How to study Kanji - part 3

This is a third part of a number of posts on how to study Kanji.

The point I want to stress out in this part is: buy a text book on Kanji. If your goal is to master just a few hundred Kanji (maybe JLPT3 level) then I think you might manage without a good book. But if you are aiming for a higher level you really should get yourself a text book solely for studying Kanji.

I know that a text book costs money, while there are some useful websites which are for free. I will try to explain why I prefer a text book over web sites. There are basically 2 reasons: 1) you need a plan, a structure to master over 2000 Kanji, and 2) you need useful information about each Kanji. On both points I think that most web sites fail, while many text books succeed (at least to some degree).

First of all, as I wrote above, in order to be able to master over 2000 Kanji, you need a strategy, a plan, a structure. My experience with websites is that they contain just the Kanji, a huge amount of data without much thought behind how they are presented. Many of them also do not contain information on stroke orders, example vocabulary using the main readings, and small tests to check whether yourself. Texts books, on the other hand, ofto do contain such features.

The books I used were 漢字マスター 3 2級漢字1000 for JLPT2 Kanji, and later on the book from the same series for JLPT1 (which I could not find on Amazon, it can be found on ther ARC website here). Kanji in these books are more or less grouped according to meaning (for example, Kanji for emotions are together in one chapter). For each Kanji the stroke order is shown, allong with its readings, and example vocabulary.

Below are some books that might be helpful for your study of Kanji. Notice how I did NOT include the books using the Heisig method. I will explain later why I didn't...








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