24 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
(d) Stroke that intersect complete shapes, such as the vertical in
or the horizontal in , are wriĴen last.- Box enclosures, such as in , are wriĴen left first, then followed
up with㇆to form , then have their content drawn, and are then
closed at the boĴom with. - Semi enclosures, such as around in or around in , are writ-
ten last, after the semi-enclosed component.
There are a few exceptions to these rules (of course), so when learning
kanji, one should always have a reference book that teaches you how to
draw kanji.
1.3.2 Reading kanji: furigana
One problem with kanji is that there is no ”built-in” way to tell which
pronunciation of a kanji is being used. For instance, when a text has the
word in it, then it’s clear how to pronounce the hiragana part, ”Ĵa”,
but whether the kanji should be pronounced as ’i’ or as ’okona’ is not
clear. The context will help, but sometimes for verbs, and often for nouns,
that’s not enough to figure out how to pronounce a kanji. Because of this,
Japanese has a unique aspect to its wriĴen language: furigana.
Furigana,
, literally means ”sprinkled kana”, and refers
to phonetic guides wriĴen over or alongside kanji to indicate the specific
reading a reader should use. You have seen several examples of furigana
already in this book, where whenever a Japanese term was used involv-
ing kanji, its pronunciation was wriĴen above it in small leĴering. This is
not something particular to this book, but a common practice in Japanese
wriĴen material, used most often to help the reader disambiguate or pro-
nounce ”hard” words, but also for stylistic or even comic effect.
As an illustration of comic effect, one might consider the case of long
words that are used with some frequency in a text. These words might only
be given two phonetic guide texts throughout the writing: a first time with
the ’proper’ pronunciation, and a second time with the pronunciation ’are’
instead – a pronoun with the contextual meaning ”whatever I wrote last
time”.
While comic effect is perhaps an added bonus to using furigana, it
is certainly widely used for stylistic effect. For instance, while the word
does not exist in Japanese, the kanji mean ”neck” and ”sword” re-
spectively. A Fantasy novelist could use this ”made up” word, and add