EDIT: I have now finished the book. It took me about five months. My review below still stands. It's a great way to learn the meaning of kanji. I strongly recommend using Anki or a similar app to assist with your learning. Anki has decks created specifically for this book. There are also webpages where users contribute their own stories and I'd highly recommend using those to find stories that stick, since the author's stories can be kind of obscure and not easy to remember.
ORIGINAL REVIEW: I really like this book. A few disclaimers before I actually review it:
1. I'm only currently about 300 kanji into the book, so this is kind of an "early" review.
2. The book teaches you the MEANING of the kanji, not the pronunciation. This is a great way to learn them, in my opinion, but just be aware of that if you're considering purchasing this book.
3. The order that you learn the kanji is different to the order that Japanese children learn them.
Ok, review time. I really like this book. I feel like it's a really efficient way to learn kanji. Yes, the order is different to what a Japanese child would follow. So far, the book has introduced certain characters and then shown other kanji that "build" off those characters. So there are surely a lot of common characters that I don't know yet, and some pretty obscure ones that I do, but the order makes sense as you follow it, in my opinion.
I think that this book works really well if you want to learn to read Japanese first, and learn to speak later (which, in my opinion, is a great way to learn). I've already found myself being able to read some kanji characters when watching anime. I can't pronounce them, but I know what they mean, which is cool.
The author provides little stories to help you remember each character, and to be honest, not all of them work for me. Some of them are really weird and I find myself coming up with much more intuitive/commonsense ways to remember them. But each person's brain makes connections in its own way, and of course the author isn't going to nail it every time. So as long as you're able to remember them in a way that works for you, then I think you'll be fine.
If you do decide to purchase this book, I'd highly recommend using a flashcard app like Anki to help you to remember the characters. I have been doing a lesson (almost) every day, and then using Anki to review. Because this book is quite popular, there are also Anki decks available to help you study.
TL;DR: If you are happy to learn kanji by meaning alone, in a way that's different to how Japanese kids learn, and you're willing to put in the effort to study, then this book is a great resource for you.
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Customer reviews
Learn to Read Japanese in 56 lessons?
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2018
After trying over the past five years different approaches to learn Japanese, I finally found a method of learning Japanese that sticks. Using Remembering the Kanji as a guide is a huge advantage. The author presents the kanji in a foundational order with their meaning and with mnemonic stories that make them truly memorable. After learning the primitive kanji and their meanings, he presents kanji that are composed from the primitives and creates a mnemonic using the meaning of the primitives that helps the reader remember the new kanji’s meaning.I’ve been studying a full lesson each day (around 15-20 kanji) since I received the book on Wednesday, learning 74 kanji so far. My process:Read the kanji and it’s meaningWrite the kanji onceRead the story to understand it’s mnemonicRepeat through the end of the lessonTo supplement/reinforce my learning, I use a tool called Anki which is a “Flashcard” app that uses a technique called Spaced Repetition to help you review the items you don’t know until they are reinforced and presents them later to confirm the memory.After downloading Anki you can find a prebuilt memory deck on the site that presents the kanji in the same order as the book. You have to use the desktop version to download the deck, but it synchronizes with the mobile versions so you can study on your phone. When doing my Anki review I write down the character as they are presented so I can both practice the writing and reinforce its meaning with the character. I set Anki Max New Per Day setting to 30 which aligns with presenting the kanji almost in sync with my daily lessons. Finally after the Anki review, I read through all the kanji I’ve written in my notebook.These three activities reinforce what I’m learning and have so far contributed to me learning 74 of the kanji in five days. The book has 56 lessons and 2200 kanji. I’m confident that following my approach I will master them in 56 days.One thing to note this first book focuses only on learning the writing and meaning of the kanji. The second book in the series teaches the pronunciation. After finishing this first book I will journey into part two. Book three adds on an additional thousand kanji to increase fluency. And there is also remembering the Kana which teaches the Japanese syllabaries hiragana and katakana.Using this plan, by the new year I will be able to read basic Japanese. By the summer I should be able to understand spoken and possibly speak Japanese.
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2018
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Top reviews from other countries
Michelle
It works, if used and understood correctly.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 20, 2018Chris
You could waste so much time trying to learn kanji this way
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 20, 2021Daniel
It does teach you but you need to do a lot of fact checking since a lot is just straight up wrong
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 19, 2022
It does teach you but you need to do a lot of fact checking since a lot is just straight up wrong
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 19, 2022
TLDR : It started off promising but mistakes and wrong definitions mean I'm no longer focusing on 100% retention as I'll be working through a graded textbook as soon as I'm finished.Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 19, 2022
(I'm updating this review as I go and find problems that I remember to highlight so the review may be jumbled.)
It's definitely a controversial book as it doesn't teach you the Japanese readings but I think it is beneficial and much faster to learn kanji in your native tongue since you can start to decode Japanese words you already know.
There are a lot of good mnemonics that help the meanings stick but it's not without its faults.
He's clearly religious as he references biblical events a lot, which is a problem if you're not religious and have no idea what he's talking about. He's an American and the book is written in American English which becomes a problem for remembering i.e. graft is used for remembering bribery but in the uk it means hard work. Then there's the uncommon or downright weird choice of meanings such as using "derision" instead of ridicule, "post a bill" for 貼 which means to stick, paste, apply and "effulgent" which you'll probably never remember.
Update : I've had to knock it down 1 star as the stories have gotten ridiculous to the point where I don't even use them (see photo) [update at 800 words, he's almost completely abandoned stories] and I've noticed a couple of mistakes that should have been caught in a book that's on its 6th edition... e.g.
-He says 町 is village and 村 is town when in reality 町 is town and 村 is a village.
-He uses 里 for "ri" when that's an old outdated unit of measurement and the kanji is now used when referring to your parent's house.
-He used 条 for "twig" which I still haven't been able to figure out because it means an article.
-He says 錮 is weld when it's only used when referring to types of imprisonment and has nothing to do with welding i.e. 軽禁錮 or 重禁錮 (minor or major imprisonment).
-The picture for the primitive birdhouse doesn't match what is drawn in the stroke order. The picture is a schoolhouse and the stroke order has a drop above it.
-He seems to get confused with a lot of primitives meaning you're learning the wrong thing e.g. confusing heavens (天) with early death (夭). Confusing 氺 which is a variation of water (水) with rice (米) etc...
-He has randomly changed the meaning of primitives that he's used for over 1000 kanji i.e. shellfish/clam (貝) has become money.
-He says 校 is exam for some reason when it's the school part of any school kanji (which isn't even a keyword he uses) i.e. 高校 - high school, 学校 - school (study school), 校長 - principle (school leader), 校歌 - school song etc...
-He says 玄 is mysterious when you’d have a hard time finding anything that means that with this kanji. It’s the gen part of genkan (玄関), the area of the house where you remove your shoes, which is probably one of the first things you learn about Japan.
I guess my main problem, other than the mistakes, is that it mainly teaches you by stroke order, not grade so you'll learn high stroke count kanji for words so difficult you might not even know the English terms 1000 kanji before you learn how to write art. That just isn't how language learning works.
I don't really see a benefit to wasting a lot of time trying to memorise a complex tricky kanji that you might not even learn the Japanese reading for until you're years into your studies and by that time you'll probably have forgotten the mnemonic anyway when you could be exposing yourself to lower level ones daily and have them seared into your memory the way 私 and 名前 probably are for everyone. (for reference even at N2 you only need around 1000 kanji which I'm very quickly approaching and there are still a lot of very basic N5 kanji I haven't learned yet)
I'll probably still go through the book entirely and create mnemonics but not focus on 100% retention, then start a graded kanji book and focus on nailing them per grade when you can actually use them.
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L. W.
Good place to start in learning Japanese
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 30, 2016
Charlotte Steggs
I never thought I'd be able to write so many kanji!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 7, 2014
