Rating: 
Summary: Learn to recognise 200 kanji without really trying
Review: As a first kanji book, this is excellent; it got me hooked on learning kanji. It's short but straight to the point, and very easy to read. It starts off describing how the simpler characters came to be, and builds on these as it shows how they are combined to form the more complex characters.In total, about 250 characters are explained. The book gives some readings (in romaji) for each character, and example compounds in some cases too. There are no mnemonics for learning the readings, however, and the book does not describe how to write the characters. Some of the etymologies differ from more accepted versions. For example, "iro" (colour) is described as a person leaning over a window rather than over another person. However, the author's interpretations do have great mnemonic value. Generally, he is very good at tying the original meaning of a character to its modern meaning; sometimes they may appear to be unrelated, but he is able to make them seem logically connected, which is what makes them memorable. I recommend this as your first kanji book. It requires only a very small investment in money and time, and is fun to read. And it will give you a good grounding in kanji recognition for when you move on to a more thorough book.
Rating: 
Summary: Reads like a story
Review: As advertised, this book is an excellent introduction to about 300 common kanji. Walsh wrote the book with a flow that allows you to read it like a story. The characters are explained in terms of the evolution from ancient Chinese drawings to modern kanji. Walsh also gives the various pronunciations of each, as well as examples of how you will see them in context. My primary criticism is the lack of an index or headings. Walsh will say, "the following are based on animals," where a heading would be more functional. Along with the lack of an index, the book cannot easily be used as a quick reference. However, I highly recommend this for anyone interested in the basics of kanji. It is an excellent first step before moving on to more advanced study.
Rating:
Summary: Reads like a story
Review: As advertised, this book is an excellent introduction to about 300 common kanji. Walsh wrote the book with a flow that allows you to read it like a story. The characters are explained in terms of the evolution from ancient Chinese drawings to modern kanji. Walsh also gives the various pronunciations of each, as well as examples of how you will see them in context. My primary criticism is the lack of an index or headings. Walsh will say, "the following are based on animals," where a heading would be more functional. Along with the lack of an index, the book cannot easily be used as a quick reference. However, I highly recommend this for anyone interested in the basics of kanji. It is an excellent first step before moving on to more advanced study.
Rating: 
Summary: would not recommend!
Review: for a first time learner of the japanese language this book was NOT very helpful. I don't understand why it had such high reviews... I am now off to the bookstore to hopefully find something that will actually help me.
Rating:
Summary: Very nice for the price
Review: I just bought this book two days ago and cannot put it down. Mr Walsh gives a good account of how the Chinese first devised their pictographic writing system, and how it was later borrowed by the Japanese. He supplies each kanji with a mnemonic device that makes it easy to remember. The book is written such that it is very accessible to the complete beginner. I agree with the reviewer who recommended getting this book as a first introduction to learning the kanji. To learn the kana, I would recommend Heisig's "Remembering the Hiragana" and Morsbach and Heisig's "Remembering the Katakana".
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book on Kanji .The book to start .
Review: I've read and reread this work since buying it many years ago. It came in handy when we traveled to Japan: I actually understood much of what I was looking at--at least on signage--while the overwhelming majority of tourists stared dumfounded. A word of advice: I would look into Chinese first--please check out Diane Wolff's marvelous "Chinese for Beginners"--inasmuch as Japanese writing was built on top of Chinese. You'll get much more out of Walsh if you read Wolff first. Also, don't think for a moment that, just because you recognize a kanji, you know the meaning of the phrase in which it appears. We learned the hard way that the Japanese mind combines characters and components of characters in _very_ peculiar ways--it was often quite a surprise when a native told us what that sign over there actually meant after we told him what we ambitious gaijin thought it meant! Walsh's book cannot possibly equip you in only a couple of hundred pages to understand why "lawful-language" means "French," or why "self-move-concentrate-mind" means "Caution: automatic door"--or why "water" means "Wednesday" on that poster! Also, bear in mind that some of Walsh's explanations for the derivation of various kanji are suspect. That doesn't really matter, of course, if his mnemonic helps you remember it--as long as you're not a philologist. Take it for what it's worth, and enjoy your heart out!
Rating:
Summary: Get this book!!!!
Review: If you want to learn to read kanji, there's no faster or easier way to pick up the basics than reading this book. When Walsh promises you'll be able to read basic Japanese after "Read Japanese Today", he's not kidding. And the way it's written, you read it like you would fiction or easy non-ficiton and you pick up the Japanese characters without even realizing it!
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic, essential little book for Japanese learners
Review: The formidable hieroglyphic writing system used by Japanese is perhaps the most intimidating challenge, among many, for native English speakers. Adopted from the ancient Chinese script in the 3rd century, the Japanese written word can seem indecipherable at first glance, like a modern Rosetta Stone. But Len Walsh actually makes sense of it in this splendid little book. He organizes each character group into categories like tools, animals, derivatives of the hand, money, and the like. He shows how the Chinese script began with approximations of basic, concrete objects in nature-- the hand, the sun, the mouth, the eye, the horse, the dog, and so on-- and then began to encompass abstract concepts via metaphors, stories, and incidents involving the concrete ones. You see how the basic characters, squared off and standardized to allow for easy writing, are incorporated as radicals into more complex ones, and how compounds are formed to represent basic concepts. And since you'll learn this history, you'll learn how to glean the meaning of a character based on its constituents. You learn, for example, how the character for "mura" ("village") came about, uniting the radicals for "tree" and "law" (the latter itself a metaphorical extension of a character for "measure"), with the village symbolizing a social structure that brought law out of the tree-lined jungle. You'll learn how the character for "name" (Japanese "na" or "mei") arose from a combination of "evening" and "mouth"-- stemming from an ancient Chinese practice of sentries demanding the names of passersby at night. Thus you not only learn the characters themselves, but gain an insight into ancient Chinese and Japanese culture. Each character is not only drawn out and linked to a word in English; its reading (pronunciation) in Japanese is given as well. Japanese characters generally have multiple readings, which vary depending on whether the character is used as a standalone word in a sentence, or one character in a compound that represents another word (e.g. a stone being "ishi" by itself and "seki"-- as in "sekiyu," petroleum-- in compounds). The standalone reading is usually native Japanese, while the reading in compounds is quite frequently borrowed from the equivalent Chinese word-- although just as French-derived English words, derived usually from Old/Middle French, differ from modern French, the modern Chinese equivalent will often vary somewhat from the Japanese. Walsh illustrates the history of the characters based on the Shuo Wen Chie Tsu, the classic source from the 2nd Century A.D. explicating the origin of the Chinese characters. Walsh's own drawings are lucid and comprehensible, and the story of many characters' origins often quite humorous (still trying to figure out how "mono," meaning "thing," arose from the combination of a cow and an elephant). In any case, you should pick up this book even if you intend only to learn spoken Japanese. You'll acquire a feel for how the vast majority of Japanese words were assembled from simpler compounds, and you'll sense the logic of the design. A very highly recommended book.
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic, essential little book for Japanese learners
Review: The formidable hieroglyphic writing system used by Japanese is perhaps the most intimidating challenge, among many, for native English speakers. Adopted from the ancient Chinese script in the 3rd century, the Japanese written word can seem indecipherable at first glance, like a modern Rosetta Stone. But Len Walsh actually makes sense of it in this splendid little book. He organizes each character group into categories like tools, animals, derivatives of the hand, money, and the like. He shows how the Chinese script began with approximations of basic, concrete objects in nature-- the hand, the sun, the mouth, the eye, the horse, the dog, and so on-- and then began to encompass abstract concepts via metaphors, stories, and incidents involving the concrete ones. You see how the basic characters, squared off and standardized to allow for easy writing, are incorporated as radicals into more complex ones, and how compounds are formed to represent basic concepts. And since you'll learn this history, you'll learn how to glean the meaning of a character based on its constituents. You learn, for example, how the character for "mura" ("village") came about, uniting the radicals for "tree" and "law" (the latter itself a metaphorical extension of a character for "measure"), with the village symbolizing a social structure that brought law out of the tree-lined jungle. You'll learn how the character for "name" (Japanese "na" or "mei") arose from a combination of "evening" and "mouth"-- stemming from an ancient Chinese practice of sentries demanding the names of passersby at night. Thus you not only learn the characters themselves, but gain an insight into ancient Chinese and Japanese culture. Each character is not only drawn out and linked to a word in English; its reading (pronunciation) in Japanese is given as well. Japanese characters generally have multiple readings, which vary depending on whether the character is used as a standalone word in a sentence, or one character in a compound that represents another word (e.g. a stone being "ishi" by itself and "seki"-- as in "sekiyu," petroleum-- in compounds). The standalone reading is usually native Japanese, while the reading in compounds is quite frequently borrowed from the equivalent Chinese word-- although just as French-derived English words, derived usually from Old/Middle French, differ from modern French, the modern Chinese equivalent will often vary somewhat from the Japanese. Walsh illustrates the history of the characters based on the Shuo Wen Chie Tsu, the classic source from the 2nd Century A.D. explicating the origin of the Chinese characters. Walsh's own drawings are lucid and comprehensible, and the story of many characters' origins often quite humorous (still trying to figure out how "mono," meaning "thing," arose from the combination of a cow and an elephant). In any case, you should pick up this book even if you intend only to learn spoken Japanese. You'll acquire a feel for how the vast majority of Japanese words were assembled from simpler compounds, and you'll sense the logic of the design. A very highly recommended book.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Start for you Japanese Training
Review: This book first off explains about how the Japanese language was adopted from the Chinese language. It also explains how the Chinese first made their language and simplifying it. It explains and it very helpful, but it explains so much at one time. It explains the written word, its name, and how it is used in compund words. Very confusing but also helpful once you get the hang of it!
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