一

One

Meaning: One

Laying on the ground is something that looks just like the ground, the number One. Why is this One laying down? It’s been shot by the number two. It’s laying there, bleeding out and dying. The number One doesn’t have long to live.

To remember the meaning of One, imagine yourself there at the scene of the crime. You grab One in your arms, trying to prop it up, trying to hear its last words. Instead, it just splatters some blood on your face. “Who did this to you?” you ask. The number One points weakly, and you see number Two running off into an alleyway. He’s always been jealous of number One.

Reading: いち

As you’re sitting there next to One, holding him up, you start feeling a weird sensation all over your skin. From the wound comes a fine powder (obviously coming from the special bullet used to kill One) that causes the person it touches to get extremely itchy (いち).

Make sure you feel the ridiculously itchy sensation covering your body. It climbs from your hands, where you’re holding the number One up, and then goes through your arms, crawls up your neck, goes down your body, and then covers everything. It becomes uncontrollable, and you’re scratching everywhere, writhing on the ground. It’s so itchy that it’s the most painful thing you’ve ever experienced (you should imagine this vividly, so you remember the reading of this kanji).

Vocabulary

Vocab is very focused in TextFugu. You only learn vocab (with kanji in it) if you’ve learned all the kanji within that vocab word. Since you’ve only learned one kanji so far, you’ll only see vocab with that one kanji. As you learn more, you’ll see more combinations, but they’ll still only use kanji you know. That way knowing the meaning of all the vocab words will be easier (since you did the hard part of learning the kanji already) and there will be fewer abstract “from scratch” things you have to learn. There’ll be a little bit, like when you have to remember the kun’yomi reading of a kanji, but it’s not nearly as bad as having to memorize straight up.

Here are the two vocab words for this kanji. Read through the info below each vocab word to get hints on how to learn them more effectively than trying to do pure memorization.

a 一（いち）＝　One

• Meaning: This vocab word means the same thing as the kanji, making it easy to remember.
• Reading: The reading is the same as the on’yomi you just learned, also making it easy to remember.

a 一つ（ひとつ）＝　One (thing)

• Meaning: This vocab means “One Thing” – i.e. one bicycle, one computer, one ____.
• Reading: This vocab uses the kun’yomi reading. You can tell it’s a kun’yomi reading because it has some hiragana sticking out of it, meaning you can also guess part of the pronunciation (you know it ends with つ). As long as you can remember that this word means “one thing,” you can use that to think about counting things. Imagine yourself counting He-Toes (He-Man Toes), and only getting to two (つ) of them. “He-Toe One. He-Toe Two…”

漢字 二 →