Review of Read Japanese Today by MoebiusW

I have an old book by Len Walsh named Read Japanese Today, written back in 1966. I believe it is still in print. It begins with the Chinese roots of a character, and uses most of the metaphors from the Chinese Bo-Po-Mo-Fo. I do not profess to be a great scholar, my interest in Japanese is mostly artistic and quasi-religious. This book takes a historical view of the kanji, and is a great book for the absolute novice to kanji. It's a great fund of kanji trivia as well. The first kanji addressed is TOO / HIGASHI , in which they dissect the Tree character, show the expansion to Origin, ( add the additional stroke ), then the combination. Thus TOO becomes origin-of-the-sun.

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