”. If you could specifically say 解らない wakaranai it would be clear that you meant the latter.

If you said 判らない the implication would be “that is not something on which (I am) able to form a judgment” and if 分からない were taken in its exclusive sense it would mean “I do not have that information” – which is probably the most likely interpretation of the spoken phrase unless there were reasons to suppose one of the others (such as being a foreigner, which might lead the questioner to be unsure that you had understood).

To sum up – you can always use 分かる in any of the senses on this page. You will never be wrong. If you use one of the others, be careful to use it correctly

* It isn’t a coincidence that the two words wakareru both mean separating.

As you probably know, the word あたたかい atatakai (warm) can be written in two different ways: 温かい or 暖かい. Is there a difference between them?

Yes there is, and actually it is a fairly obvious one, but I think it is a little less well known to learners than similar differences in other temperature-words.

Of course you know, unless you are a very early beginner, that there are two words for cold: 寒い samui, which means cold weather or ambient temperature, and 冷たい tsumetai, which means a cold object, cold hands, a cold drink etc.

You probably also know that there are two forms of あつい atsui (hot), which correspond directly to the two words for cold: 暑い (atsui with a double dose of sun) is hot weather or ambient temperature, 熱い (atsui with a fire under it) is a hot object.

So it isn’t too surprising to learn that atatakai does the same thing – though not quite as absolutely.

暖かい usually means warm weather or ambient temperature.  I see this one as 爪 tsume–chan lifting her 友 friend into the warm 日 sunshine.

Oh – you haven’t met tsume-chan yet, have you? Some day I would like to do a book introducing my personal kanji-element characters.  Tsume-chan is the 爪 element – a happy UFO-catcher claw who rescues her friends from all kinds of danger. For example, she helps 子 children 浮 float when they fall in the 氵water.

She looks like a UFO because she works in a UFO Catcher when she isn’t out on rescue missions.

Anyway, enough of that. I do love my characters!

The only other thing to remember about 暖 is that its usual on-reading is dan, as in 暖房 danbou (interior heating) and 暖炉 danro (hearth fire).

温かい is more prone to mean a warm object, warm water etc. From the kanji, warm water might seem to be a primary meaning. It is easy to remember that the 日 sun warms 氵water in a 皿 dish .

The on reading of 温 is on. Easy to remember if you think of 温泉 onsen (a warm-water spring or spa).

The two atatakai forms are not as absolutely distinguished as samui and tsumetai, and there is some crossover between them. 暖 especially seems to cross over into the area of things that warm the body, like a warm coat or a hot (i.e., warming) drink. It also seems much less used than 温 for metaphorical warmth (warm-heartedness etc), just as a cold-hearted person would be described as tsumetai, not samui.

While the two are not absolutely distinguished, if you bear in mind their general tendencies it will help you to use them in a natural-sounding way (for your own use you can treat them as equivalent to samui and tsumetai on the warm end of the scale) and to catch the nuance when you see them used.

Note that both forms of atata(kai) are used to make the two verbs atatamaru and atatameru. This is a regular maru-meru transitivity pair, so if you know the Honorary Fourth Law of Japanese Transitivity, you will know exactly what the words mean!