Remembering the Kanji 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters

*Remembering the Kanji* by James W. Heisig is the ultimate brain-tickling tome for mastering Japanese characters! This isn’t just a book—it’s a *ninja-level memory dojo* that turns kanji chaos into a wild, mnemonic-fueled adventure.It delivers:- Stories so quirky, you’ll recall 2,000+ kanji like they’re your besties’ nicknames.- A method so slick, it’s like sneaking veggies into a smoothie—learning feels *fun*.- Confidence to flex your kanji skills at sushi joints or anime marathons.Perfect for language nerds, Japanophiles, or anyone who wants to decode kanji without losing their mind, this book’s a game-changer. Gift it, and watch them scribble characters like a calligraphy rockstar—while secretly plotting to name their cat “Radical 42”!

So, I bought this on a hunch, and picked it up in earnest after learning Hiragana mostly by repetition and some visual cues. I couldn't imagine that way lasting me into learning the Kanji as well, so I was glad I had an alternative way of doing so!The premise of the book is that writing the Kanji and reading them (while sounding out Japanese) can be learned separately, and so far I wholeheartedly agree. This volume teaches only the first part - writing them.The book reorders the Chinese/Japanese pictograms in an order that allows building more complex ones from simpler ones that you learn first. Each kanji is assigned an English keyword related to the meaning of the Kanji. Then the book creates a little story for each kanji as to how it can be produced from other Kanji or "primitives" - patterns that often reappear in many different Kanji but may not be Kanji in their own right. Or helpful keywords a simple Kanji can serve as in other Kanji.Example:月 is the Kanji for "month," but you can also remember it as "moon" (moon and month are related after all, like in the lunar calendar), or as "flesh" or "body part" when using it as building block.月月 then forms "companion", and the sentence used to memorize it is something like "flesh of own flesh", like Eve was given as companion to Adam. (Don't worry, religion doesn't play a big role here - whatever makes for convenient recall is used.)The moon Kanji then reappears in kanji like "morning", "tide", but also in various parts of the body like "gland", "elbow", "stomach", or "gall bladder."The stories presented for helping remember the Kanji have been constructed by the author so far, and he has a real hunch for making stories that are memorable because they either work really well or alternatively because the mind balks at them, making them all the more memorable. You don't have to be a visual learner to benefit - I'm definitely not one. I remember the stories and their parts, and that works just as fine. It's more about imagination than visual memory.For study revision I use the free Anki software on Windows and its companion app AnkiDroid that presents you with "cards" for revision. You can download free decks for study inspired by this book that have kept the author's advice for making revision cards: They show you the keyword and you write out the Kanji, then you can "flip" them and compare your anwer and rate it. For convenience I keep two "decks" - the original from which I take cards and "move" them to a "study deck", so that my study deck is always up-to-date with my progress in the book. And both decks and your study progress within a deck can by synced between desktop and phone.The more I have revised them, the more immediate I become at producing Kanji from keywords. The brain might still make a short reference to the story, but this you barely notice as you make progress.Once you have learned to produce the kanji by keywords, sounding them out is taught in a separate volume, following a similar method. Ironically, when having finished this book (volume 1), you should be able to read the basic meaning of many Japanese writings without speaking Japanese, closing the gap a bit on the advantage Chinese and Korean students enjoy when taking on the Japanese language. You still need to learn the syllabic Hiragana and Katakana writing systems as well, as the Japanese use these to write down the grammar part of a sentence and Japanese-only words (Hiragana) or foreign loan words and transliterations (Katakana).Learning to read Japanese language is a daunting task, but this book is a great help for getting one of the trickiest part down with more ease than in most language courses. To me, it has been fun so far!

This book is awesome. It presents kanji in a logical manner, allowing you to learn the kanji that make up other kanji first, which makes it much easier to learn and remember more complex kanji. It focuses on using what Heisig calls "imaginative memory" by coming up with simple stories to go with each kanji based on the primitives that make it up. For instance, the kanji for jealous is made up of the kanji for woman and stone, and Heisig suggests that you remember it based on the idea that a woman is jealous of the ring with a large stone on another woman's finger. Another example would be the kanji for bribe, which is made up of the kanji for money and possess, which you can then remember based on the idea that someone who has been bribed has been possessed by money or that you've possessed them using money. I think that my favorite is the one for elder brother, which is made up of the kanji for mouth and human feet (and used in other kanji to represent teenager); a mouth with feet is very obviously connected with a teenager or elder brother who's a teenager. The keywords that he uses for each kanji are often an oversimplification, I think, but it works well for learning them.This approach works better for some kanji than others (e.g. petition is made up of the kanji for meadow and head, and Heisig comes up with some story about you petitioning the Wizard of Oz's head in a meadow, which is downright weird, but it's not like it's symbol combination that has an obvious connection with the meaning of the resulting kanji). So, it's by no means perfect, but it's _way_ better than learning each of the kanji individually based on the frequency that they're used without taking into account which kanji are used to build other kanji. You get a very organized approach to constructing each of the kanji and making them easy to remember (or at least easier to remember) rather than trying to learn how to draw each of them without taking each of the others into account.Now, that being said, I think that Heisig puts too much store in imaginative memory and thinks that you shouldn't be practicing drawing each kanji over and over to help remember it. I have to argue that using multiple memory mechanisms is going to improve your chances of remembering something, and writing stuff down definitely helps. So, I think that practicing each character several times rather than just memorizing which kanji make it up and writing it maybe once (as Heisig seems to think you should do) is a worse approach. But the tools that he's giving you by organizing the kanji based on which other kanji make them up as well as giving you ways to remember them based on those pieces rather than simply what the kanji looks like as a whole are an _enormous_ help and makes learning more complex kanji far easier. So, while I don't agree with everything that he says, I think that his overall approach is very good. And since I'm an engineer, how logical and organized his system is is _very_ appealing to me.Now, a serious downside to all of this is that you're learning the kanji in a very different order than anything else is going to use. So, you're not going to get much help from elsewhere (and Heisig actually says that he thinks that learning the kanji using his method combines very badly with more traditional methods such that you shouldn't use this book if you're taking classes or using other textbooks at the same time). It also only covers the kanji themselves and not pronunciation or grammar or anything like that - which I don't think is a bad thing (Heisig points out that it makes it so that when you do learn those things, you're in a position closer to that which a Chinese person would be in, since they'd be familiar with the kanji and their rough meanings but not how they related to Japanese), but the other volumes are supposed to go into that stuff (I haven't gotten to them yet, so I can't comment on them in detail). But even if you were to switch to other textbooks after having learn the kanji covered in volume 1 of this series, you'd be able to go through them that much faster, because you'd recognize the characters and know how to write them, which is obviously a _huge_ barrier to learning Japanese.On a last note, I'd highly recommend that you pick up the mobile app that goes with this (at the moment, it's under $2). In addition to listing all of the characters in the order that they're in the book, giving you a handy referencee, it shows you how to draw them with an animation (the book shows you which order to draw each stroke but not the direction of the stroke), and it can be used for flash cards, which is fantastic (even allowing you to pick which kanji are in a study list rather than just having a preset set of flashcards). It does seem to be somewhat buggy at the moment, but it works well enough to be well worth it IMHO.