Name: Remembering the Kanji
ISBN: 9780870409172

Remembering the Kanji

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.

What Hacker News says

hackshackDec 2025

"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.

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drivers99Oct 2024

I highly recommend this site for that. https://kanji.koohii.com/ which goes along with the book "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig (strictly speaking, you don't need the book, but I think it will help understand the idea behind the process). But the stories (mnemonics) on the website are better than the ones in the book, but also let you put in your own stories. You can also vote and choose existing stories, so there are crowd sourced mnemonics that other people have said work for them. One interesting side effect of that is a lot of people decided to use Spider Man whenever there is a "thread" radical, for more memorable stories. I did it around 15 years ago and learned how to write all the 2000+ commonly used kanji in a few months (9 months for me; 2-3 months for a more diligent person). It uses a spaced repetition system (Lietner box method).

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latentseaOct 2024

I did Heisig's Remembering The Kanji as my first step on my Japanese learning journey. It helped make the written language feel more accessible, and I took it on as a fun challenge, but in hindsight only learning to read is important and learning to write is mostly a waste of time. Learning to read is vital, but being a word processor idiot is how everyone is living their lives for the most part.

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claudiawernerJul 2021

I'm learning Japanese, and I'm learning the kanji using Heisig's Remembering The Kanji method. I combine that with flashcards on Anki on my PC. When it shows a keyword card, I'll write out the character on paper or I'll trace it in the air with my finger, then check if I got it right. That works surprisingly well to memorize them.

That said, the memory pathway should work for reading and writing, that is, recognition and production. I need a further skillset (pronunciation) in order to do that production on a computer, since being able to write individual characters by hand without any knowledge of the words or pronunciation isn't very useful.

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cehrlichMar 2021

Yes, IMO the easiest way to 'learn' the kanji is Heisig's book "Remembering the Kanji", along with an Anki deck to review daily. I 'learned' 2000 kanji this way in 3 months, with a daily time investment of about 1 hour. There are plenty of pre-made RTK Anki decks.

The reason I'm putting learn in quotation marks is because afterwards you need to reinforce them in context, ie by learning vocab and doing tons of reading (there's a term called 多読 which means it's not the quality of the material or even your level of comprehension, but just the sheer amount of pages you read).

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majewskySep 2020

That's interesting. For me, it's the exact opposite way. Kanji are actually the easiest thing for me. Does the WK deck or the KanjiDamage deck include mnemonics? If not, I highly highly highly recommend you get something with mnemonics. If not WK or KD, then get yourself the RTK book (Remembering the Kanji) and study with it. There are Anki decks with Kanji in RTK order, too.

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