Easy Kanji: A Basic Guide to Writing Japanese Characters [Paperback]

Fujihiko Kaneda (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0844283746 | ISBN-13: 978-0844283746 | Publication Date: January 11, 1997 | Edition: 1

Beginning Students use a step-by-step approach to develop skills with the writing system of traditional Japanese characters borrowed and adapted from the Chinese. Models of 500 kanji characters, written by award-winning Japanese calligraphers, are arranged according to their radical groups. Samples of kanji writing help students perfect their writing style, expand their vocabulary and reading skills, and increase their knowledge of Japanese language structures. Includes a section on hiragana and katakana.

Editorial Reviews

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Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (January 11, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0844283746
• ISBN-13: 978-0844283746
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,119,923 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Needs an index, April 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Easy Kanji: A Basic Guide to Writing Japanese Characters (Paperback)

This book is useful if you plan to use it page-by page to learn Kanji. It presents a radical, then several common Kanji with that radical. Every few pages, it has a review and practice section.

The Kanji are written clearly and stroke order and direction are shown on the first character in each section.

Due to the lack of an index, this is not a good book for reference or as a supplement to other books. With the addition of some method for looking up a specific Kanji, it would be much more useful.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very helpful book, February 4, 2002

By 

underivy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Easy Kanji: A Basic Guide to Writing Japanese Characters (Paperback)

I was looking for a book to supplement my Japanese classes, and I was very pleased to find this. It's a very good book for beginning students of Japanese who'd like to learn more kanji.

It lays out the rules for kanji stroke order, and it groups the kanji by radical, which I appreciate a great deal. I found this book especially helpful because it both supplemented and augmented my existing vocabulary. It's nice to finally have the kanji for many of the words with which I am already familiar but have not yet learned to write in kanji. It has very clear, easy to read, written models of 500 kanji, including stroke order, as well as some very basic lessons in writing sentences with kanji. You do not need to know how to do calligraphy in order to learn these, but it would definitely behoove you to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets before you go for the kanji.

This is probably not the best book for someone who is completely new to the Japanese language, as I would be inclined to say that it would be better to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets (at the very least), as well as some vocabulary and basic grammatical structures before jumping right into learning kanji. It is not intended to be a reference book or a stand-alone instructional manual for the Japanese language. Rather, it is a book that will supplement your other Japanese books nicely.

There are other books available from the author of this book that offer instruction in hiragana/katakana. If you are new to Japanese, I would recommend that you begin there before attempting to work through this book.

If you have a basic vocabulary and a general grasp of very basic grammatical concepts, this should be a nice supplemental book for you. Of course, it won't teach you all that you need to know, but it is a very nice introduction to 500 basic, commonly used kanji. I would certainly not recommend that you try to work your way through a dictionary in order to attempt memorizing random kanji, as they will most likely have no real meaning to you and will therefore be very easily forgotten. However, if you use this book as it is intended....as a supplement to other Japanese instruction, I think that you will find it very helpful. And at this price, it's also quite a bargain.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kanji for a beginner, November 24, 1999

By 

Guy Mitchell-Dwelly (Crowthorne, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Easy Kanji: A Basic Guide to Writing Japanese Characters (Paperback)

After many years trying to find a decent introduction to the writing and stroke order of Japenese and Chinese characters I was very pleased with the book's content and found I was able to produce recognisable calligraphy in my work almost immediately. The only downside is as a beginner I was left feeling a litte confused to the Katakana spellings and how to correlate them and also I think you will need some sort of calligraphy practice before tackling these.