I was watching the 1st Season, 1st Episode of the U.S. Television Series Heroes on DVD when I noticed a clock with Kanji Characters in a scene with Masi Oka (playing Hiro Nakamura). This led me to do this cartoon.
With non-english alphabets that do not share characters, I find it relatively easy to stare at each glyph and relate it to a sound or number and remember it. (My foreign language skills have otherwise languished.) The games Mah-Jong and Shogi have helped enormously to give me practice in this kind of character recognition.
There are some web sites that facilitate this practice:
- Hiragana Picture Matching Game in
kids Web Japan - Purposegames.com which uses a clock to
anchor the Kanji characters. - Quia Japanese Number Games (Matching,
Concentration, Flash Cards, Word Search).
I hope solving the puzzle in Kanji doesn’t slow you down too much.