Guide to Writing Kanji and Kana, Book 2: A Self-Study Workbook for Learning Japanese Characters (Guide to Writing Kanji & Kana)

Rating:
Summary: 75% small boxes.
Review: I bought this book under the impression that I would learn lots of Kanji if I worked through it, but I was very wrong.

This book is boring. It lists about 1200 kanji, but all it is a list and some boxes for you to practice writing them in. Sure, it shows you the stroke order and compounds, but everything is written in roma-ji, and the compounds aren't that useful anyway. You aren't going to learn much, even if you do fill up the boxes with Kanji. There are no exercises to increase recognition, and if you have never encountered the words before, simply learning the Kanji will not teach you how to use the word. If you have learned the word before, most likely you learned the Kanji along with the word. Don't make the same mistake I did and buy this book. There are much better books for learning Kanji.

Rating:
Summary: good for writing practice, but not for memorizing characters
Review: I've owned this book and others for several years.
This is the book I turn to when I want to practice/learn HOW TO WRITE a character.

As one other reviewer said, it's 75% white boxes (practice space), that you'll be tempted to simply xerox, so your practice won't mar the pristene book.

On a positive note, however, each character DOES come with a breakdown of its various pronunciations (and a handy index based on that, so you can look up words based on their pronunciations). You're also given 4 or 5 common compound words in which the character appears, and reference numbers so you can find pages about the OTHER characters in those compounds.

If your goal is training your hand for writing in Japanese, this book's a good choice. It shows stroke order and bookish-versions of the characters as well as typical handwritten versions. The value of this will be apparent if you think how different an "a" or a "t" in a book looks, compared to how you write them in a handwritten note. The quick-scribble versions, however, are NOT listed (wherein, for example, the 4 leg-dashes at the bottom of the HORSE character become a single elongated dash). This is a common flaw in almost all kanji-for-foreigner books, though, so we can't blame this book more than others.

If your goal is to learn Kanji so you can read and remember Japanese, then this book won't fit your goal.
Typically, Japanese people learn by this "rote" method. (rote = copy-copy-copy-the-character-til-it's-drilled-into-your-memory) However, that's a tedious mind-numbing activity, and not exactly speedy.

If you want to learn to recognize Japanese characters, I'd instead recommend a book like "Kanji Pict-o-Graphix : Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics
by Michael Rowley"

or

"Remembering the Kanji: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters
by James W. Heisig"

Rating:
Summary: Great help in Japanese study!
Review: This book is one of the best self-study guides I've ever laid my eyes on! The instructions are very clear, starting with tips on how to learn the characters best, and ending with the direction of the brush strokes when writing them. If you are serious about learning Japanese, I would definitely recommend this wonderful book.