A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese (English and Japanese Edition)

Looks like a good clear introduction but please don’t sell severely damaged books.

I've studied Japanese for about 10 years, with 5 years spent in Japan. This book motivated me to focus on kanji from the beginning so that now I can read Japanese books and newspapers.This was the first book I ever used for Kanji. Thinking back now to those days in the library poring over it evokes much nostalgia. Every kanji is written with an ordinary pen, not a brush. Brushstrokes are useless for most of us who write with pens. This one excels in that you can copy the strokes precisely with a pen and with practice have your kanji looking as good as those in the book. My Japanese professor used to marvel at how beautifully I wrote for every assignment I handed in. I had used this book as a model for every kanji! By copying the beautiful characters in this book over and over, you will form good writing habits.It is essential that you follow a text such as this one from the beginning so that you know how important stroke order is for memorizing the more complex kanji you'll encounter later on. Once you learn the basic stroke order rules you will find the difficult kanji easy to remember too, as they are usually just an amalgamation of common radicals that you learn writing the easy kanji. This book is great for beginners who need to learn stroke order and for those who want to write more beautifully. It only contains the Joyo kanji (those taught in Japanese schools). If your remember them all you'll be able to read the kanji in the newspaper.

This book is a reference book. It coveres 1850 essential Kanji, and the book shows you the stroke order. This book is great if you are learning Kanji or if you want help commiting some Kanji to memory.I travelled all over Japan, and I found learning some Kanji helpful for reading from signs to find my way. This reference is simple and well layed out.

I highly recommend this book as a kanji dictionary for beginner to intermediate students. It has two main parts: The first part contains the 881 kanji most used in the Japanese language, listed in order. It gives the stroke order and all of the readings for each, as well as a few examples for usage in different contexts (this however is not very useful, because there are a vastly larger number of words you may see any one kanji appear in than the amount of samples offered). However, the second half functions as the dictionary, listing the 1850 most used kanji, categorized by stroke quantity. It is very easy to look up any kanji as long as you can decipher how many strokes it takes to write. This may sound difficult, but it is actually much easier than the alternate method other dictionaries use which involves memorizing the different peices used, called "radicals." Once you find the kanji you are looking for in the dictionary half, the book either refers you back to the first half with the page number the kanji appears on, or it will give you the readings and english glosses right there. The book's title, however, is extremely misleading as this book will not teach you anything about reading or writing the japanese language, and should not be used as an instuctional tool in any way. However, it is a great kanji dictionary for students and it has yet to fail me. Therefore, I give it 5 stars for serving this purpose well.

Not a learning tool by itself, and a bit dated. However, this is a required book for most college classes in Japanese. It is a dictionary of the Toyo Kanji, kanji considered "standard education" by the Japanese ministry of education and required knowledge to pass high school. These kanji are what is considered fundamental (high school graduate) literacy in Japan. While I am looking for an updated dictionary, this is probably my most weathered Japanese book.

I bought this book over 20 years ago when it *was* in paperback and I can't get along without it. Seeing the hiragana and other characters written with a pen or pencil is so helpful. I have also found that when I just can't figure out where in Nelson's kanji dictionary a certain character is, I'll use this book to find it strictly by stroke count.