Remembering the Kanji 2 and 3 Now Available

Following James W. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1, the second volume,
Remembering the Kanji 2: A Systematic Guide to Reading the Japanese Characters, 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.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3166-0 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Students 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. With that in mind, the same methods employed in volumes 1 and 2 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, Remembering the Kanji 3: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency, by James W. Heisig and Tanya Sienko.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3167-7 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

Also available from University of Hawai‘i Press: Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each.