Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent learning aid, March 8, 1999
By A Customer
I have found this book to be of immense use in teaching myself the Japanese language. It provides ample practice space, guides for writing the characters, pronunciation and meanings, and a handful of compounds containing the given character. I practice in it every day!
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Logical, comprehensive approach to kanji self-study, September 3, 2006
After hitting a plateau in my Japanese studies, I realized that a solid grounding in kanji was really holding back my progress. I knew that I needed a systematic approach to the 1,945 jyouyou characters and recalled that this series had been used as the kanji textbook at my alma mater, Princeton University, in the Japanese language study curriculum. I worked this two textbook series for about 4.5 years and it has really paid off (e.g., JLPT kanji tests are a snap, even level 1). The ordering, while different from most other kanji instruction orderings, flows nicely and doesn't overwhelm the student with too many similar kanji in a row (e.g., it doesn't group by radical and present every character containing that radical). Granted, some fairly common characters aren't introduced until much later in the series, but this is a small sacrifice for an ordering that flows and supports systematic recall.
If you can speak basic Japanese and can read some characters -- but are coming to terms with the fact that you are going to have to learn the jyouyou sooner or later -- don't hesitate: by this series and get going. If you have zero experience with Japanese and are looking for survival skills in kanji and are living in Japan, I'd suggest using the Helsig approach, which has you learning basic kanji meanings before readings and written style. After all, what good does knowing the readings for "danger: slow down" characters on a sign if you don't know what they mean?
BTW, I often hear students asking why bother investing in learning how to write the characters by hand given that most writing is done on computers anyway. Don't fall into this trap: there is no better way to cement a characters morphology and meaning in your memory than learning to write. It has worked for students of the graphology for millenia -- it will work for you, too.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book!!!, October 14, 2005
I am 20, and I have been trying to learn Japanese off and on since I was 16. Recently I have tried to get back into learning it and this book has been the most useful so far, for one main reason, it has spaces for you to write the kanji, the hiragana, and the katakana. For years I have been trying to learn the Kanji by just looking at them, that did not work so well, but this system in the book of drawing them out has finally help me to remember them. Maybe I should of just got a kanji dictionary and some loose leaf paper. Then again, most other kanji dictionaries don't have stroke order and also the box shapes did help me to keep my kanji from being to sloppy.
The book also has samples of words the kanji are used in, which also helped me. Since most Japanese words are hard to remember, knowing the kanji that make them up helps make me learn the words.
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