I’ve been struggling for weeks with trying to translate some characters in the Blumengruss pattern from New Style of Heirloom Knitting. I was doing sort of ok with the kana because they are mostly foreign words and with some clever pronunciation, I could figure them out. (The best one so far? ra i to gu ri – light grey!)
But the kanji. The ABC’s of Knitting covers quite a bit of the kanji I might need, but not all of it. It really only covers the knitting terms. But in the book, there are more than knitting terms, there are descriptions of the knitting that aren’t covered in the ABC site.
Tonight I came across this site: The Kanji SITE – A guide for students of Japanese Kanji It’s a well organized site, and even though you have to search several pages to find the character you are looking for, once you find it there are often very good definitions, and also definitions of the character combined with another character and even sometimes a “not to be confused with” example. I’ve not come across a site with such a nice layout and so much content.
Plus it has the kana as well, with charts comparing them and explanations of the combining of symbols with the characters, such as adding the degrees-looking symbol to he makes pe, and adding the quote marks-looking symbol changes he to be. Many of the charts on the wikipedia don’t have all that. Plus there’s some nice commentary on the pages, and the author clearly has a sense of humor, which many sites don’t seem to have.
I’m thinking this will be helpful for translations of sites like Ten Old which has some beautiful Fair Isle style patterns (although I hear the author of that page speaks english if you email her) and also Pierrot which has a lot of crochet patterns available to download as .pdfs.
Anyway, I’ve still got more to figure out, but I thought I’d share this great resource.