 Remembering the Kanji: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Charactersby James W. Heisig After going thru all those KANJI Cards last night I’m totally gung ho about studying. I decided that my first focus should be on KANJI. As I’ve mentioned before I never studied KANJI properly and most of the KANJI I know I know from compound words I learned reading cell phone manuals and playing Final Fantasy on Playstation. I realized this while going thru the Flash Cards last night. I could only guess some of the KANJI correctly after looking at the KANJI in the context of a word. I’m guessing this is opposite from what people studying Japanese would do. For most the KANJI would be learnt first and the vocabulary after. It got me thinking about this book. I’ve always been skeptical about it’s approach. In a nutshell, you use stories to remember each KANJI but they don’t teach you how to read the KANJI, just the meaning and an English keyword to help anchor it in your memory. So after you finish the course you should be remember all 2,000+ KANJI but not be able to use them. The argument is that this course is for remembering KANJI and not learning Japanese. The language learning part comes after you have memorized all the KANJI. I have always said that the best way to remember KANJI was to study vocabulary. I still think so but the more I read about this book the more it seemed like just what I needed. I need to remember all the KANJI. I can already read more than half and know the meaning of more than that but have never completed a course that covers all the JOYO KANJI so I decided to give it a try. These books are really expensive which is probably why they’ve been discontinued. I managed to find a copy of both vol. 1 and 2 and bought both. We’ll see if I wasted my money or not. My goal is to complete the course by Mid March. There are some interesting reviews on Amazon that argue both good and bad about this book. And also an interesting review on KanjiClinic. |
Relearning Japanese
Long ago, before I was consumed by computer science, I was a Japanese major too. It’s not easy to keep up with two things, especially if you’re in grad school for one of them, and …
The stack of Kanji cards look very intimidating. Does it divide into different levels for a step by step learning process? For me, I just pick a few Kanji from the web everyday and look up the pronounciation since I know the writing and meaning already, most of the time. It’s not the proper way to learn but it keeps me interested.
Hi TC, that Kanji Card Set is the card set designed to be used with this book “Remembering the Kanji” so all Kanji Cards are indexed according to how they are grouped in the book. Generally the groupings are by radicals from what I’ve seen so far. One of the reasons why I bought the book was because I already had the cards!
Looks like you can buy those cards here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0870408852/103-7881259-6999025
Yeah, saw that on amazon. Strange thing is that I can’t find them selling it in store here anymore. Also, the publishers have discontinued volume 2!
I’ve got vol.1, but seems almost impossible to find vol.2 even on Amazon where it seems they are selling an old edition (as it can be said from the cover).
I like the method, as I guess you cannot apply the same method used in Japanese school for children with foreigner adults (writing 1000 times the same kanji). This does not mean it’s perfect or that it works for everyone.
I went to a few bookstores in Tokyo and most of them didn’t have the books. At Maruzen they told me that Vol.2 was now out of print. But I managed to find copies of both at the Yaesu Book Center which nobody hardly goes to these days because you have to climb a lot of stairs to get to the English book section. Anyway, I don’t think you will need Vol.2, it is merely the list of all the kanji again with reading and some vocab. There are no additional stories or plots to help you remember. I think you can just use and other kanji book just as well. That’s probably why they discontinued this Vol.2
oh! This is a valuable piece of info to me! So maybe it’s better to stop searching for vol.2.
Two posts, two good answers…too bad I didn’t ask before.
BTW I’ve got the vol.3, if you need it…
Thanks Roy!