Reading a book in Japanese

Despite my last post about how difficult it is to get to a level where you can read a book in Japanese, I've been going for it lately. I've been reading a book written by a Japanese lady who went to China to teach Japanese for a year. It is an account of her time there. This book is good for me because the subject matter is both familiar and interesting to me: I have travelled abroad to teach, and I'm interested in China and have visited on a few occasions.

I'm finding that I'm able to understand around 90% of the book most of the time. The odd word or two I don't understand, but from context it's often quite easy to imagine what it could be. On occasions there are passages which are more difficult, and my understanding becomes a bit more clouded, but I find it's best just to plough through these sections and wait for the clouds to clear, rather than diving to the dictionary every time, which can be distracting and frustrating.

Anyway, hopefully the more I read, the easier and less cloudy it will become.

Surprising Kanji

(手=hand + 洗=wash) = toilet

Every now and again I come across a word that is usually written in hiragana or katakana displayed in Kanji. Sometimes the kanji used are quite surprising. Here are some examples:

美味しい /  おいしい / oishii / tastes good

A word so common on Japanese TV, you only have to flick through a couple of channels and you are bound to here it. Often translated as 'tasty' or 'delicious' leading to odd sounding conversations with Japanese people in English about food. おいしい is most commonly written using hiragana, but occasionally is displayed in Kanji. These two Kanji are 実 beauty, and 味 taste— makes sense if you think about it I guess.

Another example is　上手い / うまい / umai / skillful, good at

Now I learnt 上手　じょうず　jyouzu a long time ago, and I knew the kanji for じょうず was up (上) and hand (手). Up-hand "good at something" seems to make sense. Later on I ran into the more casual うまい  which also means good, or skillful, but it wasn't until recently that I found out that うまい was transcribed as 上手い using kanji, because it's not so common to see it written like this— I guess the reason being that it's easy to get it confused with じょうず　上手.

お洒落  /  おしゃれ  /  Oshare  /  smart, flashy, fashionable, stylish.

Again, I often saw this in hiragana on TV, but only recently found out the Kanji: 洒: wash or sprinkle, 落: fall, drop, come down お洒落 sprinkle, come down = fashionable, stylish, I can make that connection.

面白い /  おもしろい  /   omoshiroi  /  interesting; funny

I was pretty embarrassed when I couldn't read this kanji after having studied Japanese for about two years, seeing as it's one of the most common words in the language! But I guess I'd just never come across it in kanji form before. 面: face, features, surface 白: white. White surface = interesting. Hmm, I guess if you're being sarcastic perhaps.

This is what I really like about kanji. The way you can connect the meaning of characters to make various connotations. Great fun, beats the Roman alphabet hands down. — (下手　へた　下: down 手: hand, down hand = rubbish, not skillful)