Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 Useful February 23, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is worth its price, but it is not very thorough, so you may not be able to find all of the kanji you need in it.
comprehensive but not ultimately didactic December 10, 2007
Bruce D. Wilner (Alexandria, VA USA)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book offers comprehensive coverage of most (not all) of the characters in everyday use, including the two syllabaries. Adequately thorough essays discuss the history of the Japanese writing system. However, in all honesty, no book can help you master the intricacies of kanji unless your brain is prebuilt for it. You see, kanji consist of hundreds of miniature pictographic elements that are combined and recombined. I refer not to radicals, but to tiny constituents thereof: for example, the compound kanji ('jukugo') for "magazine" is best viewed as 'nine tree chicken words scholar heart'. Now, if you can trivially surmount such extraordinary demands on your memory, you'll do fine, but if you can't, you won't. Remember: even though an American junior high-school student can read (albeit, obviously, not completely understand) a college-level textbook written in English, a Japanese college student is still learning how to read and write Japanese! Almost incredibly, too, the Japanese methodology for inculcating the kanji within the student is not to address the etymological or mini-pictological aspects of the character set, but, rather, drill, drill, drill, drill. No wonder the Japanese are such outstanding imitators but less than stellar initiators!
You might enjoy "Read Japanese Today" by Len Walsh.
A USEFUL REFRENCE BOOK August 26, 2007
Cesar Diaz (Bogota, COLOMBIA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I've been studying Japanese language for five years already, and I've learned that there's neither an easy method nor a method for everyone. To me, mnemonics are the best, and this book is the second best supplement I've found to my own learning idiosyncrasies. I owned a copy when I lived in Japan, and now that I'm back in my country I ordered another as a companion to James W. Heisig's Remembering The Kanji. I use Heisig's book a lot more though, because it has an arrangement that's particularly helpful to learn kanji by association, something Kanji&Kana doesn't have. On the other hand, all the introductory chapters about the history of kanji in Japan and the developement of the kana syllabaries are concise and informative, and the Jinmei-yo kanji section really helps to read names, something particularly tricky to foreigners. All in all, this book alone won't give you a method, but it's an excellent back up, and gives you a lot for the money. I wouldn't suggest it for beginners, but who knows.
A great book to start learning Kanji with November 10, 2006
nm156
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I originally picked this book up in a bookstore with the intention of learning a few random kanji so I could practice writing; I basically thought kanji were just really cool to look at. However, not long after that, I came to the conclusion that it would really be more useful to learn what the characters actually meant. So, with no prior knowledge of Japanese, I began to study kanji, meaning, pronunciation and stroke order, and this book proved to be a great tool. In the introductory pages, a brief history of the development of the Japanese writing system is given, along with a stroke order explanation, hiragana/katakana tables, and examples of Japanese punctuation marks.
The main body consists of the standard 1,945 Jouyou-kanji and 285 Jinmeiyou-kanji. For each Jouyou-kanji, the stroke order, pronunciation, meanings and up to five compound words are given. You can look up kanji through pronunciation, stroke order, or radical system. Although there are officially 214 radicals in Japanese, this book reduces the number to 79 by the reasoning that the remaining radicals aren't so common.
I learned 200-300 kanji with this book, and then picked the Kodansha Kanji Learner Dictionary, which is also good, for a good price. However, I prefer the character order in Kanji and Kana to the learner dictionary. In fact when studying from the learner dictionary, I still referred to and followed the order as listed in Kanji & Kana. I believe one of the reviews for this book says that there is no logical order to the characters, and that he prefers the order as learned in Japan. I don't think the order is illogical; in the first several pages, you will learn the kanji for person, sun/Japan, the elements, numbers, directions, etc. Throughout the book, in most cases the subsequent kanji is related to the previous either in pronunciation, a shared radical, or theme/meaning. A non-native speaker of Japanese shouldn't be expected to learn the same way as Japanese children do. Not only can they speak before they learn to read, but they will continue to learn for the next several years up through high-school.
I really can't think of many complaints about this book. Perhaps that there aren't enough compounds given for each character. But owning a Japanese dictionary or another kanji dictionary should fulfill that purpose.
I have been studying kanji for a few years now, and I still refer to this book. It is great not only for the beginner to start learning, but also for the advanced learner who needs to review. The price is great, too; you should be able to pick it up for ten dollars or less.
 Very handy kanji reference September 19, 2006
Magnus (Chandler, Arizona USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
It is true this book is more for beginners. But as such, I found it to be the best tool for learning all the common kanji. Yes, there are other more exhaustive references, but it is a LOT harder to find the kanji you are looking for in those books. I have Nelson's character dictionary with about 5000 kanji and I hardly use it.
Kanji & Kana has plenty of examples, 4-5 for each character, but the main characters are used many other times subsequently in compounds with other kanji characters. So, for example, there may be 4 examples using the character for PERSON, but many other more advanced kanji also form compound words with PERSON, so you will find additional examples throughout the book. Both ON (Chinese) and KUN (Japanese) readings are given. The characters are ordered so that the most commonly used ones appear first, so that compound words you encounter later always reference only characters that have already been covered. This ordering may bother some who like to look up characters by radicals. Never fear, you have 3 indices in the back to look up characters based on reading, or radicals, or stroke count. Very handy.
This was my only Kanji dictionary while I studied Japanese for 2 years in college, and it is still my favorite.
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