• 18 March 2006Kanji in daily life

    Here are some nice websites that can be visited regularly to practice sight-reading the kanji, and keep the interest going :

    Signese.com is a collection of photos of Chinese characters as you would see them in daily life on the streets of Beijing or elsewhere in China.

    In a similar fashion, but this time with kanji only, there is a Kanji group on flickr.com with many photos of kanji from daily life in Japan. See how many you can recognise!

    Hanzi Smatter 一知半解 is a website "dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture". With Remembering the Kanji we also learn how to write the kanji from memory. As Tian, author of the website points out, a missing stroke here and there on a tattoo DOES matter! :)

    The characters on Signese.com and Hanzi Smatter aren't kanji, but since historically chinese characters were introduced in japan, you will recognise many of them.

    From time to time you may guess part, or all of the meaning of something written on a storefront or on a signpost. This can be very motivating while studying Remembering the Kanji.

    Sometimes you may recognise all the characters, but it still won't make any sense. Keep in mind that in chinese, many characters have a grammatical purpose. Also, in chinese some characters can have quite a different meaning than their japanese equivalent.

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