Japanese written characters, or kanji, have their origin in a picture-language developed in ancient China. Over time this language evolved into stylized abstract forms that are difficult to memorize. This delightful book presents 1,200 kanji with readings, main definitions, standard printed forms, and visual and text mnemonics to make them easier to remember. Fully indexed and cross-referenced. Winner of several international design awards.
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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Succeeds admirably at what it's supposed to do:
As a background, I have already tried a few different books as an independent learner. I was told that I could get away with learning the language without learning the writing systems, but that seemed like a cop out. And in any case, it seemed silly to ignore reading and writing, since that forms such a vital part of communication. This book's premise is so brilliant that I'm surprised it hasn't been done before and I'm glad I found it. Pros: 1) The cover and titly imply that the book is all... more info
japanese ? easy...:
a fun way to (try) to learn kanji...
you can even give signs on passing (japanese) trucks a go ! you'll be surprised...
Okay if you know what you're looking for:
I'm self teaching myself Japanese and Kanji definetly is a hard hurdle to master. While I've only so far used this book to learn Kanji (along with [...]), suffice it to say you need quite a few different methods/tools to learn this difficult aspect of Japanese language. While this book is helpful if you know what you are looking for (by looking back in the glossary for the corresponding Japanese romanji term), it's too much to just to go through and try to learn all of the words, unless you're looking for... more info
Good for Learning Japanese, but Not Chinese:
I am a student of both Japanese and Chinese. When I came across this book, I thought it would be fabulous to kill two birds with one stone since the description said that it had both Japanese and Chinese pronunciation. It does have pretty helpful Japanese pronunciation (although there should be hiragana to make it less confusing) but the Chinese pronunciation is from 2,000 years ago. How helpful is Chinese pronunciation from 2,000 years ago to a student learning modern colloquial Mandarin Chinese? I find... more info
