© 2015 Richard Hunter

Just Enough Japanese

Volume Two:
Intermediate Level Practical Japanese for Go Players

Richard Hunter

Buy the full book at gobooks.com

This ePub reader does not support full scripting, so diagrams may not be interactive.

Learn to read and understand Japanese go books. This series guides you from knowing zero Japanese to understanding the text of go problems and their answers, and extracting key information from game records. Volume Two is a direct continuation of Volume One. Divided into five sections, it methodically introduces vocabulary found on book covers and in headers, captions, and diagrams. It is aimed at go players of all abilities with a fairly wide range of interest in Japanese.

Copyright Page

© 2015 Richard Hunter

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is strictly prohibited.

Photograph of Richard Hunter by Louise Bremner.

Thanks to Harry Fearnley and Anders Kierulf for suggestions and corrections.

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Introduction

Review of Volume One

SECTION ONE:
A RAMBLE AMONG THE KANJI

Chapter 1–1: Familiar Territory

The chapters in gray are included only in the full book.

Chapter 1–2: New Ground

SECTION TWO: STEP BY STEP

Chapter 2–1: 石 本 小 大 高

Chapter 2–2: 一 二 三 四 五

Chapter 2–3: 六 七 八 九 十

Chapter 2–4: 日 月 年 分 秒

Chapter 2–5: 左 右 上 下 中

Chapter 2–6: 級 段 初 心 入

Chapter 2–7: 勝 押 負 手 後

Chapter 2–8: 目 眼 形 型 半

Chapter 2–9: 門 間 問 題 第

Chapter 2–10: 答 続 欠 次 の

Chapter 2–11: 碁 詰 筋 合 無

Chapter 2–12: 辺 隅 天 元 着

Chapter 2–13: Words to Recognize

SECTION THREE: TOPIC BY TOPIC

Chapter 3–1: Problem Headers

Chapter 3–2: All Black

Chapter 3–3: Answer Headers

Chapter 3–4: Answer Captions

Chapter 3–5: Book Covers

Chapter 3–6: Grades

Chapter 3–7: Tables of Contents

Chapter 3–8: Diagrams

Chapter 3–9: Good and Bad Moves

Chapter 3–10: Types of Ko

Chapter 3–11: Players' Names

Chapter 3–12: Hiragana and Katakana

Chapter 3–13: Game Information

Chapter 3–14: Game Figures and Diagrams

Chapter 3–15: Game Results

SECTION FOUR:
SOME JAPANESE CONCEPTS

Chapter 4–1: Katte Yomi

Chapter 4–2: Byoyomi

Chapter 4–3: Teire

SECTION FIVE: EXAMPLES

Chapter 5–1: Book Cover Examples

Chapter 5–2: Table of Contents Examples

Chapter 5–3: Problem Examples

Chapter 5–4: Game Examples

Chapter 5–5: Game Record and Timesheet Example

Appendix 1: Vocabulary

Appendix 2: External Links

Appendix 3: Further Study

Appendix 4: Glossary

About the Author

About SmartGo Books

Introduction

This book is a continuation of Just Enough Japanese Volume One: Basic Practical Japanese for Go Players (JEJ1). If you start with this volume, then please check that you know the kanji listed in the next chapter 'Review of Volume One'.

All the blue links in this book are internal links except for those in Appendices, which gather together all of the external links.

This volume is divided into five sections. It is aimed at go players of all abilities with a fairly wide range of interest in Japanese. You can read it from cover to cover and then use it as a reference book, consulting specific chapters for relevant information. Alternatively, you can start more or less anywhere you want in the Table of Contents. There is intentionally considerable redundancy in the way the information is presented in different sections and there are many internal cross-referencing links.

Section One is a rambling excursion of discovery among Japanese words used in go books and online resources. The blue text links to key vocabulary discussed in more detail elsewhere in the book. Section Two introduces important kanji at the gentle pace of five per chapter. The final chapter gives important words that you should aim to recognize. Section Three presents vocabulary for different topics such as problem grades and book covers. The goal here is to recognize and be familiar with the kanji and their compounds, but not necessarily to memorize them. Of course, you can study them in more detail by yourself using books, apps, and online resources. Some recommendations are given in Appendix 3. Section Four mentions some Japanese go concepts. Section Five presents examples of go book covers, go problems, and go game records.

New Feature Support

Once again, I am grateful to Anders Kierulf for adding a new feature especially for this book. In JEJ1, he added text scaling. For JEJ2, he has added support for author control of the board coordinates displayed around diagrams, which is used in Chapters 3–8 and 5–4. This page in the Appendix lets you test whether your version of GoBooks supports these features.

Large Kanji

This book contains large kanji in gray boxes. If you encounter any problems with them, these steps should fix them.

Issue 1: Gray box is empty.
Fix: Update to the newest version of GoBooks on iOS or macOS.

Issue 2: With iOS 10 and macOS some kanji look slightly odd. E.g. 六 has a slanted line above the horizonal line.
Cause: System is using a Chinese font.
Fix: Add Japanese.
On iOS: Settings > General > Language & Region > Add Language > Japanese.
You can remove Japanese any time you want via Settings > General > Language & Region > Edit.
On the Mac: System Preferences > Language & Region > + > Japanese.

Japanese Go Terms

Most go players encounter and pick up various Japanese go terms which they use and understand. Common ones that are widely used in English go books include: atari, dan, fuseki, go, gote, hane, joseki, ko, kyu, miai, seki, sente, and tesuji. These are used because they succinctly express specific ideas that are often hard to translate into simple English terms. Old English go books, such as Modern Joseki and Fuseki used a large number of Japanese terms, but over the years many of these have been replaced by English translations. The recent SmartGo Books version of Basic Techniques of Go has been rewritten with far fewer Japanese terms than earlier printings. Nevertheless, if you read Japanese go books, you will encounter many go terms. The meanings can be looked up in The Go Player’s Almanac 2001 or on websites such as Sensei’s Library. As you work through Sections One and Two, you will learn to read some of these familiar terms in their entirety, such as dan, sente, and kyu, and you will learn elements of others, such as the seki of fuseki and joseki.

Listen to, and imitate, the proper pronunciation in external resources, such as JLearn, Human Japanese, or StickyStudy, and avoid the common mistakes.

In ordinary go books, I write terms like sente in italics as sente. In this book, on the other hand, I shall write Japanese rōmaji readings in italics, e.g. sente, and English go terms in plain form, e.g. sente. The reason for this is that some English terms differ from the Japanese readings, notably in not indicating long vowels. The English term joseki has a long ‘o’ in Japanese, which I shall write as jōseki using a macron (ō).

Review of Volume One

Volume One (JEJ1) introduced the most important kanji for extracting the key information from go problems and go games. For an introduction to the Japanese writing system, look at the page on Wikipedia or read the descriptions in some of the resources recommended in Appendix 3.

Kanji to Learn

黒 kuro black
白 shiro white
先 SEN ahead
番 BAN turn
正解 seikai correct answer
失敗 shippai failure
図 ZU diagram
死 SHI death
活 iki life
生き iki life
劫 KŌ ko
コウ KŌ ko
勝ち kachi win

Kanji to Recognize

互 taga mutually, together
相 ai mutual, together, each other
子 shi stone (lit. child)

SECTION ONE:
A RAMBLE AMONG THE KANJI

Let me take you on a journey of discovery among Japanese words used in go books and online resources. The blue text links to key vocabulary discussed in more detail elsewhere in the book.

Most Japanese kanji have two or more readings (pronunciations). In particular, they usually have a Chinese reading (called the on yomi or ON reading) and a Japanese reading (called the kun yomi or kun reading). When I introduce kanji in Just Enough Japanese, I will give only the relevant reading or readings rather than all of those given in dictionary. I will follow the convention of writing the ON reading in capital letters and katakana and the kun reading in lower case letters and hiragana. Compounds will be written in lower case letters and hiragana. If you want to study a particular kanji in more detail, you can refer to a dictionary website, dictionary app, or paper dictionary. I have not included links to an external website for each new kanji. I did that in JEJ1 (JLearn website) to assist readers as I hoped to attract casual readers at the elementary level. With JEJ2 and JEJ3, I expect you to be more committed and willing to put in some time and effort. I do not use JLearn in my own studies and I have since found an updated one that I think is better (Jisho). Mostly, however, I use dictionary apps on my iPad. The main ones I use are StickyStudy and Japanese for iOS, which are discussed in Appendix 3.

Background material that is introduced better elsewhere will be covered only briefly. Appendix 3 gives advice on exteral resources that I can recommend.

Why Two Kinds of Readings?

Why do kanji have both ON and kun readings? It is a result of how Japanese assimilated Chinese kanji. Japan encountered the Chinese language when it did not have a written language itself, so Chinese characters were pressed into service. Borrowed Chinese words had their pronunciations approximated in the transition, becoming the ON readings, which were independent of the native Japanese pronunciations.

English has also imported words from various sources. Consider the Old English word ‘water’ from Proto-Germanic with related words in languages such as Old Saxon, Dutch, Old Norse, and German. We also use ‘hydro’ from Greek and ‘aqua’ from Latin, giving us words such as hydrophobic and aquatic. Japanese ON readings based on Chinese can be regarded as counterparts of our own classical imports.

Chapter 1–1: Familiar Territory

As I sit at my desk and look up at my bookshelf, I see a set of old English go books that each has a Japanese kanji on the spine. 石, set inside a circle, is the logo for the old Ishi Press, which predated Kiseido. I have well worn copies of Tesuji and of Life and Death by James Davies and Dictionary of Basic Joseki by Ishida Yoshio, as well as several other classics.

石 means ‘stone’ or ‘stones’ and refers to go stones. The kun reading is ishi, giving us 黒石 kuro ishi ‘black stones’ and 白石 shiro ishi ‘white stones’. The ON reading is SEKI, which is an element of a couple of familiar go terms: one is joseki 定石, which is read jōseki because it has a long vowel ‘o’, and another is fuseki 布石.

In JEJ1, we encountered 先 sen ‘ahead’. Actually, sen is the ON reading, but I avoided introducing the concept of different types of readings in Volume 1. We will meet the kun readings of 先 in JEJ3. 先 is an element of several go related words. One familiar go term is 先手 sente, which leads us to our next kanji of interest.

手 SHU te means ‘hand’. That is the only definition given in most dictionaries. It is an important word in its own right and it also forms numerous compounds with derived meanings. In the context of go, ‘hand’ is hardly ever the appropriate meaning. 手 is used to mean ‘a move’ or ‘a play’. It is extremely common in go books. It occurs on its own and also in numerous compound words: both go jargon and ordinary Japanese words.

One word that 手 occurs in is 中手 nakade, which many go players know and use in conversations, though it is often translated as ‘an inside move’ in books. Another 手 word is 手抜き tenuki, although it is easily translated as ‘a play elsewhere’.

An important go term that you surely know is tesuji, which is written 手筋 tesuji. The second kanji, suji 筋, is also a go term in its own right and it is translated as a ‘technique’ or ‘line of play’.

The opposite of 先手 sente is gote 後手, which is also widely used directly as an English go term without translation.

後 GO ‘after’ (the go of gote), is not the same kanji as go, the name of the game (碁). In Japanese, many different kanji have the same reading, as evidenced by the number of entries for any particular reading in a dictionary. Another kanji read GO is 五 meaning ‘five’.

The go term seki, meaning ‘living through a local stalemate because neither side wants to try and capture the other’, is not derived from 石. Seki is an obscure reading for a common kanji, but it is usually written in katakana as セキ in modern go books, so I am not going to burden you with the old kanji form. (It is given in The Go Player’s Almanac 2001.)

Several familiar go terms are usually written in katakana, e.g. atari アタリ, hane ハネ, and seki セキ. Even when there are kanji, katakana may be used, as we saw with ko, which can be written as either 劫 or コウ KŌ ko. Nakade can be written in kanji as 中手, in katakana as ナカデ, or in a mixture as ナカ手, and all three are common styles in go books. There is a kanji for atari and it is sometimes used in body text, usually in the form of a conjugated verb (written in kanji plus hiragana) rather than the noun. We will encounter it in JEJ3. Both types of kana are covered in this volume in Chapter 3–12: Hiragana and Katakana.

Returning to my bookshelf, I have many Japanese go books. Indeed, there are far more Japanese ones than English ones. When I was living in Japan, I enjoyed browsing through second-hand book stores looking for go books. To buy Japanese go books, you need to know the Japanese for the game.

碁 GO is a kanji you may have seen on books, tee shirts, neckties, and promotional literature and in other places. In English, we call the game ‘go’, but in Japanese, the formal name is ‘igo’.

囲碁 igo ‘go’ appears on the spines and front covers of many go books. See Chapter 3–5: Book Covers. Some go books also feature images of go boards or go stones. In Japanese book stores, go books are grouped together with shogi books in the hobby section in a sub-section labeled 囲碁•将棋. If you are interested in reading Japanese go books, the best topics to choose are 詰碁 tsumego, 手筋 tesuji, 死活 shikatsu ‘life and death’, and 攻め合い semeai ‘capturing races’. The kanji 合 in 攻め合い also occurs in terms such as miai (見合い; we will meet 見 as a verb in JEJ3). Other topics such as joseki, fuseki, and yose (endgame) tend to require a greater understanding of the body text.

詰碁 tsumego means ‘a go problem’. The literal meaning of 詰 is ‘packed’, ‘pressed’, or ‘close’. Some definitions call tsumego a ‘composed go problem’. It is usually presented in a partial board diagram as either a corner (隅 sumi) or side (辺 hen) position.

What is the difference between 死活 and 詰碁? Tsumego has a wider meaning that includes life and death. Basically, tsumego refers to a restricted position rather than full-board position, but it can include capturing races and connecting out. The problems can be realistic positions that occur in actual games (実戦) or contrived ones composed as exercises. There is a modern tendency to treat tsumego as compositions that should have only one correct answer. Shikatsu books tend to focus on the shape of a position. For example standard corner positions such as the L+1 group and how to live with it or how to kill it. They may follow a series of variations on a shape with a leg, hane, open liberties, etc. Such life and death positions can have multiple correct answers. Tsumego tends to focus on the technique used.

Many players use the word jigo for a game that results in a draw. This is the Japanese term 持碁 jigo ‘jigo’. We will meet 持 as a verb in JEJ3.

Having found a go book on a suitable topic, it is a good idea to check the level of the intended readers. Most go problem books indicate book and individual problem grades. I am sure you already know the terms kyu and dan.

級 KYŪ ‘kyu’ means ‘class’, ‘rank’ or ‘grade’. It is used for lower ranked players. Note the long vowel.

段 DAN ‘dan’ means ‘grade’ or ‘step’. It is used for higher ranked players. Listen to the correct pronunciation at JLearn or elsewhere.

Grades lead us to several important kanji.

Appendix 4: Glossary of English Go Terms

Most English speaking go players quickly incorporate a number of Japanese and English go terms into their vocabulary. The following are assumed to be familiar, but here are their definitions.

atari: the condition of having only one liberty left so that the stone or group could be captured on the next play. It can be used as a noun (an atari) or as a verb (to atari, to play atari).

bent four in the corner: a shape that sometimes occurs in the corner. Under AGA rules, the position must be played out unless both players agree that it is dead.

dan: grade used for expert go players

fuseki: the opening stage of the game where moves are played in the corners and along the sides before the middle game fighting starts. It may also refer to a specific formation such as the Chinese Fuseki.

go: the game of go (igo)

gote: a play that does not require a local answer

hane: a play that bends around in contact with stones of the other color. It can be used as a noun (a hane) or as a verb (to hane, to play hane).

joseki: generally agreed-upon sequence of play (especially in the corner) which can result in a fair outcome for both players

ko: a situation in which both players can continue recapturing single stones in a way that recreates the same local position

kyu: grade used for weaker players

miai: two points of equal value such that if one player takes one the other player will take the other

seki: a situation in which two groups of stones are intertwined in such a way that neither can capture the other and hence both are alive

sente: a play that requires a local answer

tesuji: a skillful tactical move, usually a well known way of dealing with a difficult situation in fighting

See also ⤴ Japanese Go Terms on Sensei’s Library.

Feature Test

This page lets you test whether your version of GoBooks supports the new features used in this book. If not, try upgrading to the latest version. Even if your device hardware or OS version prevents that, you are not missing too much, and you can still enjoy this book.

黒

The kanji should be quadruple size.

Vertical coordinates: 一 二 三 四

No board coordinates

About the Author

Richard Hunter

Richard Hunter is a British go player currently living in the UK. He lived in Tokyo, Japan, from 1980 to 2008. He was introduced to the game by his elder brother, Derek (then British Go Association Secretary), and began playing at Birmingham University Go Club and then at Oxford University, where he served as club secretary and president. He attended the opening of the London Go Centre, where he met Iwamoto Kaoru 9 dan and Magari Reiki 9 dan and later lost a 9 stone game to Magari in Bristol. Hunter was a member of the BGA council in 1978.

Hunter’s relocation to Tokyo allowed him to take lessons from Iwamoto and some of his disciples, and he eventually managed to get to four stones against Iwamoto and three stones against Magari. He was a regular contributor to the British Go Journal from 1991 to 2006. He received a UK 4 dan certificate in 1991 but currently plays as 2 dan. He regularly plays in British tournaments and has in the past played in several European Go Congresses, most recently Dublin 2001, and one US Go Congress (Washington DC, 1994). While in Japan, Hunter enjoyed browsing through second-hand book stores in Tokyo looking for old go books.

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© 2015 Richard Hunter

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