Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Before you consider using this book, you need to think about why you are learning kanji in the first place. If you're like most learners, you eventually want to learn to read Japanese. The kanji themselves are not useful, they are merely a tool that you will use to read the Japanese words. In my mind, the major failing of this series is an overemphasis on individual kanji and underemphasis on compounds and reading practice. If someone wanted to learn English, would you give them a list of the 2000 most common words and tell them to memorize each one starting from 1 until you hit 2000? I don't think so, yet that is exactly what Heisig wants you to do with this book. You cannot even begin to try reading any Japanese until you finish the entire 1st book and much of the 2nd. You must wade through a number of obscure kanji to find the common ones. Another cornerstone of his system is that you must learn 2000 kanji before any of them are of use (he says this explicitly in his introduction). Frequency counts show that the 500 most common kanji account for 80% of the kanji appearing in newspapers, and 94% can be covered by 1000. These numbers do not hold true for all Japanese writing, but they do show Heisig's claim to be suspect. However, to put this into practice it's not enough to simply know the readings of the kanji and how to write it by hand. You must also know the words that are formed from those kanji. In volume 2, Heisig introduces 1-2 compounds per kanji, as opposed to other books like Kanji in Context which introduce sometimes as many as 15 compounds for one kanji. Anyone who has reached an intermediate or advanced level of Japanese knows that you can make a good attempt at reading actual Japanese even with only 800-1000 kanji, provided you know many compounds for those words and have a good grammatical background. His idea of breaking down the kanji into component parts is a good one, but you do not need his book to do that -- you can break the kanji down yourself. Also, the goal of this book (learning to write the kanji by hand) is questionable. As Heisig himself says in the introduction, many native Japanese speakers cannot write all the kanji by hand. Why should a beginning learner spend a lot of time learning to do something that even educated Japanese are unable to do? With the advent of word processors, the ability to write kanji by hand is not as useful as it once was. My advice is to only use this book as a last resort -- if you are absolutely unable to learn kanji by any other method. Too many people, however, spend their time flipping through kanji flash cards and then lament that they are unable to learn the characters. What you need to try is a book that integrates reading practice with learning the kanji -- something like Basic Kanji Book, Kanji in Context, or Japanese: The Written Language. -Chris