Remembering the Kanji I: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters Vol.1
| Date: 08 May 2011, 01:40
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http://kanji.koohii.com/ is a great website that aids you through RTK 1-3 and has a great community to back it up.
For general motivation in your quest to learn Japanese, check out http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/
There is also an errata available for the RTK 1:
Review:
This Book Changed My Life
If I were to make a list of the ten most influential books I have ever read, "Remembering the Kanji" would be at the top. Rarely does one come across a book that is so in tune with the way one's own mind works. I recommend this book to anyone who expresses frustration learning kanji. Most use methods directed at native speakers. This one is intended for westerners. I am not exaggerating when I say that James Heisig changed my life by writing this book.
Review:
The best way to literacy
The method described in the book is, in my opinion, the best way to learn Japanese kanji in existence. It took me somewhat upwards of 200 hours to learn all 2000+ standard use kanji. Now not only the Japanese texts are a lot more transparent, since there are no unfamiliar symbols there any more, and not only it is quite often easy to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words, but, most importantly, learning *new* words has just become an order of magnitude easier, since they are now composed of characters whose meaning you can easily recognize.
I recommend to follow this book with Kanji in Context, as it will build on your knowledge of kanji and fill in the needed vocabulary in a systematic way, with kanji readings coming as a free bonus.
Why start with this book at all? Not because knowledge of the "meanings" is that important in itself, but because being able to identify all kanji is a great help at every point further down the line.
Using this method, it would take one substantially less time to learn 2000 kanji AND both readings and writing of say ~2000 words than it would take to *just* learn the readings of those 2000 words alone, and the vocabulary retention would be far better.
Review:
I'd recommend this for serious learners of Japanese
First I'd like to start out by saying I never finished this product completely and only reached lesson 23. I've since started over and figured I would throw in a review since I'm more than satisfied with this product.
Another thing I'd like to add is I think that this book is much better for absolute beginners or relatively new learners of Nihongo. Most of the complaints about this product come from people who have studied Japanese and are around a moderate level. Alot have usually tried at least a few different techniques for learning Kanji, some more effective than others, so when looking at this product generally don't understand the true purpose.
There are major things that this product tries to do:
1. Teach you basic meanings of the 1945 most widely used Kanji
2. Teach you Kanji in a way so that you can recall them from memory easily.
3. Teach you a technique that you can use for new Kanji learned w/o this book.
The author is VERY specific about why he doesn't bother teaching multiple meanings and why it's beneficial to actually be able to write and recall a Kanji from memory before actually trying to match up words with them.
Out of the 3 items I mentioned above I'd say 2 is the biggest benefit of this book and well worth the price if that's all you learn and nothing else. IMO this beats most conventional methods of remembering Kanji (ie: rote repitition, constant writing, quizes and quizes). There are Kanji I learned in this book that I haven't gone over for over half a year yet I can still write and recall them perfectly. Before I used this book it took me 5 days to learn the symbol for 'water' and i forgot it about a week later. With this book I could learn 20 Kanji a day and remember them all a month past.
As I mentioned earlier this book is made more for beginners of learning Kanji who have either n
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