Customer Reviews

Kanji Pict-O-Graphix: Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

...it's just not an effective way to learn kanji. In this book each kanji has a little picture associated with it, which may be helpful if you're curious about what a kanji looks like, but if you're trying to learn kanji efficiently and hope to retain what you learn I don't find this book very useful.

One problem with it is it can't help you with much else besides recognition, looking at a kanji and knowing what it is. If you're trying to use this book to learn kanji, then the basic steps you'd follow would be: 1) look at the kanji, 2) what picture does the kanji look like, 3) what is the meaning based upon this picture. First of all, there are a lot of kanji which look very similar, so it may be difficult to keep them straight if you're trying to remember what a kanji "looks like". So even recognition itself is difficult. Second, even if you do remember correctly what it "looks like", you may have trouble then recalling what the meaning of that kanji is, since sometimes that meaning is very abstract, or you could incorrectly come up with alternate meanings.

Another major problem is that it doesn't do much good if you want to recall how to write a kanji given it's meaning. If you recall what the picture is given the meaning, it doesn't mean you'll necessarily write it correctly.

Instead of this book I'd highly recommend Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". The sole purpose of his book is to learn how to remember the meaning and writing of kanji; there's no japanese whatsoever in it. But it turns out this is a really effective method. His guide is really just a set of mnemonics, or memory tricks essentially, to help you remember the kanji. He introduces rougly 2000 kanji to you, and in an order which facilitates you learning all of them. Instead of associating a picture with each kanji, you associate a little story, and from the story you can remember how to write it. You'll need to know that many kanji eventually anyways, so you may as well learn all their meanings right away. I was skeptical at first, but once I started trying it I was learning kanji at an amazing pace. In the first week alone I memorized the meaning of 300 kanji (I spent a lot of time studying though, it just shows that it's possible). I'd also recommend using an computer flashcard program, one that allows you to write your own flashcards and test yourself on your computer (I used a good one called VTrain). It's much more convenient this way than writing them on index cards. 2000 sounds like a lot of kanji, but you'd be surprised at how fast you can learn them if you're diligent. I found that it was much easier to learn the readings of the kanji once I already knew all the readings. Trying to learn both at once will really slow you down. Plus knowing the meaning of the kanji is the most important part. Even if I don't recognize a word, I can usually get it's general meaning based upon what the kanji means. If you're still skeptical, consider how many years it takes Japanese children to learn all the kanji, and these are kids that already speak Japanese fluently. You can't expect to learn kanji the same way they do and learn it much quicker than them.

I had purchased this book simply because it was one of only 3 books on Kanji I could find. Had I so much as a few hours' worth of experience back then, I'd have passed this book up. This book does in fact turn out to be one you can judge accurately by the cover, which makes for a perfect example of why this is a terrible first or second foray into kanji.
The author's cute attempts at using his own version of visual association will begin to work against you from the start. For example, right on the cover happens to be the same association I would have put together for the term "stop." While a crossing guard protecting a little guy might make a fun means of remembing "stop," the accurate representation to consider is that of the foot, meaning "stop."
Being historically inaccurate for the sake of easier recognition would perhaps be forgiveable if it weren't so detrimental; truly learning involves building from the learned kanji and their appearance in compounds, so while the "foot" might not quite rest in the mind as easy, the "crossing guard" is all but obsolete when it comes time to actually use the intended "foot" representation in compounds.
Too many occurences of such short-sighted teaching.
To make matters about as bad as they can possibly be, some of these baseless adlibs are actually tougher to get than the true visual association ancient times. Some of the pictures are rather ridiculous.
One can, in fact, end up worse for having tried to learn by studying this book.

Why should a picture of a misshapen person, eye, heart and ear make you remember Kanji #549 "Listen"? Or one man beating another with a stick, Kanji #400, "Industrious?" For the same reason King Philip Came Over For Good Sax*, I suppose - who knows why and how mnemonics work, but in this cleverly (sometimes, fiendishly so) illustrated volume, Michael Rowley provides memorable mind-helpers for those learning Kanji, or just simply fascinated with the development of this writing system borrowed from the Chinese.

The book aggregates kanji into thematic groups, determined by the radical, or root element, of each kanji, and makes for much easier comprehension than standard elementary Kanji texts. Each kanji is presented with its Japanese and Chinese reading (very, very roughly speaking, similar to the way we have the Germanic "sweat" and Latinate "perspire" to mean the same thing), a brainy icon system for indicating which part of the kanji comes from which other character, and a mnemonic.

Rowley uses bold, strong graphic elements, and those lovable faceless "people-oids" you remember from 1970s government-issued pamphlets to illustrate the meaning, along with those odd quirks of literature - the mnemonic ("Our rice products earn a pile of money" or "the prisoner's hands are bound with thread"). Distinctive, odd, and, yes, MEMORABLE.

This charming book is good for curious teens, the diligent Nihongo-phile, or the dedicate sensei's toolkit.

Enjoy strongly!

(p.s. My favorite Kanji is #96, "Snow")

* The classic mnemonic from biology for recalling Linnaean taxonomy: "kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species."

I bought this book sight unseen (apart from the cover and the excerpts found in the "look inside" section and elsewhere on the net) as my local bookstores/libraries did not have a copy. I would advise you to spend a half-hour browsing through the pages to see if Michael Rowley's method will work for you. It didn't, and hasn't so far for me. And this, in spite of having been a visual learner all my life.

Especially insightful is how the Amazon.review describes Rowley's method as "a mnemonic-association approach that provides a hook on which to hang the meaning and retrieve it easily when the kanji comes into view." COMES INTO VIEW. That's key. You learn to recognize kanji, but may find it very difficult to summon it from memory, and write it with the right stroke order. Is learning stroke order something one can put off? I don't think so. I think you have to do it right from day one.

The drawings are entertaining, but I think they can only prove confusing to the beginner, and if you already know the kanji, the book is pointless, except maybe to leaf through idly, to see another person's mind at play. If that's what you want, great. But if it's learning the kanji you're after, I really recommend Heisig's Remembering the Kanji Series. There's much to be said for breaking down the monumental task of learning the first 2,000 kanji, and learning to recognize, understand and write the kanji with the proper stroke order FIRST before studying the onyomi/kunyomi readings makes learning much easier. Heisig's imaginative mnemonic approach is also more playful and whimsical (read: you get better hooks) and the devices ("primitives") build upon each other amazingly well.

In any case, sample the book first, then buy if it works for you.

While the number of Kanji is a bit small (the Toyo Kanji list was 1,850 when I was in college), and it is not always useful in remembering the Japanese onyomi and kunyomi, it is perfect for simply learning the meanings. Since this is the first step to learning kanji, and all many people are interrested in, this book is a very valueable learning tool. I wish I had it in college.

Please read this review. I say this only because I would like to recommend this book to anyone who is beginning Japanese and needs to memorize the cumbersome Hiragana and Katakana characters. This is, bar none, the easiest way to mnemonically retain both the characters and their sounds, period! All it takes is half an hour of trying to read any Japanese text while flipping back through Rowley's book and his ingenious pictures will begin appearing right before your eyes, instilling instant gratification of a sense of progress. However, Rowley's main focus is on Kanji, which he does just a magnificent a job of illucidating and entrenching their definitions upon anyone who reads this text. I would suggest to any student, including those who do not need any knowledge of Kanji, to give this text a try for the sheer brilliance in which Rowley has takled these most formidable phonetic syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana.

The first thing you will notice about Rowley's book is his creativity in language study. Some will surely say, "What creativity?! Kanji are already word pictures...he's just doing what's been done for thousands of years!" True. However, this book is definitely geared toward the Western reader, and Rowley's methods of memorization are sure to make Japanese study significantly easier (especially if you are American, British, Australian, etc.) More "serious" scholars will undoubtedly turn up their noses at such sophomoric scholarship. But I say: whatever works. I lived in Japan for almost two years, and this book helped me to start recognizing kanji [if you're not familiar, there are three major ways to write Japanese: hiragana = a rather easy alphabet for words native to Japan; katakana = another alphabet (with less curves and more "sharp" characters) for foreign words (mostly English words); and kanji = a group of thousands of Chinese characters that each represent an IDEA, rather than an alphabet that represents SOUNDS.]. Memorization doesn't have to be dry and boring...it can actually be fun, and Rowley definitely makes it fun. Unfortunately, a couple of the pictures/explanations are definitely off-color...but then, so is much of life.

There are so many mistakes in this book. Mis-numbered cross referential numbers and kanji is just wrong are some of the most glaring examples. It is difficult to learn anything when you are second guessing the material. The most embarrassing oversight is the kanji for noisy which is made up of three little kanji women. That kanji is only really used with a power kanji in front to mean rape. Not only is the Kanji useless by itself (assuming you are not living in the Heian period), but it is offensive when you try to use it.
The idea of the book is great epically with my learning style, but get a Japanese editor.

First, let me say that I (being a student of Japanese of 2 years) love browsing through this book. The art is beautiful, the mnemonics usually make sense (except a few cases where you can tell that Rowley had a bit of a hard time thinking up mnemonics for things), and the radical categorization system is excellent.

However, as a study aid, i found the value of this book is questionable. I missed being able to see how the kanjis work within a compound of kanji-kana/kanji-kana (as most words in Japanese are).

Also, while the book features a kanji and its Ohn/Kun readings, which occasionally will have a different meaning, it doesn't specify exactly which meaning corresponds with which. As someone with a limited vocabulary at this point of her studies, I learned a lot from this book, at least where reading is concerned. I COULD have learned even more from it had they bothered to add this valuable snippet of information to each item in the book.

At first glance this book looks like the way to solve the problem of learning those tedious kanji in Japanese! It looks like a completely NEW way to do it! But I am not sure it is. Firstly, I have to say that some of the pictures are good for learning the meaning in relation to the shape of the kanji, like the one on the front...but what about the ON and KUN readings? They still have to be learned somehow! They are included in the book, but the kanji are not placed in any context that might help you relate them to vocabulary. This is an interesting innovation which is, I daresay, helpful, but not definitive. However, I can say with my hand on my heart that Mr Rowley took a lot of the pain out of learning the kana with the ingenious drawings he came up with (even if the pronunciation is ostensibly American!).