Easy Kanji

Rating:
Summary: Kanji for a beginner
Review: After many years trying to find a decent introduction to the writing and stroke order of Japenese and Chinese characters I was very pleased with the book's content and found I was able to produce recognisable calligraphy in my work almost immediately. The only downside is as a beginner I was left feeling a litte confused to the Katakana spellings and how to correlate them and also I think you will need some sort of calligraphy practice before tackling these.

Rating:
Summary: A very helpful book
Review: I was looking for a book to supplement my Japanese classes, and I was very pleased to find this. It's a very good book for beginning students of Japanese who'd like to learn more kanji.

It lays out the rules for kanji stroke order, and it groups the kanji by radical, which I appreciate a great deal. I found this book especially helpful because it both supplemented and augmented my existing vocabulary. It's nice to finally have the kanji for many of the words with which I am already familiar but have not yet learned to write in kanji. It has very clear, easy to read, written models of 500 kanji, including stroke order, as well as some very basic lessons in writing sentences with kanji. You do not need to know how to do calligraphy in order to learn these, but it would definitely behoove you to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets before you go for the kanji.

This is probably not the best book for someone who is completely new to the Japanese language, as I would be inclined to say that it would be better to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets (at the very least), as well as some vocabulary and basic grammatical structures before jumping right into learning kanji. It is not intended to be a reference book or a stand-alone instructional manual for the Japanese language. Rather, it is a book that will supplement your other Japanese books nicely.

There are other books available from the author of this book that offer instruction in hiragana/katakana. If you are new to Japanese, I would recommend that you begin there before attempting to work through this book.

If you have a basic vocabulary and a general grasp of very basic grammatical concepts, this should be a nice supplemental book for you. Of course, it won't teach you all that you need to know, but it is a very nice introduction to 500 basic, commonly used kanji. I would certainly not recommend that you try to work your way through a dictionary in order to attempt memorizing random kanji, as they will most likely have no real meaning to you and will therefore be very easily forgotten. However, if you use this book as it is intended....as a supplement to other Japanese instruction, I think that you will find it very helpful. And at this price, it's also quite a bargain.

Rating:
Summary: A very helpful book
Review: I was looking for a book to supplement my Japanese classes, and I was very pleased to find this. It's a very good book for beginning students of Japanese who'd like to learn more kanji.

It lays out the rules for kanji stroke order, and it groups the kanji by radical, which I appreciate a great deal. I found this book especially helpful because it both supplemented and augmented my existing vocabulary. It's nice to finally have the kanji for many of the words with which I am already familiar but have not yet learned to write in kanji. It has very clear, easy to read, written models of 500 kanji, including stroke order, as well as some very basic lessons in writing sentences with kanji. You do not need to know how to do calligraphy in order to learn these, but it would definitely behoove you to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets before you go for the kanji.

This is probably not the best book for someone who is completely new to the Japanese language, as I would be inclined to say that it would be better to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets (at the very least), as well as some vocabulary and basic grammatical structures before jumping right into learning kanji. It is not intended to be a reference book or a stand-alone instructional manual for the Japanese language. Rather, it is a book that will supplement your other Japanese books nicely.

There are other books available from the author of this book that offer instruction in hiragana/katakana. If you are new to Japanese, I would recommend that you begin there before attempting to work through this book.

If you have a basic vocabulary and a general grasp of very basic grammatical concepts, this should be a nice supplemental book for you. Of course, it won't teach you all that you need to know, but it is a very nice introduction to 500 basic, commonly used kanji. I would certainly not recommend that you try to work your way through a dictionary in order to attempt memorizing random kanji, as they will most likely have no real meaning to you and will therefore be very easily forgotten. However, if you use this book as it is intended....as a supplement to other Japanese instruction, I think that you will find it very helpful. And at this price, it's also quite a bargain.

Rating:
Summary: Look for something better
Review: Like anything this book has several positive and negative features. The introduction gave a thorough explanation of the correct stroke order for writing Japanese charaters, which I liked a lot. New kanji are introduced by a shared radical which makes memorization easier. The 3 major downfalls of this book are 1) no index 2) romaji and 3) it's difficult to make any actual use of some of the kanji because most are just listed with a few onyomi readings and no sample words. Fine if your a fairly fluent in Japanese already and know lots of words, but odds are that if you're buying this book you aren't. There is, however, a section at the end that gives sample sentences with Kanji and readings. It's nice, but it's too little too late. What really astounds me is that only after all 500 kanji are presented does the author introduce hiragana and katakana. That's a little backwards.

Point: You can save yourself money if you just buy a kanji dictionary(which you'll need eventually, anyway) and start memorizing it by rote. This book is not worth a buy, but maybe worth checking out at a library.