Remembering the Kanji I

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1. cehrlichJun 2020
   There are good reasons for this. It's not just Japanese - for example, anyone who has ever ordered cheap Chinese electronics from Amazon will be familiar with the terrible fonts/weird letter spacing they use in the English part of the manual.

   Most Japanese fonts include characters for the roman alphabet for the sake of compatibility, but they're usually 1. monospaced, as most Japanese fonts are monospaced and having bits of non-monospaced text in a block of monospaced text is a bad idea, and 2. very low effort, as they just exist for compatibility so that any English text that needs to be rendered in this font doesn't end up as gibberish.

   This wouldn't be an issue if people switched to a different font when they want to write something in English, but the reality is they often don't, and that's how you end up with these awful looking bits of English text. Most people just type things up with whatever the default font is in whatever app they're writing in, and in the case of Japanese and Chinese people writing bits of English, that's the ugly character set that exists for the sake of compatibility.

   It's certainly not an issue of not knowing any better - just like you can instinctively tell a beautifully rendered Kanji from an ugly computer font one, they can do the same for English. I have seen Japanese technical documents, restaurant menus, etc with beautiful typography for the English bits. It's just that for most cases it's not worth worrying about to the people making the things.

   Regarding your other question, there two good reasons for drawing Kanji with the correct stroke order. 1. It makes them much easier to remember. This is important when there's thousands of them. If you want to know a bit more about this, read the introduction to Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". I learned 3000 of them in about 3-4 months, and primitives/stroke order were essential to achieving this. 2. when reading kanji that were written with a brush (or even writing them quickly with a pen), you can see from the lines which order the strokes were written in, and it helps enormously with deciphering peoples handwriting.

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2. MichaelGGJul 2015
   Have you looked at "Remembering the Kanji"? I was skeptical when reading "Remebering the Kana", but halfway through it I found that despite the silliness, it worked. I tried the Kanji book for a bit and was fairly surprised how well it was working.
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3. da3daJan 2013
   Have you tried using Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji"? I have never tried to learn Japanese, but I have heard very good things about using this book to learn the Kanji.
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4. redcapNov 2009
   Of course there are exceptions, but a remarkable number of kanji share their on-yomi based on a common component.

   James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji I gives you the tools to write the kanji and assign an english meaning to it (same manner as suggesting that grass that makes you feel better is medicine), with volume II showing the readings in common.

   I've only gone through volume one, but that itself saves you a heck of a lot of time in that you can write characters without repeatedly practicing them - you just need to use some imagination in creating and remembering stories.

   I learned to read by reading. Once you have a large enough vocabulary you do pick up on the on-yomi patterns a lot better. Of course knowing this earlier did help - I studied radicals and their meanings before entering university and we hardly touched them there - it was more about brute force rote memorisation.

   So I can read Japanese (and write it to an extent), but still need more work in speaking it.

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5. ginkoutestFeb 2023
   I've studied Japanese in my free time since high school, on-and-off, starting with Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji".

   I'm curious to know what has been the biggest challenges others have run into trying to learn Japanese. And have you tried paying for tutors, premium services, etc. or do you exclusively use only free online materials?

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6. wodenokotoJan 2022
   Thumbs up for revising the keywords of remembering the kanji.

   I don’t follow his book but I do refer to it when studying and sometimes his keywords really can be far out. If I remember correctly he never clarifies if the kanji for “can” is “can do” or “can of soup”.

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