Rating: 
Summary: Thank you Mr. Heisig!
Review: This book changed my life! The method is ingenious, simple, effective. Before finding that book, I tried to learn 3 Kanji a day the traditional way, only to find out that I forgot most of them after 2 months, now I'm learning 20 a day and they're here to stay!
Rating: 
Summary: Lacks an important element in studying kanji....
Review: This book has some good examples to help you remember Kanji. HOWEVER what good is trying to learn kanji when the book doesn't even tell you how the word is actually pronounced. In this book you get the Kanji character and what the character means in English, but it fails to tell you how the word is pronounced in Japanese. It doesnt even have to be written in Hiragana or Katakana, Romaji would do. But there is nothing to show you how the word is read. I find this to be a -huge- flaw in a book that is supposed to help you learn Kanji.
Instead look into purchasing Kanji Pict-O-Graphix, a much better choice in Kanji learning and comprehension. There are plenty of other books that are better than
"Remembering the Kanji", so look into them instead.
Rating:
Summary: Great supplement for Japanese and Chinese study
Review: This book is invaluable for learning the meaning of the Kanji characters quickly. As many reviewers noted, it does not teach the Japanese pronunciation of the Kanji, which means you must go through other books to fully master Japanese (which you have to do regardless). That said, this is a great book, particularly for those who are at first intimidated by the thousands of Kanji and find out how incredibly easy it is to learn them. The advantages of this book really boil down to three principles:
1. Breaking complex Kanji into simple components. It is easy to learn the simple components, which he calls primitives and which overlap with radicals to a large extent.
2. Emphasizing the use of imaginative memory rather than rote memory. It is much easier to remember a character when you can think of a story that links the simple components.
3. Most importantly, and frequently overlooked in the reviews, is the *organization* of the list. Rather than following the grade levels Japanese students learn the Kanji, RTK uses a building block approach. This means you only study a Kanji after you have learned its components. You also repeatedly use the components so that remembering the meaning of the component is no problem at all. For example, after learning the character for "water" you will repeatedly use it as a component of new characters. This gives you a hint about what the new characters mean and makes remembering "water" automatic.
While some reviewers believe learning the meaning only and not the Japanese pronunciation is a disadvantage, I believe it is a big advantage. The reason is that you can learn the meaning much faster and thus build a large vocabulary quickly. As you learn Japanese through other methods, such as Japanese for Busy People and Pimsleur, it becomes quite easy to attach the correct pronunciation to the relevant Kanji.
Finally, a nice side advantage to focusing on the meaning independent of the pronunciation is that your resulting bigger vocabulary will improve your Chinese reading comprehension. After going through the three books in this series, your Chinese reading comprehension will be further along than you might expect.
As a couple readers mentioned, the free Kanji Gold flashcard program (do a Google search) is great when used with RTK. You can review the Kanji in the same order as this book, it breaks out all the radicals for each Kanji, it shows the different pronunciations of the characters, and it shows many compounds. You can also create your own Kanji list (up to a little over 6,000) if you want to keep going beyond this book's list.
Rating: 
Summary: Negative Reviewers Have Missed The Frickin' Point
Review: This book is meant to be a breadth-first survey of the kanji. It is admittedly useless by itself, but in covering the entire ground it produces a foundation of familiarity that will be built upon with further study & exposure.I hated kanji when studying it in college, found Henshall to be interesting but useless as a memorization guide (his "mnemonic" entries tended to the counter-productive). The two critical points of Heisig's book are: 1) Building an association between the english "codeword" and a mental narrative of the corresponding character's components 2) Ordering the lessons to study the common component kanji before the more complicated composed kanji, and grouping lessons to target a single common component (or shared group of components). #1 is indeed revolutionary, and really works. #2 is obvious, but the "educational" ordering (used in eg. Henshall) has LOTS of kanji "out of order". During my first year in Japan, I discovered this book -- in one memorable month I crammed over a thousand characters, often pounding stacks of 50 or 100 in one go. I'm giving this book 4 stars because the edition I used had some errors, and probably the current edition could still use some editing & revision.
Rating:
Summary: Response to previous reviews
Review: This book sets out to teach you to the meaning and writing of the Joyo kanji and the kanji commonly used in name as well as a handful of other useful kanji. While admittedly it does not cover all the possible meanings of the kanji, it reasonably approximates its goal with one meaning with each kanji. The main point of me writing this is to address the previous reviews of this book. Notice that this is part I of a three book series. Book II is meant to address the readings of the Kanji that are lamentedly absent in the first volume. Also, unless one is already entirely fluent in Japanese odds are that they will not even know any words in Japanese that contain some characters, thus adding further burden to any systemized attempt at learning kanji. And to complicate matters there are many kanji that only occur in compounds that have meanings difficult to extract and pin down to a single word. The author asserts that if one can memorize the meanings and shapes of the characters, then later adding in the readings is a relatively simple and straightforward process. After having studied Japanese for four and a half years I would concur with this assertion. If your goal is only to be able to see and recognize the kanji, any system will work about the same for you. However, if you actually want to be able to write Japanese by hand, then despite how dumb all these little stories may seem at first I believe this book will be a great aid. Bottom line: I agree with the author that devoting time to exclusively learning the shapes and meaning of the characters through systemized mnemonics and then tackling the readings separately is easier and will give one a better chance of actually learning and remembering the characters than trying to absorb the information all at once and just writing the character a million times trying to burn it into your memory. I recommend this book for those who would like to take the first step.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth the money and overly confusing...
Review: This book starts with the basic kanji and in the first 100 pages or so, you can get along with the different stories which can make you remember the characters. But after a while, the author tries hard to make up stories which in my opinion do not fit and do not make sense. And on top of that he starts to refresh the definition of basic kanji everytime to make it fit to the composite ones.
Well it makes you confuse in the middle. And the book is really expensive (at least in Singapore!). Also you don't get to learn the pronunciation of any of the kanji. It's not worth spending that kind of money. I would recommend instead the book "Kanji Pict-O-Graphix: Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics by Michael Rowley" which is much much better in making you recall.
Rating:
Summary: Don't be a Baka
Review: Those people who wrote bad reviews are completely out of their minds. WAKE UP YOU DORKS! Look at something before you buy it. If you had even opened the book before buying it you would have noticed that there are NO READINGS FOR THE KANJI! That is the fundamental principle of Heisig's book.
That being said, you must take this book as the Kanji Rosetta Stone. I have been studying Japanese for years and am well past the intermediate stage. Oh, by the way, I live in Japan too. Upon my arrival, I already knew several hundred Kanji but frequently forgot how to write them. That is what this book teaches. That's it. If you don't know jack about Kanji and are looking for the that chimera of instant kanji gratification, go elsewhere. If you want to master the writing of over 2000 kanji, this is for you. This book is for people seeking ADVANCED LITERACY in Japanese. This book is not for completely illiterate English teachers living in Japan trying to stumble their way through the menu at their local izakaya.
If you are a beginning student I recommend this book. It will definitely help you when you start formally learning Kanji. If you already have an advanced vocabulary and are trying to remember some sort of organization for the knaji you already know, this is for you. If you are trying to hack through the hentai manga you just bought at the train station then this book is going to offer a world of frustration. With patience and perseverance, this book will pay off in the long run better than any other method on the market. And unless you are a total blockhead the readings of the kanji will naturally present themselves.
Rating:
Summary: Don't read a review, see it for yourself
Review: Tired of reading reviews and still not being decided? Well, you're lucky, because Dr. Heisig is a permanent fellow of the Nanzan Institute, and Nanzan's website hosts a PDF file containing the first part of the book, that is, the guide to learn 276 characters. Just search in Google for "Heisig kanji" and in the first or second page of results you'll get a link to the Nanzan institute. There are also a couple of "errata" files that you must download in order to bypass the typos. These erratas also allow you to have a peek to how the course develops in later lessons. By the way, there are also an Spanish and a French version of the book.
About flashcards, you don't need to create thousands of them for reviewing; you can use a program such as KanjiGold, Stackz! or VTrain. These programs can be set to make you review only when you need to. That is, they follow theories about the gradual fading of memory. One of them even includes Heisig's list of kanjis.
And for those concerned about the lacking of pronunciations and rules of coumpound-making: Those are taught in book II of this series of three books (Book III guides you to other useful 1000 characters and their pronunciations, and with those, you sum up about 3000 characters, equal to most educated native speakers), and, in fact, it is a lot better to focus on one task at a time.
It is true that some of the mnemonic stories might not make sense for you, but you can always make up your own, and in fact, you're encouraged to do that gradually!
Rating:
Summary: A great book, but you have to know how to use it!
Review: To begin, this is not a book to learn how to pronounce kanji. This book teaches you how to recognize & remember each kanji, and it does an incredible job of it. I first learned Japanese in college, and was taught the traditional romanji -> hiragana -> some kanji method. It stunk. I wish I had this book in school (and strangely enough, we used Hielsig's other wonderful books (in two books at that time) for learning Hiragana/Katakana in the class) You will learn the kanji with this book, and in such an easy way! I split the kanji into percentages, with about 100 kanji representing 5% of the total, and I had 5% of the total kanji under my belt in the first 2 weeks. As a final note, the review before this mentioned using flash cards. I know Heilsig had a method in his learning katakana book for a "learning box" using flash cards. I used it & I would highly recommend you look in the book for that technique. Buy this book, you will not be disappointed!
Rating: 
Summary: Almost useless
Review: Yes, the simple meaning of each kanji is presented (in unbearably saccharine prose), but there is absolutely no indication of the Japanese pronunciation. Perhaps useful if you never intend to speak the language, but useless if you are trying to learn the actual words associated with each character. There is not a single word of Japanese to be found anywhere in the book, so the only thing you will take away is: kanji 1 = english anecdote, kanji 2 = another english anecdote. And so on.
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