Subject: KANJI PICT*O*GRAPHIX, by Michael Rowley, Stone Bridge Press

From: [email-masked]
Date: 20 Jan 94 19:09:00 +1900

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To those who, like me, are fascinated by Han characters (Kanji in Japanese,
Hanzi in Chinese) and who are delighted in front of the jewel in which each of
these characters consists, I highly recommend a book I just bought, namely the
one I put in the title of this article.

Even my wife, who always found odd and Uranian (she has an "odd" interest in
astrology, and my dominating planet is Uranus..., the planet of eccentricity)
my attraction to Chinese culture, is delighted by this book and said she would
frequently browse though it, as will my 2 children: it describes 1000 Kanji (and
also Japanese hiragana and katakana) with mnemonic clues: very good drawings
the author invented with the help of his Asian wife to give visual clues,
augmented with sentences emphasizing the clues, plus decomposition and good
references to radicals.  He also gives the Chinese original phonetics (which I
discovered changed sometimes much, but it is still recognizable: if my memory is
good the Japanes borrowed the Chinese script around the 7th Century A.D.  and it
evolved from there) plus the Japanese phonetics of Kanji.

On the cover page, there is an example: the character I always interpreted as
"prohibition" is shown on the left side with, imitating its shape on the right,
a drawing of a base line over which there is a whistling policeman with his arm
stretching horizontally in front of him (to the right of the picture), with a
small person standing at his back (a vertical shape at the left of the drawing).

For visual persons, the shape is roughly the following (I wish the vertical
lines and underlines are not distorted by some ASCII conversion in France, in
Scandinavia or elsewhere on the network) for this character:

           |
         | |--
        _|_|___

The Chinese SHI is given under the character, alongside with the Japanese
"tomaru, tomeru". Under the drawing of the policeman is written "STOP!"
Now these drawing are remarkable artistic creations, the author explaining in
the Introduction that this character originated from the image of a footprint
(perhaps 5000 years ago), not from the one of a policeman.  All the book is like
this.

So, for lovers of Asia... it's a duty to have a look on this wonderful book.
For me, who concentrated on Chinese, I will have an extra duty: to check each
character with the Chinese phonetics and even meaning. But it will be a
primary apprenticeship of Japanese which delights me too.

Alain LaBont<e'>