Yaeko S. Habein

This requires a higher level of Japanese, especially kanji, knowledge, so relegated to the future! Some of the observations are quite valuable: thus the info that some 98 percent of the Joyo kanjis (general use kanjis) have on-readings (Chinese or Sino-Japanese readings), and 40% have only on-readings. So the advice given is to bone up on the on-readings; a somewhat forbidding prospect, as they are mostly single-syllable sounds, like shin and shu, that seem to repeat endlessly. Apart from this, the kanjis printed in the text seem to be too small and not clear enough (at least in the electronic version I accessed) to be the basis of actually learning and practicing. There are, however, other texts that give varying subsets of the Joyo kanji list (close on 2000) for practical purposes.

I am trying hard to appreciate this book in my second attempt, but I am sorry to have to say that it is as difficult as ever. Some of the patterns are not really as per the author's descriptions, and hence are mystifying. Very often it is difficult to make out out the shapes in the digital version I am following. It is clear, however, that without getting a thousand kanji (or better, two thousand) under your belt, it will be difficult to be really competent language-wise. Further, I see no method better than getting to know individual kanji through use in example sentences; the sound correspondences given in books of the present type are not quite as helpful as claimed. Thus, acquisition of the required repertoire of kanji will be a slow and assiduous process, say at the rate of two or three a day, and probably cannot really be speeded up. However the book does have a few tables of correspondences and differences at the end, which ought to be useful as a reference and revision tool… (altro)