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The Japanese language ranks sixth in number of speakers worldwide after Chinese, English, Russian, Hindi, and Spanish. Although Japan is an advanced economy, there is a shortage of English speakers who can avail of the opportunities the country offers, due to the challenges of learning to read and write the language. The purpose of the book ‘Emergency Passport * Japanese Script’ is to present Japanese characters in ‘bite-size’ portions, spiced up in a lighthearted way which should appeal to the English speaking student. The stories and cues accompanying each glyph are constructed with the primary purpose of making them memorable to the learner; any relationship to the real etymology is just coincidental. The goal is to offer you a shortcut in memorizing large numbers of characters. The means is by equipping you with memorable link words and associations that focus your imagination on all the elements of a glyph in addition to its readings, and meaning and then tying up these various strands with a potent little mnemonic.
Within the everyday kanji, the most common 500 will allow a reader to understand around 80% of everyday writing you will see on newspapers or TV (Hayashi, 1982), when you do come across unfamiliar kanji, chances are you will recognize some component parts, which will help you to make progress. This aim of the book is to present hiragana, katakana and selected kanji in a way which you will find them easy both to write and to say. Other literature which I have reviewed do offer a range of approaches but can tend to focus more on repetitive writing, and there is a need for a book which really focuses on the character of glyphs themselves and a coherent method of remembering them that is targeted at the mind of an English speaker.
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