ONE is the most difficult number

“ONE” IS THE MOST DIFFICULT KANJI

I go to teach at the university by train at 7 in the morning. I scan the advertisements and news and inspirational messages that adorn the inside walls of the commuter train. Here is something I might be able to read. Hmm, I understand the individual words. I conclude it is the Japanese version of the aphorism, “He who travels alone sees the most.”

In class, my students read a newspaper article about the historical difficulty of learning to write. The newspaper commentary says that from time to time, Japan considers abolishing the hard-to-write characters. Not surprisingly, the Japanese sophomores do not want to trade their language’s Chinese characters--called Kanji-- for Roman characters.

Next, I ask the young men and women to discuss favorite and least favorite kanji.

One student claims to hate to write “one” – a horizontal line segment.

I am astonished. “Why? What is challenging about a straight line?”

“One” is hard to align properly, the student says. It tends to crumble into an underscore or a dash. “What is your favorite kanji?” she asks back.

I think of the aphorism in the train. The poem repeated the kanji for “one person”. I ask for the correct pronunciation; the two are pronounced the same. Thus enabled, I garble enough of the poem to achieve recognition.


The poem means, “’Everyone can do one thing uniquely well,’” the students agree. And by implication, they add, the poem suggests, ‘” Find that thing for yourself.’”

I had been wrong about the meaning. But I am very glad for the effective classroom communication. It is a conversational English class.