Writing the Thirty-Two
After this you can
Write all 32 characters of 第三課 and 第四課 by hand, from an English prompt, with the right number of strokes — and not lose marks on the three pairs that look almost the same.
The two minutes — play me in the car
You already know these 32 characters by sight. The practice sheet asks for something different: it says handwrite Lesson 3 and Lesson 4 and hand it to the instructor, and recognising a shape is not the same skill as producing one from a blank page. So this is the production pass. Three things carry most of it. First, four of these characters are just other characters stacked — a man is a rice field with strength under it, and the word for a gap is a gate with the sun showing through — so that is four shapes you never have to memorise as shapes. Second, six of them are eight strokes or more, and those are the ones that come out crooked when you write them at speed; they need the pen, not the eyes. Third, there are exactly three pairs that get marked wrong by people who know both characters perfectly well, and thirty seconds on those three pairs is worth more than another pass over the easy twenty-nine.
How to run this — three moves
Blank paper. Work down the English list below and write each character from memory before you look at anything. What you get wrong is your real study list; what you get right is finished. This takes six minutes and saves an hour.
For each miss, find it in the grids below. If it has a build — 男, 間 — learn the build, not the picture. If it doesn't, write it five times, saying the reading out loud each time.
Last, before you put the pen down. They are at the bottom of this page. This is the step people skip and it is the one that costs marks.
第三課 — where things are
One reading per character, the one that carries most of the words you will meet. The small number is the stroke count — how many separate pen strokes the character takes.
第四課 — who is in the picture
Which four characters in these two lessons take the most strokes? Name them before you look.
間 12 · 前 9 · 後 9 · 南 9. Then 東, 門, 学 and 国 at 8. Those eight are where handwriting goes wrong under time pressure — give them the extra reps, not the two-stroke 力.
Four you don't have to memorise
These are built from characters you already own, which means you can reconstruct them at the desk instead of recalling a picture.
A rice field with strength underneath it. Field on top, strength below — get the order right and the character writes itself.
A gate with the sun showing through the gap. 日 is from Lesson 2 — you have had it for a week. That is the 12-stroke character reduced to two things you already know.
Study + life = a student. Ahead + life = the one who got there first, which is the word for teacher. Two words, three characters, and 生 reads せい in both.
Before noon and after noon: a.m. and p.m. Two characters buy you both halves of the clock.
Write, by hand, the word for "student" and the word for "teacher." Then say what the shared character means.
学生 and 先生. The shared character is 生 — life or birth. A student is study-life; a teacher is ahead-life, the one who arrived first. If you wrote the readings as がくせい and せんせい without hesitating, that pair is done.
The three pairs that cost marks
Every one of these has been marked wrong by somebody who knew both characters perfectly well. Thirty seconds here, every time you study.
You have written a gate shape with something inside it. Which character is it, and what does it mean?
An empty gate is 門. A gate with the sun in it is 間, and it means a gap — in space or in time.
Do this tonight
Blank paper. Write the character for each of these, from English only: outside · behind · gate · gap · noon · south · man · mother · every · country · what · year · past · study · strength · rice field. Then check against the grids above, and write only the misses five times each.
Sixteen prompts, about seven minutes. Whatever falls tonight is what you drill tomorrow — and what falls twice is what you look at on the way into the quiz.
Where this connects to the recognition pass
The recognition pass takes these same 32 characters and teaches you to read them — read the underlined part of a sentence and say it. That is the right order: recognition first, production second, because recognition is what makes production possible. This sheet flips it. The characters have not changed; the direction has. And the pieces you already know are the reason this is short — 日 from Lesson 2 is what makes 間 cheap, and 田 and 力 from this lesson are what make 男 free.
Three worth asking in class
On the drill sheet, does stroke order get marked, or only whether the finished character is right? (It changes how your practice time is best spent.)
後 reads うし in 後ろ but ご in 午後. Is there a rule for which reading a character takes in a compound word, or is it word by word at this stage?
For the Lesson 1–4 quiz, are we asked to write the characters, or only read them? (The answer decides whether the class should be drilling production or recognition in the run-up.)
Kanji Quiz 1 — 漢字小テスト, Lessons 1–4. These 32 characters plus Lessons 1 and 2 make up all 64 of it.
Character lists and the component and look-alike notes follow the Kanji Look and Learn 第三課・第四課 sets as the course assigns them. Every reading and stroke count on this page was re-checked against KANJIDIC2 (© EDRDG, used under the EDRDG licence) — none was typed from memory.