Customer Reviews

Kanji ABC: A Systematic Approach to Japanese Characters

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I'm a Japanese learner, and I've begun to tackle the very overwhelming (and seemingly insane) task of learning Kanji. I've tried different methods of learning Kanji (Writing them over and over, flashcards, etc.), and I have found this to be the most effective book/method in UNDERSTANDING Kanji.

You learn key characters that make up Kanji characters; therefore when you learn a Kanji character. You'll say to yourself, "So that small character means "xxxx" and that other character means "xxxx." So I put the two together, and the Kanji means "xxxx." That makes sense." Rather then trying to mash into your brain the way of reading a Kanji you're unfamiliar with, you learn the concept of understanding the Kanji. You learn the pronunciation later.

But that's also the only downside. In order to commit to this great system of remembering Kanji, you have to be serious about it. So anybody that just wants to "skim" Kanji, I don't suggest you use this book. It takes commitment, and it takes time. But it pays off in the long run.

The format of the book is to intoduce the simpler kanji first, and use sets of components which you learn before learning the associated kanji, thereby avoiding giving you kanji with unknown components. This allows you to create a stronger association between the character visually and its meaning, leaving the image much clearer in your mind. But if you want to use the book afterwards for looking up a kanji that you can't remember, then you would be much better off with a kanji dictionary or similar. Some other works have better facilities for looking up kanji, but most of the books that cover all of the every-day use (joyo) kanji are significantly more expensive than this. The stroke order numbering can also be confusing (the numbers are sometimes placed so that determining which line it refers to is difficult). If you want to quickly learn a core set of kanji that you can use, or want to be able to look up the kani you see rather than learn them all, then get another book. If, however, you want to learn the joyo kanji (something every serious student of japanese should aim to do), then this book could be of great assistance for your studies

This book is a must buy. It simplifies the learning process and categorizes the characters by grouping them according to shape and meaning. With so many SIMILAR characters to learn, it is vital to have an effective system for memorizing and distinguishing them. Some characters are so similar that many students give up for this reason alone. No other book has been able to effectively group characters in a system for memorizing.

One of the most practical applications of this book is that it is laid out in such a way, that you can photocopy each page onto cardstock and make your own study cards. After copying, I folded mine horizontally along the lines so I could alternate guessing at the meaning or guessing at the character readings. I don't think the publisher even thought of this, but it works! Another great element about this book is that beside each character is shown the meaning of each complex root. For instance "irodo(ru), SAI" has the meaning of "color" and comes from the root of "harvest" and "style." At the beginning of the book, you are taught each individual root, called graphemes, so you can easily pick out which part of the complex character means harvest and which means style. Also, beside each character is reference numbers so you may look them up in dictionaries for further study. And, one of the most important things for me is that this books contains all of the joyo kanji, "the 1,945 characters recommended for everyday use by the Japanese government." The graphemes are also numbered for stroke order so that you may practice writing. It is a great place to start, and you may find out at the end you are way ahead of everbody else! This book makes learning Japanese as easy as, well, ABC.

I've been studying Japanese for nearly five years, now, and I've found that organizing Kanji into specific groups based on similarities has helped a great deal with learning them. I'm currently using this book to help with the process of mastering my ability to read and write Kanji and it's working like a charm. I suggest that anyone serious about studying Japanese--those wishing to take the level 2 or 1 Japanese Proficiency Test, for example--look into investing in this study tool. It's sure to help!

This book is a great help for finding tricks to learn kanji characters more quickly. However, I don't think it's sufficient on its own to really complete learning these characters.

The book is divided into two parts; Part I is a repertoire of around 250 "graphemes", kanji "pieces" that are used to build up actual kanji characters, but may not necessarily form characters of their own. If that sounds like the definition of a "radical", well good: they're closely related. However, there are various graphemes that are not officially considered radicals, so you might consider the graphemes to be a superset of the radicals.

Each grapheme is associated with an english word or phrase. The book is fairly careful to use different words for very similar meanings, so that you can manage to keep them separate.

Part II is a list of two thousand kanji characters, ordered in such a way as to make full use of the graphemes learned. The kanji are ordered so that the characters only use those graphemes that have already been introduced in the associated group from Part I. Each character is listed along with only its very most common readings (kun and on), and a list of the english words representing the graphemes from which it has been built (which appear in an index at the back of the book).

The book is intended to be used in one of two ways: one way (the way I've chosen to use it) is to learn all of the graphemes in Part I (or at least a large number), and then use Part II to look up characters you wish to learn, and see which graphemes it is made up of. Of course, in reality, you wouldn't normally need to look them up to begin with if you know all the graphemes: you'll recognize them in the characters themselves.

The other way this book is intended to be used, is to systematically learn all the characters of Part II, by learning one group of graphemes, and then studying all the characters from Part II for that same group (which will be ordered appropriately). According to the preface, this is the "ideal" way to use the book. However, I don't really see that as practically possible, without the use of a more detailed kanji dictionary (such as The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary. Because, for on readings, you can't really get a feel for a character without seeing in what compounds it appears, and how; and learning kun readings can be very misleading, since often a single adjective (atatakai) or verb (hajimeru) may be written using multiple alternative kanji, depending on the context and subtle differences in meaning that are intended. Thus, Kanji ABC might be adequate by itself to learn to _read_ the most common cases where these characters appear, but is quite inadequate for learning when to _write_ them.

The nice thing about this book is that it provides just the tools you need to help grasp the components of a given kanji character, and little else. It doesn't bog you down with _why_ these components have been associated with a given meaning. In the end I think this helps you to learn them more quickly. Other books that may focus more on a character's etymology (such as A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters (Tuttle language library) (Japanese Edition) can be very enlightening, but in the end they tend to just confuse, as the original etymology of the characters can often have little to do with the modern form and meaning. On the other hand, the trade-off is that you often don't get the "true, original meaning" of a radical or grapheme, just the one that makes it easiest to combine it with other graphemes to learn a kanji.

Reviewers who claim that this book is just a list of kanji miss the point of the book. The authors have broken the kanji down into radicals and basic kanji which form the building blocks--components--of all other kanji. By memorizing the components first--the authors call them "graphemes"--you make the job of remembering more complex kanji easier by several orders of magnitude.

There are other books based on the same method, called "component analysis," but this book is more flexible. You don't have to learn every kanji in a single, pre-set order. At any rate, if you are an adult learner of Japanese, component analysis is the best way to learn kanji.

Of the three alphabets used in writing and reading the Japanese Language, the Kanji (Chinese loan characters) are the most difficult to memorize. The complexity of Japanese writing characters is based on the number of 'brush strokes' each character is composed of. The Hiragana and Katakana are generally composed of 1-4 brush strokes, whereas the Kanji can be composed of as many as 25 brush strokes. How then can a non-native speaker best approach this task? Japanese natives have spent 12 years (grades 1-12) sitting in class writing Kanji over and over again - the rote learning method. Speaking as a College Graduate with a Japanese Language degree, how can one compress these twelve years into the 4 years that a non-Japanese is supposed to learn the reading skill? This book is the answer. Although one is supposed to acquire a reading skill of about 2000 Kanji to read a Japanese newspaper, there are thousands of Kanji to learn. As this book shows, each Kanji is composed of stylized sub-pictographs called graphemes (sometimes called radicals). About 220 graphemes make up 95% of all Kanji. With this excellent book, a student of Japanese memorizes the 220 graphemes by meaning, which then facilitates the memorization of Kanji, by allowing one to memorize the shapes that make up the Kanji. Your average native Japanese professor at a USA university learned by the rote method, and so is probably unaware of the existence of this book. The big problem for non-native readers of Japanese is that the Kanji all look like chicken-scratches, and there is no handle to grasp in the task of memorizing the Kanji so as to read Japanese. This book gives you that handle, and should be issued to every Japanese language student who is serious about learning to read Japanese. While one will still spend hours writing Kanji on paper again and again to memorize them and gain reading ability, this book shortens and facilitates that task enormously, and is without doubt the most useful book in my Japanese language library.

My daughter borrowed this from her Japanese teacher over Christmas break and we are now going to buy it for her and an extra copy for her teacher so he can lend more out. As the reviewer below me stated, the characters build on each other and you can learn them.

As an artist, I find the explanation on how to write the letters very helpful. There is nothing easy about learning Kanji, but this book shows you how to break it down and learn it.

I recently started to attend a Japanese language and culture group and met a person who had been studying Japanese for 10 years. He said that this book was the best means toward learning Kanji as it breaks down the Kanji into various radicals(parts of the Kanji character) and forms them into the regular Kanji.

Over many years, on many occaisons I tried to learn Kanji. But every time, after reaching Kanji 300 or so, they all started looking the same.

This book provides a mnemonic system with English meanings that lets me look at any Kanji and instantly break it down into its constituents; and remembering them is far easier too.

It's not perfect. I dislike how Tuttle uses romaji instead of hiragana and katakana, so I'll keep practicing with my White Rabbit flash cards. Also, they'd do well to clarify some ambiguous words. For example, for the character ^ä, the authors give the English word "well." But there's no clue whether it's "Johnny fell down the well," or "Johnny plays guitar well."

However, I cannot imagine going back and learning Kanji any other way. If your first language is English, then this book is super effective. Hence, the 5-stars.