This is a great book, which uses some very well-designed associative pictures (or "visual mnemonics") to help you remember kanji (and also hiragana and katakana). The book is very inventive and the visual method really works. It has about 1,200 kanji in total, but they don't include all of the JLPT kanji and are grouped by topics, not difficulty level or frquency of use. So while I wouldn't recommend using it as the sole basis of your studies, it's fun to look through and may help you look at the kanji in a new way.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61066 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Synopsis
This guide presents 1200 Japanese characters with readings, main definitions, standard printed forms, and visual and text mnemonics to make them easier to remember.

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Customer Reviews

Attractive, useful supplement but largely useless.
I like this book. Its good for kana, and it can help you see the way kanji are formed and their regular nature. It`s just there`s so much that could be done with this format, but just isn`t. Where oh where are the compounds (1 page!), these are what makes Kanji so difficult to remember. Learning the ENGLISH menmonmics is all very well but you won`t be able to read anything in Japanese. I would suggest using this book as a supplement for difficult Kanji you fail to remember repeatedly.... BUT so many pain in the a*s Kanji are omitted and may more obscure ones are included for artist value. There`s no hiragana in the main text, so you are limited to romanji (inaccurate and time consuming)

All in all remember, there are no nice, soft cuddly ways of learning Kanji.It isn`t fun, but its possible. Find something Japanese people use to teach there kids in a methodical, logical order.

Good fun but not useful as study tool
Buying and reading this book has been amusing. The covered kanjis are all illustrated wonderfully with funny, shocking and frank pictures. The layout is good and the book has some great mnemonic s for remembering kana.

But it is not a way to learn kanji, far from it. In fact, its nigh-on useless if you plan on going anywhere with kanji. The approach taken by this book is very unsystematical. You are not taught how to draw a kanji either.

For the same money you would be better off with a stack of flash cards really. This book really should be categorized as art or entertainment, since I find it of little to no use as a self-study tool. If you are serious about kanji, check out James Heisigs works instead.

Useful and fun, but not everything you need
This book is very good at what it tries to do: provide visual mnemonics to help you recognise kanji and remember their meanings. And it's very bad at the things it doesn't try to do: teach readings, compounds, or how to actually read the kanji in genuine Japanese text.

"Kanji Pict-o-graphix" is a fun book to browse when you're not feeling up to some serious study. But it's not a workbook. You can't just sit down and learn some kanji from this book, not in a way that will help you in the real world.

However, it is an excellent supplement to a more structured workbook like "Let's Learn Kanji" (ISBN: 4770020686). If you've got a proper textbook, workbook, or taught course, then "Kanji Pict-o-graphix" goes great by the side to help you associate meanings with the radicals you learn.

"Snow" is built from the symbols for "rain" and "hand": so remember "snow is rain you can hold". The kanji for "Left" and "Right" differ only in one component meaning "construct" and "mouth" respectively: so remember "work with your left hand, eat with your right". Simple mnemonics like this are a great assistant to a more formal workbook.

It is marred by a number of simple errors in the cross-referencing: printing "702" instead of "704", "100" instead of "653", and so on. This is slightly irritating, but only in the cross-references for kanji components and not a major problem, because you can easily find the correct reference yourself.