 If
you want to read a Japanese scoreboard or the team and
player standings in a local sports paper or on the
Yahoo! yakyu page, you'll have to learn a little
kanji.Kanji
are symbols used to write Japanese words. Though there
are several thousand such characters, if you know as few
as 100, you'll be able to read most of the names on any
given scoreboard. That's because most Japanese names use
common characters that are easy to identify.
The
majority of Japanese names are two-kanji compounds. Each
character has between one and three syllables. The name
"Yamamoto," for example, is made of two kanji, yama
and moto (see example below).
Most
kanji can be read in two or three different ways. The
symbol for "river" can be read as both "kawa"
and "gawa." But other characters are
more complex. Naka, which forms part of the name
"Tanaka," can also be read as "chu,"
the same character used by the Chunichi
Dragons.
Since
our goal is to read a Japanese scoreboard, the following
lessons concentrate only on those kanji that most often
appear in family names. though definitions for each
character are supplied, it's more important to learn
which sounds are associated with each kanji.
Though
there are different regional dialects, most Japanese
vowel sounds correspond to the word "spaghetti":
a (ah), e (eh), I (ee). "O"
and "u" are pronounced
"oh" (as in "row") and "oo"
(as in "food") respectively.
Each
of the following lessons contains ten common kanji. Learn
all 100 characters and you should have little problem
reading most Japanese scoreboards.
Lesson
1: basic
nouns like yama, da, and kawa
Lesson
2: more
simple kanji, such as ki and moto
Lesson
3: common
characters (miya, taka, oka...)
Lesson
4: simple
tree kanji (matsu, mori, mura...)
Lesson
5: basic
water and gate kanji
Lesson
6: grass
kanji and symbols paired with "to"
Lesson
7: more
simple characters: ishi, kane...
Lesson
8:
strange and unusual kanji
Lesson
9:
characters often paired with "ta"
Lesson
10: ten
more important kanji
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