Easy Kanji: A Basic Guide to Writing Japanese Characters

The beginning covers some basics and history... I'm a broad stokes learner so it suits me!Each section covers kanji with radicals in common, so you can get an idea of all the meanings of the radical.

I wasn't expecting it till the 26th (the estimated date of arrival)I was half-worried I'd miss it cause we had to leave at the 24th, and won't be back a week later. But surprised was I when it arrived just now (October 21).Excellent I say XD

I was looking for a book to supplement my Japanese classes, and I was very pleased to find this. It's a very good book for beginning students of Japanese who'd like to learn more kanji.It lays out the rules for kanji stroke order, and it groups the kanji by radical, which I appreciate a great deal. I found this book especially helpful because it both supplemented and augmented my existing vocabulary. It's nice to finally have the kanji for many of the words with which I am already familiar but have not yet learned to write in kanji. It has very clear, easy to read, written models of 500 kanji, including stroke order, as well as some very basic lessons in writing sentences with kanji. You do not need to know how to do calligraphy in order to learn these, but it would definitely behoove you to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets before you go for the kanji.This is probably not the best book for someone who is completely new to the Japanese language, as I would be inclined to say that it would be better to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets (at the very least), as well as some vocabulary and basic grammatical structures before jumping right into learning kanji. It is not intended to be a reference book or a stand-alone instructional manual for the Japanese language. Rather, it is a book that will supplement your other Japanese books nicely.There are other books available from the author of this book that offer instruction in hiragana/katakana. If you are new to Japanese, I would recommend that you begin there before attempting to work through this book.If you have a basic vocabulary and a general grasp of very basic grammatical concepts, this should be a nice supplemental book for you. Of course, it won't teach you all that you need to know, but it is a very nice introduction to 500 basic, commonly used kanji. I would certainly not recommend that you try to work your way through a dictionary in order to attempt memorizing random kanji, as they will most likely have no real meaning to you and will therefore be very easily forgotten. However, if you use this book as it is intended....as a supplement to other Japanese instruction, I think that you will find it very helpful. And at this price, it's also quite a bargain.

After many years trying to find a decent introduction to the writing and stroke order of Japenese and Chinese characters I was very pleased with the book's content and found I was able to produce recognisable calligraphy in my work almost immediately. The only downside is as a beginner I was left feeling a litte confused to the Katakana spellings and how to correlate them and also I think you will need some sort of calligraphy practice before tackling these.

I really struggle remembering Kanji and bought this to supplement my past learning and other text books. I would agree that you probably need to know hirigana and katakana to get the most out of it, but it explains things that my Japanese teachers had forgotten to go over.I'd agree that an index might be useful too, but it is quite a small book and I've found working through it really helpful with my poor, poor memory for other languages.

大学で外国人に日本語を教えていますが、学生はお金がないので、いつも漢字の勉強には手作りの漢字教材を使っていました。でもこの本なら、もうそういった手間に惑わされることなくて大丈夫です。なんと言ってもこの価格で、基本の漢字が600字以上勉強できます。基本的な熟語もたくさんあります。見やすい大きな字で、はっきりと書いてあり、しかも繰り返し練習できるようにマス目が印刷してあるタイプです。マス目を使って正しい位置に書く練習をしたり、大きさを把握したりするのにとても良いと思います。日本語教師の手間を省く、かなり優れものの漢字の漢字の教科書です。