Then after you finish reading the manga, there is a section on exercises that help you practice writing the kanji, choose the correct reading for kanji, recall the meaning of kanji, and make corrections on the Japanese spellings of various kanji.Īfter you complete all of the exercises, there is a section that contains all of the answers for you to check, along with an English translation of the manga which you can read to see what you understood correctly and what you still need to work on.Īt the back of the book there are also some indexes that help you to look up specific kanji when you need to. This technique is nothing new, and I believe the author’s friendship with James Heisig who wrote the well-known book Remembering the Kanji (RTK) which uses a nearly identical method.īut since Kanji in MangaLand also incorporates the use of kanji, it focuses a lot more on visual memory and visual cues to help people remember the meaning of a kanji, whereas RTK uses a person’s imaginative memory instead.Īt any rate, the MangaLand book is divided into chapters that teach a number of kanji this way, and then at the each of each chapter is a full page of manga that uses the kanji that were taught in previous lessons. The “walking” part is this new kanji’s meaning, and the “stopping” and “a little” part come from those individual kanji that make up the new one. In this case, they went with the story that “ walking is equivalent to stopping a little.” However, sometimes the kanji are more complicated and no single picture will work, so what the book does is combine those pictures into a story that helps people remember. This works pretty well for the simple kanji. The pictures are uses to help people visualize the meaning of the kanji in order to remember them. In the particular case of the picture above, the kanji 歩 for “to walk” is actually made up of the following two kanji: The method that this book uses to help people remember the meaning of the kanji is a combination of mnemonics (a story telling technique that helps with memory) and the use of pictures that illustrate this story. Now let’s talk about those pictures along with the box in the bottom middle that tells a story in this next section. This is a little warning to let the reader know not to mix them up with one another. The bottom left box shows an alternative version of the kanji that is sometimes used for the same meaning, and then over on the bottom right we see some similar looking kanji that are easy to confuse with the one being taught. Over on the right side we see the readings of the kanji, both the on’yomi and the kun’yomi along with example words that help to illustrate how the kanji is used. It’s a nice thing to look over, but there’s not much need to memorize it. It also it useful for learning how to write Japanese.īelow that are some different versions of the kanji, which will sometimes appear depending on what font is being used in the material that you read. In the top left it shows the stroke order so that you can practice writing the kanji to assist in memory. In the middle it what the kanji looks like and its meaning in English.Īs for the pictures right below the kanji 歩 (to walk), I will explain what those are for in the next section. In addition to this, it also teaches people how to learn hiragana and katakana (the two Japanese syllabaries) so that people who no nothing about Japanese can start learning the written part of the language with this book.Īs you can see from the above picture, it teaches a lot of different things about each kanji. It’s designed to be a self-study tool that teaches the first 240 kanji that Japanese kids learn in school. The book can be used in combination with other Japanese studies, or it can be a standalone item. Otherwise let’s get back to this kanji book specifically. If you want to learn more about this grammar series, then check out my review on Japanese in MangaLand. There are also two workbooks that are optional for the grammar series which are actually pretty good. The second book is about twice as thick as the first one, so once you’ve got the system down from the first one, you can just continue using it throughout the next one to learn more and more kanji.Īs for the other part of the MangaLand series, there are three grammar books that take people from absolute beginner in Japanese up to the intermediate stage. The second volume continues where the first one ends, and is really just a lot more of the same. It then goes over several hundred kanji for people to learn in the first volume. It introduces the concepts that it uses for helping people learn and remember kanji, along with the example manga panels and exercises to lock information in. This book is the first in a duo for the kanji series. 5) Where To Find It The Book And The Series
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