Basic Kanji Book (Bonjinsha) (V2)

This is an excellent Kanji book! After trying several other Kanji learning books, this one stands out as the best by far! The book is organized exteremely well into sections and lessons. For every lesson there are about 10 different Kanji that you learn and each lesson has some kind of a theme to it. For example, one lesson may cover only numbers, another lesson will cover only animals, etc. There are also exercises at the end of each lesson so you can practice what you just learned. If I had to name one downside to this book, it would be that the answers to the exercises are not listed in the back of the book as they are in many practice books. But overall, I can't say enough good things about this book. It has helped me with my Kanji tremendously!

Volume 2 picks up where vol. 1 left off (naturally!!)... There are quite a few interesting exercises that challenge you to use what you have learned in each chapter. This is the second book in a great series, and the only ones I found like it while I was in Japan. Like everyone else says, be sure to learn hiragana and katakana before buying this book. ...only those more serious about mastering Japanese need apply.

I have been studying Japanese concurrent with Korean for the past few years. I picked up this book while I was in Japan because I wanted to learn all the Kanji that native Japanese speakers use in their writing. The book is perfect. There are exercises throughout each chapter that force you to use each character in context. Halfway through the book you find yourself reading a simple letter with quite a bit of Kanji in it. Do yourself a favor and at least learn Hiragana before you attempt to learn Kanji. It's also informative to know that the 1st volume teaches about 72 of the 80 characters that are testable when taking level 4 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

This is part 2 of the Basic Kanji Book, and contains 249 characters, bringing the total for the two books up to 500. This volume is even better than the first because the Kanji are more advanced, and there is a minimal amount of English. All of the instructions are written in Japanese, and the only English you see is when they are translating new words. If you are uncomfortable with the idea of having to know how to read a lot of Japanese in order to be able to understand this book, make sure you get volume 1 and work through that. Otherwise you might have a hard time getting the most out of this book. This is the best book you can get for learning how to read, write, and understand Kanji. It also teaches you how to read train schedules, how to use a Kanji to Japanese dictionary, and how to fill in a form.Once you are done with this book, you'll find yourself understanding a lot more about Japanese and Kanji.

Basic Kanji Book was compiled by four Japanese editors (Chieko Kano, Yuri Shimizu, Hiroko Takenaka, and Eriko Ishii) for the purpose of teaching the first 500 most basic kanji. These 500 kanji are divided up into 22 separate lessons. Each lesson is thematically and grammatically organized for higher connection rate in the learning process. Lessons include Kanji for time, Kanji at the Zoo, Kanji for Adjectives, Kanji for Verbs, and many more. The text is written to the goal of preparing the student for higher levels of Kanji learning by laying out the foundations that lead to the understanding of its inner workings. Though the text is complete in itself for accomplishing many basic day-to-day tasks in written Japanese. The teaching methodology includes stroke by stroke lessons, examples of each character in compound forms, both "on" and "kun" readings, practice blanks within the book to follow, transliteration of sentences from English to Japanese, various writing exercises, periodic reviews, practical examples of daily use for the characters within any given lesson, fun games to encourage learning, and helpful illustrations for learning mnemonics. Varied methodologies promote fuller language acquisition.This book is written for the student that has a firm understanding of both Hiragana and Katakana though no prior knowledge of Kanji is necessary. The layout of this book promotes effective self-study though this book could also be effectively used as the primary classroom text for teaching Kanji. In conclusion, few if any other Kanji learning books do as superb a job as this one in making an otherwise difficult task both easy and fun. Quite possibly this is the best Kanji book for high learning retention and practical use on the market.