Japanese Kanji – Books

There are a couple of great books to help you learn Japanese kanji characters. If you want to learn how to use kanji within the Japanese language itself, have a look at our guide to all of the Japanese symbols used for writing the language.

To learn just the meanings of the characters, which can be rewarding in itself, have a look at the following books, both of which I’d highly recommend.

A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters

The first book, A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters
by Kenneth G Henshall has really useful stories about each character. Japanese Kanji characters came about as pictures of things in nature and concepts which were then combined by various methods into the characters we see today. Some are very simple, for example 木 – ki – ‘tree’ is a picture of a tree. Likewise 川 – kawa – ‘river’ is a picture of a river.

The stories in the book tell you about how the character was formed, and how the parts of it were combined for their meaning or sound. It also gives a quick and simple phrase to help you remember the character’s parts.

The only downside for me on this book is that all of the characters are hand-written rather than printed. It gives a slightly messy feel, and it’s not totally clear sometimes how the character would be formed in print. Some of the hand-writing is required because examples are given of old characters that would no longer be available in print, but for me it’s the only downside of the book.

Kanji and Kana

The second book I’d highly recommend is Kanji and Kana: A Handbook and Dictionary of the Japanese Writing System by Hadamitzky and Spahn. It has a good amount of information about how Japanese kanji characters are written and used, and in what order to make the marks (stroke order). The bulk of the book is a list of the one-thousand nine hundred and forty five characters that make up the ‘daily use’ list or joyou kanji. Each character has its readings and several compounds using that character.

The stories from the previous book are not present, but the printed form of the characters is large and clear, meaning it should be possible to learn them well.

Conclusion

Both of these books are excellent for different reasons, and I’d strongly recommend buying both. If you can only afford one, I would suggest the former for casual study and the interesting story of each character, or the latter for some hard-graft, nose-to-the-grindstone style learning.