Discover / Book
Remembering the Kanji I

Remembering the Kanji I

James W. Heisig, Tanya Sienko · 1985 · 485 pages

Japanese languageTextbooks for foreign speakersChinese charactersOrthography and spellingEnglishLanguage & Linguistics

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Some book links are affiliate links; you pay the same price and we may earn a small commission.

About this book

Students who have learned to read and write the basic 2,000 characters run into the same difficulty that university students in Japan face: The government-approved list of basic educational kanji is not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialization requires supplementary kanji of its own, a large number of these kanji overlap. With that in mind, the same methods employed in volumes 1 and 2 of Remembering the Kanji have been applied to 1,000 additional characters determined as useful for upper-level proficiency, and the results published as the third volume in the series. To identify the extra 1,000 characters, frequency lists were researched and crosschecked against a number of standard Japanese kanji dictionaries. Separate parts of the book are devoted to learning the writing and reading of these characters. The writing requires only a handful of new "primitive elements." A few are introduced as compound primitives ("measure words") or as alternative forms for standard kanji. The majority of the kanji, 735 in all, are organized according to the elements introduced in Volume 1. For the reading, about twenty-five percent of the new kanji fall into "pure groups" that use a single "signal primitive" to identify the main Chinese reading. Another thirty percent of the new kanji belong to groups with one exception or to mixed groups in which the signal primitives have two readings. The remaining 306 characters are organized first according to re

Appears in these reading paths

Learn Japanese: a realistic roadmap

Beginner10books108 hrs4 stages

Related reading guides

Reader reviews

Ratings and notes from readers — tagged with how deep into the subject they were.

Loading reviews…

Discussion