The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course

A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering 2300 Characters
Andrew Scott Conning
Foreword by Jack Halpern
A Publication of Kodansha USA

Description
The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course is an innovative and highly effective system for learning and remembering kanji, or Sino-Japanese characters. It contains all 2,136 Joyo Kanji ("kanji for everyday use") plus 164 of the most useful non-Joyo kanji, specially arranged to maximize efficiency of acquisition.

One of the book's key features is its mnemonic devices - original stories for each kanji that teach students to associate graphical components with images linked to the character's meaning. With these, learners will find it hard to forget the nuances of the kanji they've studied, and will be more likely to find it easier to decipher the meanings of unfamiliar compounds that contain those characters.

Another unique feature is the author's emphasis on comparing similar-looking kanji as a means of differentiating them. Most kanji dictionaries and textbooks arrange their entries in ways that do not address the needs of non-native learners, such as by traditional radical or by the grade in which the kanji are taught in Japanese schools. The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course uses a unique sequence that presents look-alikes one after the other, and building blocks before the complex kanji they appear in.

This book fills an urgent need for a timesaving, yet reliable, kanji-learning system that can be used from beginning through advanced levels. It is intended for anyone who is serious about learning to read Japanese.


Author Information
Andrew Scott Conning is a doctoral candidate and Presidential Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He received a bachelor's degree in languages from Georgetown University (USA) and a master's degree in social anthropology from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Mexico). He has been active in Japan as a lecturer and university administrator, and most recently as a research scholar at the University of Tokyo.

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Keith Conning: Andrew Scott Conning, who was born in 1971, is my son. He ran track and cross country for me at Berkeley High School. He spent the last year doing research and teaching at Peking University in Beijing, China. He speaks Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin. He returns to his studies at Harvard University this fall.