Total Japanese : Reading and Writing [Japanese]

This is the first kanji book I found really useful. This book covers 400 kanji. It starts with a (very) brief intro to hiragana and katakana, and then it's onto 39 lessons of kanji. It starts with typical basics - the numbers, 'Japan', 'person', etc - and continues on. Each lesson has the new kanji - with their readings - followed by some kanji tasks, and then reading and writing tasks. 'Kanji tasks' can include things like working out the stroke number of a particular stroke, using newly learnt kanji to make compound kanji words, intuiting the meaning of kanji compounds you've never seen before (for example, you might have never seen the word before, but when you've learned that the first kanji means 'borrow' and the second 'money', you can match it to the meaning 'debt'). I think these tasks are really useful for encouraging students to use kanji they know to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words. Another really good thing about this book is that it builds up. There are plenty of pieces of text to read, and these texts always include plenty of kanji you learned in previous lessons, not just the current one. This does mean you have to sometimes go back and look up old kanji you didn't remember, or old kanji appearing in a compound you didn't remember, but this is good revision. One of my frustrations with some other kanji books I encountered is that they always had a lot of boxes for you to practise writing the kanji, but then only gave you one sentence to read with the kanji in it, and no other mention of that kanji in the entire book. This book is cumulative and you are always encountering and thus reminding yourself of kanji you learned before. I learn kanji so much better in context anyway; if I just see the character and its meaning, I don't remember it; if I'm reading it in a sentence, I can remember it, or at least predict it. As you continue, there is less and less in English. At the beginning, every exercise is explained in English; by the end, the only English is the English definitions for words and kanji. One other thing I like about this book is the kanji are arranged in topics. For example, in one lesson there are several kanji related to sickness, hospitals, etc. In another lesson there are several kanji related to university and tests. You could then have texts to read that relate to that topic. Readables include sentences specifically written to include kanji you just learned, and often some kind of story or anecdote, which will include a variety of new and previously learned characters. There may be reading tasks - eg, read these sets of directions ('turn left, go over the bridge...') and decide which picture they are describing. There is a decent amount of variety in reading material - especially later in the book, the stories get more interesting - and you can also read bits and pieces of questionnaires, recipes, machine operating instructions, forms, letters, reports and so on. Be aware that this book is, in my