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Remembering the Kanji is a series of three volumes by James Heisig, intended to teach the 3007 most frequent Kanji to students of the Japanese languageJames W. Heisig: Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese CharactersPreview at http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Characters/dp/4889960759The aim of this book is to provide the student of Japanese with a simple method for correlating the writing and the meaning of Japanese characters in such a way as to make them both easy to remember. Heisig presents a method for learning how to associate the meaning and writing of 2042 kanji, including all the jōyō kanji. It is intended not only for the beginner, but also for the more advanced student looking for some relief from the constant frustration of how to write the kanji and some way to systematize what he or she already knows. The author begins with writing because–contrary to first impressions–it is in fact the simpler of the two. He abandons the traditional method of ordering the kanji according to their frequency of use and organizes them according to their component parts or “primitive elements.” Assigning each of these parts a distinct meaning with its own distinct image, the student is led to harness the powers of “imaginative memory” to learn the various combinations that result. In addition, each kanji is given its own key word to represent the meaning, or one of the principal meanings, of that character. These key words provide the setting for a particular kanji’s “story,” whose protagonists are the primitive elements.There is no attention given to the readings of the kanji, as Heisig believes that one should learn the writing and meaning first, before moving on to the readings in Volume II.522 pagesJames W. Heisig: Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 2: A Systematic Guide to Reading Japanese CharactersPreview at http://books.google.com/books?id=gAhcJTiJAhUCThis volume takes up the pronunciation of characters and provides students with helpful tools for memorizing them. Behind the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China lie several coherent patterns. Identifying these patterns and arranging them in logical order can reduce dramatically the amount of time spent in the brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms. Many of the “primitive elements,” or building blocks, used in the drawing of the characters also serve to indicate the “Chinese reading” that particular kanji use, chiefly in compound terms. By learning one of the kanji that uses such a “signal primitive,” one can learn the entire group at the same time. In this way. Remembering the Kanji 2 lays out the varieties of phonetic patterns and offers helpful hints for learning readings, which might otherwise appear completely random, in an efficient and rational way. A parallel system of pronouncing the kanji, their “Japanese readings,” uses native Japanese words assigned to particular Chinese characters. Although these are more easily learned because of the association of the meaning to a single word, Heisig creates a kind of phonetic alphabet of single-syllable words, each connected to a simple Japanese word, and shows how they can be combined to help memorize particularly troublesome vocabulary. Unlike Volume 1, which proceeds step-by-step in a series of lessons, Volume 2 is organized in such as way that one can study individual chapters or use it as a reference for pronunciation problems as they arise. Individual frames cross-referencethe kanji to alternate readings and to the frame in Volume 1 in which the meaning and writing of the kanji was first introduced.199 pagesJames W. Heisig and Tanya Sienko: Remembering the Kanji: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level ProficiencyStudents 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.The 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 cross-checked 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 first part is in the style of Volume I, where the writing and keywords are learned. The other part is in a similar style to Volume II, where the readings of the kanji are learned.474 pagesWorksheetsSource unkown342 double pages