Today’s blog post is about Japanese again, this time about how to learn the Kana and Kanji characters easily with visual mnemonics. I’d like to introduce and review two books that I found very useful for learning and memorizing the characters, especially for strongly visual learners like I am. The books are entitled Kanji Pict-o-Graphix: Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics and Kana Pict-o-Graphix, both by Michael Rowley.

When I started to learn Japanese several years ago, I found it really very difficult to memorize the Kana syllabaries and kept forgetting the characters, and was unsuccessful in learning them for weeks. Until I came across the tiny booklet ‘Kana Pict-o-Graphix’, which helped me to learn both syllabaries in just two days (!), after having tried for so long! The strong point about the book is that it presents not only the character in a visual way, which in itself is really helpful for committing characters to memory, but it also provides a sentence with a clue on how to pronounce the Kana-character. This combined method really helps to retain the characters for a long time.

The book also exists for learning the Kanji, ‘Kanji Pict-o-Graphics’, and introduces about 1000 characters of the mandatory 1954 Japanese characters required for being able to read texts. Each basic character is rendered with a visual picture, which it also (mostly) retains in compound characters that follow which the book introduces. Each cluster of pictures for a character is then followed by a sentence that combines the elements into a small ‘story’ or memorable sentence, which helps you to recall them later on when you come across them again.

Here you can have a look inside the book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0962813702

I also use the 3 books ‘Remembering the Kanji’ by James W. Heisig, which have their own strengths and are more comprehensive, and which most learners use, but for me as a very visual learner using the ‘Pict-o-Graphix’ book is much easier to efficiently learn, retain and revise the Kanji.