Beneath the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China in the fifth century, there lies a solid and rather ample base of coherent patterns. Discovering these patterns can reduce to a minimum the time spent in brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms. Volume II of REMEMBERING THE KANJI takes you step by step through the varieties of phonetic pattern and offers helpful hints for learning kanji that resist systematization.
