Intermediate kanji book is by far the best book I have found for systematically studying Kanji. Let me state my brief credentials so that you can have some confidence in my review. I graduated from university with a major in Japanese and Spanish for Education, K-12 (in the US). I taught Japanese in public schools, elementary, junior high and high school, as well as tutored college students. I studied abroad at a school that focused primarily on teaching Japanese (all in Japanese), and I am currently living and working in Japan. Japanese is my personal hobby, and I spend approximately 20 hours a week studying, reading, and writing Japanese (specifically for increasing my knowledge of the language).
That said, I have found no Kanji book designed to teach Kanji that I can recommend apart from this series. The one critical flaw is that it uses some translation (English), which I feel is unnecessary and best excluded (so as to market this book to people of all mother tongues, and to avoid "poluting" a learner's brain with English as they study Japanese). Aside from that, it has an excellent approach.
Most Kanji books begin with showing you the character, the various readings, some example compound sentences (and maybe some example sentences), translation in English, and how to write the character. Then, of course, you begin filling in 10-20 little boxes with the character until your hand cramps up, all to end up completely forgetting how to write it the next day (and maybe even forget the reading, too).
This book is different. It takes you through the Kanji in a wholistic fashion, with no fill-in-the-boxes. Well, at least not the traditional kind. Instead, you look at Kanji as a set of characters composed of other characters, and see how they interrelate. You compare pronunciations of similar looking Kanji, of those with the same radical (root character), and those with opposite meanings, etc. You look at the various Kanji with the same reading but different meaning, and you compare groups to see what they have in common (commonality, such as the shape, meaning, use, and pronunciation). You will also look at characters attached to other combinations that are used as suffixes and prefixes, such as characters that negate meaning (turning "convenient" into "inconvenient").
By using this book, you can very efficiently and truly learn Kanji. You will be able to tell the difference between very similar Kanji, find it easier to write them by breaking them down into parts, and easily recall and use Kanji with opposite or similar meanings as well as apply suffixes and prefixes to make your language use more particular.
Some may notice the lack of apparent "emphasis" on writing the Kanji. It may appear so because it does not contain lots of boxes to write your Kanji in, and it never tells you to "write this Kanji 20 times." In fact, for many of the characters it will not show you ALL of the step by step strokes. Why? Because it places the radical/base character in one box. Why keep re-learning the stroke order for a character you should already know? In fact, if you learn each Kanji you come across as merely a series of strokes, you will feel constant frustration at your inability to remember how to write them. After all, who can remember 5-18 strokes for most of the 2000 characters? Multiply that and average it out, and see how unreasonable a task that is. Instead, you learn the radicals and then simply use them. For example, a character like the one used in the days of the week (I can't use Japanese font in Amazon, sorry, but the romaji is "YOO" or "YOU" with a long "O" sound), is extremely hard to remember. It has 18 strokes and doesn't look like anything but a complicated character. however, it's actually quite easy. On the left is the character for day ("HI"), then across from that at the top are two Katakana "YO" characters side by side, and then the last character is a standard character that, although it looks complicated, it's easy to learn and replicate. Remembering this character in this manner makes writing it from memory easy.
The infamous and highly controversial "Heisig Method" uses basically this same principle, except that you attach random (unrelated) English words to each character (or radical/base character). This allows you to memorize them easily, but the English word you attach to them is absolute nonsense and may confuse and harm your ability to learn the meanings of the Kanji later (yeah, you learn the meanings in the second book of Heisig's methodology; first book is nothing but the shapes of the characters). Using the Intermediate Kanji Book series (or the Basic Kanji Book series), you can do the same thing without the messy, nonsense English attached.
Get this book, study it, periodically review all of them, and then be proud of your Kanji ability. Yeah, go read those manga, novels, and magazines you bought but left lying around on the shelf because looking up the Kanji was too hard -- now you don't have to look too much up anymore!
Download links:
- 4shared : Vol 1 | Vol 2
- Mediafire: Vol 1 + Vol 2
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