Natalie Hamilton studied Japanese in high school in Sydney. However, despite having loved the language and getting good marks, she dropped it for the Higher School Certificate, fearing that she would not be able to learn the large amount of kanji required.
She went on to complete a Bachelor of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, and has worked as a writer and educator for over 20 years. In 2004 she followed her dream of learning a foreign language, moving to rural Oita Prefecture in Japan to teach English on the JET Programme, a grass-roots international exchange program. She stayed for three and a half years and while there not only fell in love with the people and culture, she realised she loved teaching and became fascinated with kanji characters.
It was during this period of intensive kanji study for the JLPT and Kanji Kentei tests that Natalie identified a number of phonetic components and visual patterns that could be linked to kanji ON readings. As a result of this knowledge, her Japanese reading skills improved dramatically. Natalie wrote The Kanji Code textbook as a way to share what she learned with today’s students of Japanese.
When she returned to Australia Natalie undertook a Master of Translating & Interpreting at Macquarie University part-time, while working as a Translator at Fujitsu and Technical Writer of elearning materials at a global software company. Upon graduation, she attained NAATI Certification for Professional translation from Japanese to English, and worked in freelance translation for several years as Ocha Translations. During this period she translated content for companies including MUJI, ANA and Sony. She specialized in software localisation and marketing translation or ‘transcreation’, and especially enjoyed translating social science academic papers. She was employed as a sessional academic at Western Sydney University from 2018-2020, where she taught Translation Technology, Text Analysis for Translation and Translation Practicum.
In 2018, while staying home to care for her two-year-old son, she returned to the linguistics dissertation she had written during her Translation studies. She formalised the rules she had observed and collated lists of example kanji, components, radicals and vocabulary, publishing The Kanji Code in February 2019.
Wishing to gain a theoretical understanding of education to underpin the instincts that led to The Kanji Code, Natalie completed a Master of Teaching (Secondary) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in October 2022. She was a recipient of the 2022 Dean’s List prize for academic excellence. She holds teaching codes in Japanese, English and English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EALD) and is currently employed as a teacher in NSW.
The Kanji Code 