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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Useful and fun, but not everything you need, 28 Aug 2003
This book is very good at what it tries to do: provide visual mnemonics to help you recognise kanji and remember their meanings. And it's very bad at the things it doesn't try to do: teach readings, compounds, or how to actually read the kanji in genuine Japanese text."Kanji Pict-o-graphix" is a fun book to browse when you're not feeling up to some serious study. But it's not a workbook. You can't just sit down and learn some kanji from this book, not in a way that will help you in the real world. However, it is an excellent supplement to a more structured workbook like "Let's Learn Kanji" (ISBN: 4770020686). If you've got a proper textbook, workbook, or taught course, then "Kanji Pict-o-graphix" goes great by the side to help you associate meanings with the radicals you learn. "Snow" is built from the symbols for "rain" and "hand": so remember "snow is rain you can hold". The kanji for "Left" and "Right" differ only in one component meaning "construct" and "mouth" respectively: so remember "work with your left hand, eat with your right". Simple mnemonics like this are a great assistant to a more formal workbook. It is marred by a number of simple errors in the cross-referencing: printing "702" instead of "704", "100" instead of "653", and so on. This is slightly irritating, but only in the cross-references for kanji components and not a major problem, because you can easily find the correct reference yourself.
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by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura
by Joyce Yumi Mitamura
by Max Hodges
