Easy Kanji

by Fukihiko Kaneda and Fujihiko Kaneda

Beginning Students use a step-by-step approach to develop skills with the writing system of traditional Japanese characters borrowed and adapted from the Chinese. Models of 500 kanji characters,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0844283746
• ISBN13: 9780844283746
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A very helpful book

I was looking for a book to supplement my Japanese classes, and I was very pleased to find this. It's a very good book for beginning students of Japanese who'd like to learn more kanji.It lays out the rules for kanji stroke order, and it groups the kanji by radical, which I appreciate a great deal. I found this book especially helpful because it both supplemented and augmented my existing vocabulary. It's nice to finally have the kanji for many of the words with which I am already familiar but have not yet learned to write in kanji. It has very clear, easy to read, written models of 500 kanji, including stroke order, as well as some very basic lessons in writing sentences with kanji. You do not need to know how to do calligraphy in order to learn these, but it would definitely behoove you to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets before you go for the kanji.This is probably not the best book for someone who is completely new to the Japanese language, as I would be inclined to say that it would be better to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets (at the very least), as well as some vocabulary and basic grammatical structures before jumping right into learning kanji. It is not intended to be a reference book or a stand-alone instructional manual for the Japanese language. Rather, it is a book that will supplement your other Japanese books nicely. There are other books available from the author of this book that offer instruction in hiragana/katakana. If you are new to Japanese, I would recommend that you begin there before attempting to work through this book. If you have a basic vocabulary and a general grasp of very basic grammatical concepts, this should be a nice supplemental book for you. Of course, it won't teach you all that you need to know, but it is a very nice introduction to 500 basic, commonly used kanji. I would certainly not recommend that you try to work your way through a dictionary in order to attempt memorizing random kanji, as they will most likely have no real meaning to you and will therefore be very easily forgotten. However, if you use this book as it is intended....as a supplement to other Japanese instruction, I think that you will find it very helpful. And at this price, it's also quite a bargain.

Kanji for a beginner

After many years trying to find a decent introduction to the writing and stroke order of Japenese and Chinese characters I was very pleased with the book's content and found I was able to produce recognisable calligraphy in my work almost immediately. The only downside is as a beginner I was left feeling a litte confused to the Katakana spellings and how to correlate them and also I think you will need some sort of calligraphy practice before tackling these.

Needs an index

This book is useful if you plan to use it page-by page to learn Kanji. It presents a radical, then several common Kanji with that radical. Every few pages, it has a review and practice section.The Kanji are written clearly and stroke order and direction are shown on the first character in each section.Due to the lack of an index, this is not a good book for reference or as a supplement to other books. With the addition of some method for looking up a specific Kanji, it would be much more useful.