How to Make a Kanji Bingo Game Part 1: The Bingo Card

Who doesn't like bingo? Especially in Japanese, where the kanji is based on putting several pictographic roots together to make new symbols, bingo can be a good way to start seeing kanji in terms of the roots they are made up of, which make them easier to learn.

One of my tasks in the lab last week was to recreate on Microsoft Word a kanji bingo game my boss had brought back with her from Japan. The first problem to be confronted is how to make the card itself. There needed to be rows and columns of squares divided in half, so each side could play host to a kanji root that, when next to each other, would make a whole kanji. The most obvious way to do this would be tables; however, there was a bit of an issue in the fact that I didn't know how to put two tables next to each other, side by side. So I had to come up with a kind of creative solution (that I'm rather proud of, hence the blogging about it).

If you want, for instance, three side by side sets of divided squares, you create a table with eight columns and one row (six columns for the three divided squares, two for the spaces between them). If you put your cursor directly over a dividing line between columns, it will let you move the line around. In that way, you can move lines around until the space columns are as thin as you can make them (or as narrow as you want the spaces to be) and the divided squares are all the same width.

Next, highlight one of the space columns and right click, then scroll down to "Borders and Shading."  Under the preview, in borders and shading, clicking on the top and bottom borders will make them invisible. Your preview should look like this:

Select the option to apply it to the cell. Then do the same to the other space column.

Once the space columns are thus rendered invisible, you can highlight the whole table and copy and paste it all down the page, to make numerous rows of bingo boxes. My completed kanji bingo card looked like this: