My name is Dana White; and no, I don't own a wrestling empire. I am a student of languages. I originally studied Spanish and French. After that, while performing with the U. S. Air Force's White House Band, I continued the study of languages.

I was rated fluent for Spanish and French and was a working translator for Spanish and Portuguese. I visited the majority of Latin American countries on behalf of the Air Force in that capacity.

While I have made my living as a computer programmer, my love of language has never waned. The list of languages I have studied through the years, to varying levels of success are: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, Najuatl (Aztec), Quechua (Inca), and, of course, Japanese.

Studying Japanese writing reminds me of a joke. Question: "Where is the city hall?" Answer: "Go down this street and turn left where the school used to be."

Interesting, but not useful. The Japanese government reworked their written language following WW II. This site requires absolutely no knowledge of what their kanji looked like prior to that time.

Japanese, however, fascinates me due to the influence that its spoken language plays with its writing systems and vice versa. While Japanese studies didn't begin until I was well into my 30's, it has become one of my favorites because of the stories behind their characters and writing systems.

However, I find the approach to learning the kanji kind of random. As foreigners, we are forced to wander among the thousands of kanji with little sense of orderliness.

I have a mountain of reference material and they seem frustratingly inconsistent and isolated. Each book offers different lookup methods and there is no official common identifying theme being followed. To study from any of them becomes an experience in pain just finding a kanji of interest in each reference. Each has something interesting to say but I am always left feeling that I want more. Finding that information in unrelated, non-cross-referenced books is, to say the least, painful.

This website is still very much under construction but I am committed to its completion. There are nearly 3,000 separate pages with many thousands of links.

I can be contacted via the link below, "Contact us."
Dana White, website author, One-Stop Kanji