Kanji Pict-O-Graphix: Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics
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Description
How does one learn kanji, the characters of written Japanese? The traditional approach is rote memorization. Japanese children write each kanji hundreds of times at their desks, and eventually they are acquired. Michael Rowley offers a different way, a mnemonic-association approach that provides a hook on which to hang the meaning and retrieve it easily when the kanji comes into view. The concept is simple: each character is represented under the word or concept it stands for (such as turf, bamboo, eat, or duty), followed by the pronunciations of the word in Chinese and Japanese, and a drawing that captures the meaning and resembles the character enough so that it'll come to mind whenever the kanji is seen. Organized thematically in chapters such as "Power," "Places," "Tools," "The World," "Food," "People," and "The Body," Rowley's book lets you learn the root symbols before teaching the words that add to them for further meanings. For example, the character for water is a splatter of three dashes that Rowley pictures as three splashing water drops. Later, you see that steam, float, boil, dirt, and bathe all build on the water character. For steam, there's the water character plus a series of lines that Rowley exaggerates to resemble swirling, vapory tendrils, and the association helps. Building on units of memory and relationship, recall is aided considerably by the simple yet evocative drawings. Rowley even manages to help with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, providing appealing pictures that look a bit like the letters in question and begin with the same sounds. So the na letter looks like a knot, nu resembles Rowley's drawing of noodles held by chopsticks, and it's easier to remember which symbol means te when you picture a telephone pole. It's hard to do Rowley's book justice with words, since the visual element is what makes it tick. He does a wonderful job, blending insight, imagination, and drawing technique, in a book that far surpasses the old rote method, making kanji learning both appealing and accessible. --Stephanie Gold
Book Description
Japanese written characters, or kanji, have their origin in a picture-language developed in ancient China. Over time this language evolved into stylized abstract forms that are difficult to memorize. This delightful book presents 1,200 kanji with readings, main definitions, standard printed forms, and visual and text mnemonics to make them easier to remember. Fully indexed and cross-referenced. Winner of several international design awards.
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0 out of 1 people found the following review helpful:
This is not a good way to learn KanjiThursday, May 05, 2005
Go instead with
Remembering the Kanji: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters by James W. Heisig
0 out of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Not an effective way to learn kanjiThursday, April 14, 2005
I got this book as an early learner of Japanese hoping it could help me learn kanji. After a very short time, I realized that it wasn't going to help me. It's basically 1000 kanji arranged by category with strange pictures for each one with no real explanation of the point of why certain pictures appear where. As one reviewer mentioned, many of them are even creepy and disturbing. There's also a short English phrase with each one that's supposed to work as a mnemonic device, but rarely seems to bear any relation to the picture so it's really just a way to remember the English word by itself. The book also gives the reader no idea how to write the characters, and they have the kanji written in some weird style, with the pictures provided to further confuse the issue.
Even learning the kanji by rote is better than trying to use this book. A much better one is Remembering the Kanji, Volume 1 by James Heisig. It costs twice as much, but it's 100 times more useful.
0 out of 2 people found the following review helpful:
What mnemonics?Sunday, April 10, 2005
I had high hopes when I bought this book, but I soon realized that it was no help to me.
The illustrations really turn me off. Some of them are creepy and repulsive. I also failed to connect most of the pictures and stories with the kanji.
I find it a lot more helpful to study radicals and practice writing the characters.
15 out of 17 people found the following review helpful:
it seemed like a good idea, but....Tuesday, September 21, 2004
...it's just not an effective way to learn kanji. In this book each kanji has a little picture associated with it, which may be helpful if you're curious about what a kanji looks like, but if you're trying to learn kanji efficiently and hope to retain what you learn I don't find this book very useful.
One problem with it is it can't help you with much else besides recognition, looking at a kanji and knowing what it is. If you're trying to use this book to learn kanji, then the basic steps you'd follow would be: 1) look at the kanji, 2) what picture does the kanji look like, 3) what is the meaning based upon this picture. First of all, there are a lot of kanji which look very similar, so it may be difficult to keep them straight if you're trying to remember what a kanji "looks like". So even recognition itself is difficult. Second, even if you do remember correctly what it "looks like", you may have trouble then recalling what the meaning of that kanji is, since sometimes that meaning is very abstract, or you could incorrectly come up with alternate meanings.
Another major problem is that it doesn't do much good if you want to recall how to write a kanji given it's meaning. If you recall what the picture is given the meaning, it doesn't mean you'll necessarily write it correctly.
Instead of this book I'd highly recommend Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". The sole purpose of his book is to learn how to remember the meaning and writing of kanji; there's no japanese whatsoever in it. But it turns out this is a really effective method. His guide is really just a set of mnemonics, or memory tricks essentially, to help you remember the kanji. He introduces rougly 2000 kanji to you, and in an order which facilitates you learning all of them. Instead of associating a picture with each kanji, you associate a little story, and from the story you can remember how to write it. You'll need to know that many kanji eventually anyways, so you may as well learn all their meanings right away. I was skeptical at first, but once I started trying it I was learning kanji at an amazing pace. In the first week alone I memorized the meaning of 300 kanji (I spent a lot of time studying though, it just shows that it's possible). I'd also recommend using an computer flashcard program, one that allows you to write your own flashcards and test yourself on your computer (I used a good one called VTrain). It's much more convenient this way than writing them on index cards. 2000 sounds like a lot of kanji, but you'd be surprised at how fast you can learn them if you're diligent. I found that it was much easier to learn the readings of the kanji once I already knew all the readings. Trying to learn both at once will really slow you down. Plus knowing the meaning of the kanji is the most important part. Even if I don't recognize a word, I can usually get it's general meaning based upon what the kanji means. If you're still skeptical, consider how many years it takes Japanese children to learn all the kanji, and these are kids that already speak Japanese fluently. You can't expect to learn kanji the same way they do and learn it much quicker than them.
3 out of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Beautiful, interesting, and fun!Friday, September 10, 2004
As a visual person who makes up his own mnemonic devices to remember all sorts of things, I fully appreciate Rowley having done the work for me with the kana and kanji. It must have been painstaking but enjoyable.
I bought this book primarily for the kana, but have spent hours perusing the kanji for the sheer joy of it. I now recognize and understand many kanji I never really tried to learn.
If you also want to write the kana and kanji, you need other books for the pen strokes, in addition to (not instead of!) Rowley. Start with Heisig's "Remembering the Kana."