Remembering the Kanji I [Paperback]

Amazon's customer reviews for RTK1 cover a broad spectrum ranging from near-total rejection to devoted acceptance. This is NOT a book that seems to attract many 3-star reviews. As you, the potential consumer of RTK1, debate whether to buy the book or not, I hope my little review will help push you over the edge into the "buy" mentality.

I have given this remarkable book a 5-star rating. RTK1 helps level the "kanji playing field." (Incidentally, you can easily discover if this is "THE KANJI BOOK FOR YOU" by going to google.com and inputting "heisig remembering kanji." Dr. Heisig has convenietly made available his well-reasoned, indeed, history-making introduction as well as downloadable stories for the first 250-or-so kanji that he teaches in his system. If you are 'turned on' by his introduction and his first 100 or so stories, then RTK1 is a good tool for you. You will need the book to build a strong memory foundation for the remaining 1750-or-so kanji used in standard written Japanese.)

Good luck. This book gives a solid foundation to serious students of written Japanese, and I dare say Chinese, too.

Oh, yes, almost forgot. The book is also available in French and Spanish.

The truth is, there is no easy solution to kanji. You just have to buckle down and learn them. And for that, I would recommend Bruce Henshall's _A guide to remembering Japanese characters_ over this book any day. For one thing, the mnemonics Henshall offers are actually based on the real, historical derivations of the kanji. Heisig's are not always so based. For another, you get the various readings of the kanji and some sample compounds for each kanji. I wish he included stroke order for each kanji (since even if you know "the rules" it's not always transparent how to write them), but since if you're serious you'll have a good kanji dictionary anyway you can use that if you need to.

In choosing which kanji to learn you could go in order of appearance in this book, or at later stages you can look up words as you encounter them. Check out Henshall's mnemonic, make it into something meaningful to you, and then put it into your memory system. You NEED a system or your lost. I use Supermemo (a fantastic and cheap program that will come up if you search for it on the net) on my PDA now, but I used to do it on my desktop. It's a better, more efficient version of flashcards. Other people use flashcards which of course works but is a bit ponderous, hard to keep organized, and time consuming since you will review a lot of cards you don't need to.

Then you've got to stick with it. 10 minutes every day is better than an hour on Saturday, BY FAR. Read the memory research and you will see that this is a well-supported finding. I like to set myself periodic goals and go from there. The first year I studied Japanese (when kanji weren't as immediately important), it was to learn the 100 kanji necessary to pass level 4 of the Japanese proficiency test. The next year it was to learn the 300 or so necessary for the next level, and so on.

Words of encouragement: The first 100 were by far the most difficult for me. If you stick with it, you'll find your brain gets adapted to learning this sort of information and you will start to be able to learn fairly large amounts of kanji much more quickly than you could've at first. It's also very mentally satisfying. I have a theory that it adds to our visual intelligence (see Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences). It's also a kick when you discover the kanji for a word that you've sort of known and you go, "Oh, that's where it comes from!" Good luck. It's a long haul and not for the faint-hearted, but the journey does get really fun and interesting in itself after a while. You probably lessen your chances of getting Alzheimer's by studying kanji, too :-)

I've been studying Japanese for 7 years, and can speak fluently. I have tried manifold methods for learning the kanji piecemeal, but have never advanced beyond what a Japanese twelve-year old might know. Upon completion of this book, I'm very confident that I can take this acquired visual memory and run with it to become literate. (Can you hear the chorus of angels in the background?)

If you are just getting started in Japanese but want to get beyond the spoken, take a season to go through this book. You won't regret it.