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

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Key Phrases: rice plant

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

How does one learn kanji, the characters of written Japanese? The traditional approach is rote memorization. Japanese children write each kanji hundreds of times at their desks, and eventually they are acquired. Michael Rowley offers a different way, a mnemonic-association approach that provides a hook on which to hang the meaning and retrieve it easily when the kanji comes into view. The concept is simple: each character is represented under the word or concept it stands for (such as turf, bamboo, eat, or duty), followed by the pronunciations of the word in Chinese and Japanese, and a drawing that captures the meaning and resembles the character enough so that it'll come to mind whenever the kanji is seen.

Organized thematically in chapters such as "Power," "Places," "Tools," "The World," "Food," "People," and "The Body," Rowley's book lets you learn the root symbols before teaching the words that add to them for further meanings. For example, the character for water is a splatter of three dashes that Rowley pictures as three splashing water drops. Later, you see that steam, float, boil, dirt, and bathe all build on the water character. For steam, there's the water character plus a series of lines that Rowley exaggerates to resemble swirling, vapory tendrils, and the association helps. Building on units of memory and relationship, recall is aided considerably by the simple yet evocative drawings. Rowley even manages to help with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, providing appealing pictures that look a bit like the letters in question and begin with the same sounds. So the na letter looks like a knot, nu resembles Rowley's drawing of noodles held by chopsticks, and it's easier to remember which symbol means te when you picture a telephone pole.

It's hard to do Rowley's book justice with words, since the visual element is what makes it tick. He does a wonderful job, blending insight, imagination, and drawing technique, in a book that far surpasses the old rote method, making kanji learning both appealing and accessible. --Stephanie Gold

Review

Michael Rowley has created a visual vocabulary that is striking and, most importantly, memorable." -Wired Magazine -- -Wired Magazine

Michael Rowley has created a visual vocabulary that is striking and, most importantly, memorable." -Wired Magazine -- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press (June 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0962813702
• ISBN-13: 978-0962813702
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 7.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #75,048 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars it seemed like a good idea, but...., September 21, 2004

By	Matt Hayes (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

...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.

47 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Featureless faces form firm figures from Fuji-land, May 27, 2003

By	Marc Cenedella "www.cenedella.com/stone" (East Village, New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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."

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Looks fun and approachable, but can do more harm than good, February 13, 2006

By	Joe Friggins (Long Island) - See all my reviews

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.