Manual For Reading Japanese is intended as a helpful tool for any serious student who wishes to master and retain written Japanese.

A Chinese character in Japanese could be “pronounced” in more than one way; that is basically, there are at least two ways of orally reading any given Kanji--the KUN-yomi (the historical Japanese reading) and the On-Yomi (the borrowed Chinese reading). Within each reading are variations, and the student must learn which reading to use, and when to use it (or its variations), by referring to the context.

This manual is aimed primarily at helping students determine correct usage (and therefore correct “pronunciation”) of the 500 most-used Chinese characters in Japanese. The characters are arranged in order of frequency of occurrence; this order is derived from a recent occurrence-frequency analysis of popular Japanese journals, conducted by the National Language Research Institute in Japan. A student who has mastered all of the 500 characters presented will be able to read and understand a large part of contemporary Japanese reading materials with relative ease.