Customer Reviews

The First 100 Japanese Kanji: The quick and easy way to learn the basic Japanese Kanji

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It's difficult to imagine an easier way to get started writing than with The First 100 Japanese Kanji: The quick and easy way to learn the basic Japanese Kanji.

CONTENT
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- 100 characters
- major readings for each one
- glosses for the meanings
- radicals, so you can look it up in a dictionary
- several compounds with other words
- shows how to write characters with the proper stroke order
- has plenty of space for you to practice writing each character.

PROS
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+ A good book for self-study, because in my experience, writing the characters is important for gaining language proficiency.
+ As the author suggests in the introduction, you might want to make flashcards out of the information contained in this book.
+ Comes with a brief, but well-written introduction to kanji.

CONS
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- Why are the characters printed instead of handwritten? If possible, you'll want to have a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese take a ball-point pen and write the character in the first box of the practice section for you. Otherwise, you are trying to write like people type.

- The book starts out right with an easy character, but mixes them up with relatively difficult ones. I cannot figure out why. All of the characters are useful. I just don't know why some like the character for "tea" are included here, but you don't get the character for "small" until the second book. I would recommend buying them both together.

SUMMARY
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This is a good book for those just starting out with Japanese, because you really can begin writing and practicing immediately.

As a Japanese language learner living in Japan, this book is an excellent first introduction to Japanese kanji, and writing them is the best (only?) way to learn them.

However, the user ought to be aware that this book has its limitations. For each kanji, a number of compound words are provided, which is great in concept. Unfortunately, for many kanji the selection of compound words was often times pretty weak:

1. Commonly encountered compounds were often absent, to my surprise.
2. A number of the compound words given were rather obscure/useless to know. Much more useful examples could have been selected. My Japanese friends frequently told me to disregard some of the examples given.
3. There are no usage notes given, so beware of attempting to pick up new vocabulary without referencing a dictionary first.

That said, the selection of the kanji characters themselves is good, and the discussion in the introduction is extremely useful, so this serves as a good base going forward.

this is a good workbook.. its got examples of compounds and lots of practice space.. nice systematic approach.. great for rote memorization of stroke order

This book is OK. It's the traditional Japanese way of learning kanji, the brute-force method. Write each kanji a kajillion times.

Do your sanity a favor - check out Read Japanese Today: The Easy Way to Learn 400 Practical Kanji (Tuttle Languge Library). This book makes learning kanji easy. It takes a logical and natural approach - learn the origins of the symbols and how they morphed into the modern symbol, and you will remember what they mean. Read a short paragraph about a kanji and remember it forever. It really works. You will still need to learn the stroke order, but this Read Japanese Today book really is a great way to start.