The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course
"The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course is an innovative and highly effective system for learning and remembering kanji, or Sino-Japanese characters. The book contains 2,300 character entries, including all 2,136 Joyo Kanji ("regular-use kanji") plus 164 of the most useful non-Joyo Kanji. It offers learners a sophisticated, pedagogically sound method for remembering the basic meaning of each character, conveniently summarized in concise keywords to facilitate memorization. Each kanji is accompanied by an explanation of how to remember its meaning clearly and distinctly. These mnemonic explanations teach learners to associate each kanji's graphical form with its unique range of meaning, often using visualization and concrete imagery to simplify complex characters and make their meanings immediately recognizable in their graphical forms. An outstanding feature of the course is the special attention it gives to the challenge of learning each kanji in a differentiated way. This allows learners to associate the meaning of each character with the features that distinguish it from graphically similar characters"
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2015–2023years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Probably goes without saying that there are as many ways to learn Japanese as there are students. The only really hard-and-fast rule is that whatever you're doing, you need to do a lot more of it than you think.
That said, I've found that the kanji separately really helped my Japanese studying. If nothing else, it's kept me from falling too far behind the Chinese and Taiwanese students in class...
The book I used for the kanji is The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course by Andrew Scott Conning. Can't recommend it enough.
https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/d...
- Recommendation: "The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course" by Andrew Scott Conning is a modern version of RTK. Same concept, but better organization, more kanji, and a more natural layout and learning order.
- I you want to get a head start on something, Kanji is probably a good idea - there are about 2000 of them in common use (more, if you read more advanced stuff or in names), and teachers probably won't have a lot of time going over them. Plus, you essentially just have to memorise them, something you can only do on your own.
There are several ways of learning Kanji, each with their benefits and drawbacks, such as WaniKani, Remembering the Kanji, Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course, etc. Ultimately, Kanji are painful and time-intensive to learn, so none of these will be perfect, but you can maybe spend some initial time trying to find out which works best for you and then just stick with it.
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