We have just released Volume 5 of the KLC Graded Reading Sets on iBooks and Kindle! Volume 5 contains 4,671 exercises covering KLC kanji 701-1000. Thank you very much for your patience while we were preparing this volume.
Book updates
We have uploaded new versions of Volumes 1-3 to incorporate a number of edits. You will know that your book has been updated when the cover changes to the new (variegated) color scheme. If your previously purchased book has not already been updated, please see the instructions on the website.
If you downloaded Volume 1 as a free PDF, you can download the updated version here.
A couple of edit suggestions came in after we made the updates. These will be included in the next round of updates. Many thanks to everyone who suggested one or more edits.
I am pleased to announce that I have (finally!) begun releasing the Kanji Learner’s Course Graded Reading Sets, and welcome you to download Volume 1 for free as noted below. Thank you very much for so patiently waiting for this series to come out.
Freebies and discounts
Volume 1 of the Graded Reading sets is available for free from this site, and from the iBooks Store. I have tried to make it free on Amazon Kindle as well, but the best I could get was $0.99 (without surrending my right to release on non-Amazon platforms). If you are a Kindle user, please feel free to use the free pdf for Volume 1, then purchase other volumes from Amazon Kindle. To the extent possible given the particular constraints of iBooks and Kindle, the price for Vols. 2-9 will be nearly or exactly the same on both platforms.
Also, if you are learning kana, or could use a little more information on the fine points of this surprisingly complex subject, please feel free to download my Kana Crash Course. Naturally the back matter is chock full of ads for the various supplementary products I sell to try to make ends meet!
Series structure
The series consists of 30,000+ exercises covering all 2,300 KLC kanji and containing over a quarter million total kanji. On average, the nine volumes provide 432 reading exercises (containing over 3,600 kanji) per US dollar, based on the US price without discounts. If you get through it all, you will be a certified kanjisseur and fluent reader of Japanese!
In accordance with the cumulative nature of this series, each volume contains more practice content than the last. The series thus adapts automatically to your evolving needs as a learner, providing relatively little practice at the early stages (when your priority should be to learn more kanji and grammar patterns), and increasing the volume of practice later on (as your priority shifts toward applying and reinforcing the kanji and vocabulary you have already learned).
The best way to quantify the progressive development of this series is to calculate the average “kanji content” of each volume:
With a series whose English portion alone is the length of 17 copies of Macbeth, I had to strike a balance between having too many volumes and having too much length per volume. Already the combined volume for kanji 1-400 weighs in at 948 pages (as Kindle calculates it), and by this measure, the most advanced volumes will surpass 2,000 or even 3,000 pages! While bundling the series into nine volumes makes some of the volumes incredibly long and somewhat unwieldy to navigate, at least you will only have to deal with nine volumes — or only seven, if you download the combined set for Vols. 1-3. This set, covering the first 400 kanji in the course, consists of 4,060 exercises containing over 20,000 kanji.
Scrolling View
I am releasing the GRS on both Amazon Kindle and the iBooks Store. Users with iOS devices can use the Kindle app for iOS, but should seriously consider opting for the iBooks version instead, due to its Scrolling View feature. This feature allows you to display each practice item without displaying its phonetic and English glosses. Both Kindle and iBooks for MacOS currently lack this feature, and require you to advance by page-by-page, rather than scrolling one line at a time.
Facebook group
I love communicating with users one-on-one. Still, this group would be better off being able to communicate as a group and share different perspectives and experiences. I have created a public Facebook group that I hope everyone will join and use to share information. Please share your news with us and help us build the best source of information on learning Japanese.
Using this Keys to Japanese (KTJ) site
In addition to the Facebook group, I warmly invite you to use this site to track your progress with the KLC, form study groups, ask questions, etc. I have created the public Facebook group because I feel it will have a wider reach and be the best approach for sharing information publicly. But KTJ is a better fit for forum discussions on particular topics and for creating study groups. As soon as the next version of the MyCred plugin comes out, KTJ will also enjoy some great new features for tracking stats on your kanji learning. Please join us here as well as on Facebook, thank you!
Please send your feedback
While I have done some initial testing and fixing with a small group, I would be very grateful indeed if you would let me know of any kinks you might discover (especially any display issues), and any advice you might have on how to improve the series. In particular, I would like to ask your advice on how I can get the word out about the series. Please contact me at asc@lexicaglobal.com, thank you!
Delay and improvements
I sincerely apologize to those of you who have been waiting a very long time for this release. Needless to say, the process of creating these books has taken me far longer than I anticipated.
I owe you a brief explanation. Chief among the causes of this delay were the countless obstacles that I encountered, many related to displaying the Japanese and furigana properly across different platforms and devices. Then there was my decision to include a very large volume and variety of practice material, drawing examples from over a hundred sources (many of which required editing), in addition to writing thousands of exercises myself to ensure that you would get sufficient practice with each character. Finally, there was my characteristic tendency keep making improvements and adding more features, the most time-consuming of which were adding the grammar support and switching to a “flowable” text format.
I sincerely hope that the result of this process will be helpful to you and will justify the long wait. Although adding the grammar support took a very long time, I felt it was important to give you extra help with the countless grammar structures that randomly appear in the exercises. Depending on your grammar level, many of the tips may be unnecessary (especially at the beginning). Please just ignore them until you start needing them.
Converting to a “flowable” text format (i.e., no fixed layout) required a complete do-over after having completed one volume using an entirely different system for producing and displaying the furigana (phonetic guides). Displaying furigana in a flowable format required discarding the “ruby” and displaying the phonetic guides parenthetically. The result is a product that will allow you to display the text in any point size without having to manually zoom in and out, and which provides word division (in the phonetic gloss) as an additional learning aid. I would like to thank Alistair Kerr for timely feedback that led me to make this important improvement to the series.
Thank you
Thank you very much for your support for the KLC and your incredible patience waiting for the Graded Reading Sets. Good luck, and see you on KTJ & Facebook!
Warmly yours,
Andrew Scott Conning
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Japanese is a rich and fascinating language. Among its many extraordinary qualities is its uniquely complex script, which combines two parallel phonetic syllabaries (kana) with Roman letters (rômaji), Arabic numerals (Arabia sûji), and of course Chinese characters (kanji). With five scripts used simultaneously, Japanese is often called the world’s most difficult writing system. As some wit said about his demanding Japanese teacher, “OK class, now you’ve learned Chinese characters. On to page 2!”
Does this mean that visitors to Japan must resign themselves to becoming lost amid a sea of unintelligible print? Not quite. For one thing, anyone reading this has already mastered two of the script systems listed above! Indeed, the kinds of things that foreign travelers need to read – menus, tickets, street signs, and so forth – are most likely to be bilingual, and prices are written in Arabic numerals more often than not. Moreover, it is possible to gain basic proficiency in both kana syllabaries in perhaps 8-10 hours of study. In another 20 hours or so, one can master 100 kanji and 300 kanji-based words. And of course, thanks to Google, one can always point one’s smartphone camera at Japanese text and translate it instantly!
If you are able, it is well worth taking some time to become familiar with kana and some kanji before setting off for Japan. With that in mind, I offer below a brief introduction to the writing system, and recommendations on where to go to learn more.
Background
The earliest effort to write the Japanese language used imported Chinese characters, irrespective of their meaning, as phonetic symbols for similar native syllables. This first, seventh century attempt at a Japanese syllabic script (or kana) was known as the man’yôgana.
As these complex Chinese ideographs proved unsuitable for transcribing a polysyllabic tongue, the Japanese soon invented a pair of purely phonetic kana symbols: the relatively curvy hiragana (adapted from cursive man’yôgana), and the more angular katakana (adapted from fragments of man’yôgana). These derivations, offering a window into the earliest development of Japanese writing, can be seen here.
Though the Japanese stopped using Chinese characters (kanji) for phonetic writing, they retained them for the countless words they borrowed from Chinese, or invented on the Chinese pattern. They also began using kanji to denote native Japanese words of similar meaning, this time without regard to phonetic similarity, so that many kanji came to have both a Chinese-derived pronunciation (the on-yomi, used in reading words borrowed from China) and an unrelated native pronunciation (the kun-yomi, used in reading native words). Having thus become associated primarily with meanings rather than sounds, kanji could be used to represent the stem of a polysyllabic Japanese verb or adjective, whose inflected portion could be represented by kana. In this way Japanese came to be written in a mixture of kana and kanji.
Today kanji are used mainly for Chinese-derived nouns, proper nouns, and the stems of native verbs and adjectives. Hiragana are used for all types of native words not written in kanji, and for the inflected endings following a kanji stem, known as okurigana (for example, the く in 巻く). Katakana are used mainly for Western loanwords, scientific names (such as names of species, like ヒグマ in the photo above), sound-mimicking words, and emphasis (like italics). In modern Japanese, most numbers are written in Arabic numerals (except in vertical text), and rômaji appear fairly frequently, primarily in alphabetical abbreviations (like “NHK”) and foreign names.
Picking up the basics
If you have some spare time, there’s no reason you can’t learn kana and some kanji before visiting Japan. Given the prevalence of Western loanwords in Japanese, it makes sense for foreign travelers to prioritize katakana. Knowing katakana makes it possible to sound out many useful words such as タクシー (taxi), バス (bus), and ホテル (hotel), and provides a kind of key for comprehending the many loanwords used in Japanese speech. Unlike words written in hiragana, most words written in katakana are likely to be intelligible to English-speaking travelers who have learned to read the individual katakana characters.
If you are embarking on serious language study, simply learn the kana scripts in whatever order they are taught in your textbook. Thoroughly mastering kana will be your essential first step, meriting top priority so that you can study the other aspects of the language by means of kana, rather than via the ill-advised expedient of rômaji transliteration.
To learn the kana, please take full advantage of the Kana Learner’s Course mobile app (the free version is very thorough but excludes tests).
To try your hand at some kanji for travel, I recommend Read Japanese Today by Len Walsh (Tuttle, 2008). Don’t take the title literally. If you interpret “Read Japanese” to mean “Be Able to Make Sense of Some of the Chinese Characters Used in Japanese”, you won’t be disappointed.
For those planning to study Japanese in earnest, I recommend you go straight to my much more comprehensive Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course, and its companion volume, the Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary (both Kodansha USA, 2013). Both are appropriate for learners from novice through advanced levels. Warning: These hefty books are not suitable for light packing!
If you have any questions at all about learning kana or kanji, feel free to post them via the forums on this website. To learn more about how to make the very most of your trip to Japan, be sure to get yourself a copy of our favorite guidebook to Japan (or anywhere else for that matter!), Gateway to Japan!
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Kanji content for Volumes 1-9
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