Remembering the Kanji 3: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-level Proficiency: 3: Vol. 3 [Japanese] [Paperback]

As the editorial review claims, the 2000 or so Joyo Kanji are not sufficient for advanced Japanese literacy - even though I have committed to memory the Joyo Kanji, in my work as a translator I encounter kanji that fall outside the Joyo list every day. I consider these characters to be "de facto" Joyo Kanji, and putting them all together in one reference work is a fantastic idea for which the authors should be commended.

Ivan Rorick

This book teaches kanji that are useful for reading novels and other books. While some of the choices are a bit arbitrary, most of these characters show up fairly rapidly when reading something beyond primers.

Apologies but my kanji examples have disappeared. I guess it has to do with the encoding.

I really like Heisig's approach in volume 1. So no need to trash this review just because you liked that book. However, the current volume is in my view totally useless, or rather will involve a lot of wasted time. I get the feeling that it is written more for people who want to 'collect' kanji rather than learn Japanese. My concern is not with the approach Heisig has taken in his first book (volume 1). My concern is with the specific implementation in this book. His approach works for relatively frequent characters, but it is not so useful for rate characters - the focus of volume 3. Two problems:

First: There are several frequency tables of kanji available. Had Heisig used one of these tables, the situation would have been better. Now we are missing several quite common characters, for instance XX XX XX' (all ranked around 1800). Instead we get very rare characters included, for instance 'XX XX XX' (all ranked around 5000). So in terms of importance, I think Heisig's choice of characters is quite poor. Roughly speaking, every time a character ranked 1800 is used, the character ranked 100 has been used 80 time. For every time a character ranked 5000 is used, the character ranked 100 has been used 100,000 times.

Second: The meaning Heisig gives to characters is not all that useful for rare characters. For instance compare 'XX and 'XX. Their meaning is pretty much identical. However, Heisig gives the characters different keywords. This will obviously lead the learner to think there is some semantic difference in meaning. As a matter of fact one of the characters is an alternative to the other and is only included in the book because it is a name-kanji. So in fact while it has the same meaning, the reason why it is included in the book is that some people have it in their names! Had Heisig provided some usage instruction for the characters, the book would have been much stronger. For common characters this is not a major problem because you will revisit them when you learn vocabulary.