{"id":31,"date":"2004-07-03T19:32:01","date_gmt":"2004-07-03T09:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.localguy.com\/japan\/learn-japanese\/textbooks\/guide-to-remembering-japanese-characters\/"},"modified":"2005-07-10T16:47:26","modified_gmt":"2005-07-10T06:47:26","slug":"guide-to-remembering-japanese-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/learn-japanese\/textbooks\/guide-to-remembering-japanese-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>\"\"<\/div>\n

Kenneth Henshall<\/p>\n

This book is a really interesting exploration into the origins of the 2000 most common kanji in Japanese. It gives a lot of information about where each kanji comes from — like most writing systems, the characters were once pictures, and this book shows where they came from and how they came to be as they are now.<\/p>\n

The rest of the information supplied is not as satisfactory. There’s no stroke order. Pronunciations are given, but they are in Roman letters instead of Japanese kana. There’s also a mnemonic phrase to help remember each character, but these are mostly useless — they’re often quite arbitrary and thus hard to remember. And even if you do remember them, they’re not much help in actually writing or recognizing the kanji!<\/p>\n

As a fascinating sourcebook of historical information about the kanji, this is an excellent book. But as a “guide to remembering Japanese characters” it falls well short. Learn the kanji with Heisig’s book instead, and then get this book for background.<\/p>\n

Again, you can get this book from Amazon.com<\/a>. If you’re in Europe, go to Amazon.co.uk<\/a>\"\".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kenneth Henshall This book is a really interesting exploration into the origins of the 2000 most common kanji in Japanese. It gives a lot of information about where each kanji comes from — like most writing systems, the characters were once pictures, and this book shows where they came from and how they came to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}