Series 'Remembering the kanji'
Books in the 'Remembering the kanji' series
Reviews of the 'Remembering the kanji' series
Review by Ben Finney
Heisig's method is sound, if you follow it as he suggests in his introduction and through the lessons (as opposed to how others might summarise his method). If you have a good knowledge of English language already, and can manage abstract concepts -- i.e. if you are an adult with English as a ... read more
Review by Ilya Farber
I'm now at the end of my first year of Japanese, and I've used all four of Heisig's books (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji I & II) as well as many others, so I thought I'd share my impressions of them.
The kana books were wonderful, and I would highly recommend them to anybody interested in ... read more
Review by Charles M Richmond
The one reason that I don't reccommend Heisig's Kanji books is that the student will inevitably learn erroneous derivations, confusing the actual meaning of the radicals with Heisig's mnemonic suggestions. If Heisig had done the extra work to be accurate historically like Henshall did in his book, ... read more
Review by Jeffrey Friedl
The first thing to know about him is that he is not a linguist or a Japanese scholar. He doesn't know nor care about Japanese other than as a tool to do his work (whatever work a philosopher does). Until he met me he'd never heard of Spahn, Hadamitzky, Halpern, or (if you can believe this) even ... read more
Review of Remembering the kanji series by Ilya Farber
I'm now at the end of my first year of Japanese, and I've used all four of Heisig's books (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji I & II) as well as many others, so I thought I'd share my impressions of them.
The kana books were wonderful, and I would highly recommend them to anybody interested in the language. They're entertaining, and help to give you an "eye" for the relations among the characters in a way that simply staring at a syllabary chart would never do. What I found most useful about them, though, is that they provided a mental "fallback" for those times when I couldn't remember one of the kana right off. If you've just memorized the kana by rote, it's a binary thing; either you remember one right off, or you have to go look it up (or you can try pounding your head against the desk until the memory surfaces, which is effective but costly). With Heisig's method, you can almost always think through the mnemonics until you remember the right one, which means you're never totally stuck and don't have to carry a syllabary around with you.
On the other hand, I would be more wary about recommending the kanji books, for reasons similar to those suggested earlier by rsrodger (name?): unlike those offered in many other kanji books, his mnemonics have little or nothing to do with the actual history or structural composition (radicals, etc.) of the kanji, which is a serious barrier to deeper understanding and to use of more traditional resources (such as radical-indexing schemes). I felt rather uneasy about filling my head with "just-so stories" about the kanji, especially when the real stories were often not much harder to learn and did a better job of unifying the kanji. For someone who just wanted to get a basic reading vocabulary as quickly as possible, Heisig's books may well be the best bet; but anyone planning on a lifetime relationship with the language should probably look elsewhere.
☆ See all reviews by Ilya Farber.