Kanji Pict-O-Graphix: Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics

I hit a wall in my independent studies when I tried to pick up reading material... and all the vocabulary I had learned was in kanji, so I couldn't read it. This book is helping me sort through that at a healthy pace, and it feels more like reading a picture book than studying. Please note that some of the kanji in this book are not from the jouyou kanji list, and there aren't enough to become literate in this book alone, but it starts you off on the right foot learning important parts of kanji such as radicals. Understanding radicals will make everything so, so much easier. Within the text the author recommends additional resources that you can turn to for further learning, and seems to genuinely care if you learn or not. The pictures are fun and memorable.

Why should a picture of a misshapen person, eye, heart and ear make you remember Kanji #549 "Listen"? Or one man beating another with a stick, Kanji #400, "Industrious?" For the same reason King Philip Came Over For Good Sax*, I suppose - who knows why and how mnemonics work, but in this cleverly (sometimes, fiendishly so) illustrated volume, Michael Rowley provides memorable mind-helpers for those learning Kanji, or just simply fascinated with the development of this writing system borrowed from the Chinese.The book aggregates kanji into thematic groups, determined by the radical, or root element, of each kanji, and makes for much easier comprehension than standard elementary Kanji texts. Each kanji is presented with its Japanese and Chinese reading (very, very roughly speaking, similar to the way we have the Germanic "sweat" and Latinate "perspire" to mean the same thing), a brainy icon system for indicating which part of the kanji comes from which other character, and a mnemonic. Rowley uses bold, strong graphic elements, and those lovable faceless "people-oids" you remember from 1970s government-issued pamphlets to illustrate the meaning, along with those odd quirks of literature - the mnemonic ("Our rice products earn a pile of money" or "the prisoner's hands are bound with thread"). Distinctive, odd, and, yes, MEMORABLE. This charming book is good for curious teens, the diligent Nihongo-phile, or the dedicate sensei's toolkit.Enjoy strongly!(p.s. My favorite Kanji is #96, "Snow")* The classic mnemonic from biology for recalling Linnaean taxonomy: "kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species."

I have bought lots of Kanji books and this is one of my favorites. I would recommend this book to anyone trying to learn to read the Kanji characters. The visual and written mnemonics really helped me remember the characters. The book is broken down by subjects; some include the world, food, body, people and animals. For each word the Kanji character, reference #, English meaning and visual/text mnemonic are show. On and Kun readings, as well as the schematic of elements are also included. There is a Kanji index in the back.My only wishes were that it had the romaji translation and contained information on how to write the characters.

Not only for non-Japanese but also for Japanse, Kanji is somthing strange, hard to understand and interesting. Many dictionary called 'Kanwa-Jiten (kanji dictionary)' have been published in Japan, but they don't have a good idea of displaing such Kanji's attractiveness. This book has done the great thing.

Please read this review. I say this only because I would like to recommend this book to anyone who is beginning Japanese and needs to memorize the cumbersome Hiragana and Katakana characters. This is, bar none, the easiest way to mnemonically retain both the characters and their sounds, period! All it takes is half an hour of trying to read any Japanese text while flipping back through Rowley's book and his ingenious pictures will begin appearing right before your eyes, instilling instant gratification of a sense of progress. However, Rowley's main focus is on Kanji, which he does just a magnificent a job of illucidating and entrenching their definitions upon anyone who reads this text. I would suggest to any student, including those who do not need any knowledge of Kanji, to give this text a try for the sheer brilliance in which Rowley has takled these most formidable phonetic syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana.