Japanese Kanji for Beginners: (Jlpt Levels N5 and N4) First Steps to Learn the Basic Japanese Characters: (JLPT Levels N5 & N4) First Steps to Learn ... Online Audio & Printable Flash Cards]

This is the best book I have found for learning kanji. The lessons use real life, practical examples which help you to memorise the kanji very effectively. The CD-Rom (the contents of which can also be downloaded from the publisher website) are very helpful and add even more value to your purchase. Highly recommended!

Excellent product. Well packaged and speedy delivery. Thank you. A*****

As someone who has been struggling with Kanji, I found this book incredibly helpful and the CD is great

Overall, I'm happy with the book. However, there are few reasons for not giving five stars, first the kanji are very small to read and to practice. In addition, the sort of "pictures" behind the kanji that help memorizing them (e.g., a man running) are most of the times unreadable. It would have been nice to simply add these pictures next to the kanji, or at the end of each chapter (few chapters have them). Also, it is very annoying the fact that for each kanji introduced later in the book, the kanji is followed by with a "*" and with a footnote saying "this kanji will be presented later in the book" (or something like that). Why not just say in the preface: All kanji followed with a "*" will be presented later in the book" rather than repeating that sentence 3/4 times each page? Minor point, but very annoying.

This book as many others use a mnemonic trick based on images that would be very good, butthe images are printed with a light grey color and covered by black bold kanji that makethem unrecognizable on most of kanji presented in the book.

Este es un libro que ha sido de gran ayuda para aprender kanji. Hay que tener paciencia, llevo años y apenas voy a la mitad pero el proceso para aprender japonés toma tiempo.

Ótimo livro para iniciantes em japonês que já saibam inglês ! Bastante exercícios para praticar e vocabulário!

All what you need to start learn kanji

Bought this book around the beginning of the year and have recently finished it over the course of about 7 months, to prepare for the JLPT N4, with no prior kanji knowledge. It teaches kanji in a reasonable order for new students, covering 430 of them in total. Here's my thoughts on it:The good:-Pretty decent order in which the kanji are thought, mostly starting of with either simple or common ones, before getting to more difficult ones (which have already become easier to understand at that point).-Categorized into different subjects, e.g. nature, travel, family, sports, verbs, etc.-Every single one already comes with a certain mnemonic that has been thought of for you, which is often the key to remembering how the kanji is written, especially for more complicated ones-Often teaches certain kanji, that are often paired together in a common word, one after the other (e.g. ketsu + kon = kekkon)-Always shows at least 2 (common) words in which the kanji is used-Both the book itself and the link to their public website page offers some practice exercises and reading passages, that contain the kanji you have learned through the book, which are helpful and can be fun to do as well.The bad:-Although not too common, there are some plain typo/spelling errors in the readings sometimes, which is really bad (ex. for the kanji for "North", it says "ホク KOKU", which should be HOKU as the hiragana shows. Although, you would notice this is wrong when looking at the vocabulary)-In some occassions, I found the keywords for the kanji to be a little questionable-It teaches kanji along with the on-yomi and kun-yomi readings, but does not always teach you words for both readings in the 'useful vocabulary' part that comes with every kanji. This makes it hard, for example, to remember a certain on-yomi for a kanji, since you don't know any words in which it appears.-Although subjective and a little less prevalent, it sometimes does not teach certain readings that are considered 'common readings' by other sources, and other times teaches readings that are not considered common by them-It only teaches kanji, not radicals, although the mnemonics sometimes randomly assume you know what a certain radical is called, such as e.g. the radical "long kimono"My tips and other comments about this book:-You must know all hiragana/katakana in advance, this is the only requirement. The book goes straight into learning kanji. You'll get much better and quicker at reading kana along the way, but you should know them beforehand.-Works well alongside a textbook that teaches you Japanese grammar, without really covering kanji, such as Genki I/II-Use the book alongside free online kanji database sources, such as Kanshudo or Jisho. I started doing this about 1/3rd of the way through and did this to compare keywords, check if the common readings are identical, and check out other common words that use the kanji I just learned, which may not be found in the book-The publisher offers printable flashcards for the kanji thought in this book, but I manually made digital Anki flashcard decks for bundles of chapters along the way, which is much more convenient, in my opinion-Use the book mostly for a fixed order of learning kanji and their ready-made mnemonics. If the mnemonic doesn't make so much sense to you, you'll be able to think of one yourself.-PC Kindle not being able to zoom in on mnemomic pictures and pictures used in the exercises, can makes it annoying or just plain impossible to look at or read them, but it was not a huge deal for me-The book advertises itself as one made for JLPT levels N5 + N4, but teaches 430 kanji in total, which is well over the amount of the 250 (80 x N5, 170 x N4) classified online as N4, including kanji classified as N3, N2 and sometimes even N1 as well. However, since there is no official list of kanji per N-level, it is not a bad thing to learn more of them, as the N4 test might include a kanji classified unofficially as a higher level online (e.g. the kanji for hot 暑 is said to be level N1 online, but has shown up in questions in past JLPT N4 exams)Overall, this book was a good start for me, I now know all the kanji it includes, was able to answer all the kanji related questions on the N4 exam quickly and with absolute certainty of being correct and am in a good spot to continue my kanji studies.

alles