Heisig, James W., Remembering the Kanji
ISBN (Japan) 0-87040-739-2, 0-87040-748-1, 0-87040-931-X.

Remembering the Kanji is a trilogy of sorts, answering the age-old question of how to teach a foreigner the ins and outs of the Japanese writing system. Originally titled Adventures in Kanjiland, it presents a novel approach to learning the 2,000+ Joyo (essential kanji) and Jinmei Kanji (kanji that may appear in names).

But first, some background on the general categories into which one can divide the kanji.

• Pictorial Ideograms: The kanji one is a single line; the kanji for mouth looks like a mouth. These account for perhaps 10% of the vocabulary.
• Ideographs: These consist of two or more pictograms written together to derive abstract ideas from simple ones. The ideograph for tree (木) gets double-duty: (林) - 'grove' is two trees, and (森) - 'forest' is three.
• Radical-and-phonetic compound kanji: There are about 220 so-called radicals, or primitive kanji that express basic ideas. The majority of kanji consist of a radical, representing general meaning, and a phonetic that links the meaning to the simplified chinese sound associated with it. For example, the word for duty or task (任), is composed of the radical for man mixed with the phonetic that represents the sound NIN (corresponding to the chinese sound RÈN) These are the vast majority of kanji.

There are further distinctions, but these are more or less the ones we need to discuss the methodology in Remembering the Kanji. See Chinese characters for a more thorough discussion.

Essentially, Remembering the Kanji recognizes that pictographs and ideographs are really easy to remember. After only a bit of practice on recognizes a square as 'mouth', or a square with a line through it as 'day'. So he takes the radical-and-phonetic kanji and breaks them down, writing a story with the radicals and assigning a meaning to the phonetic.

"96. cavity

Probably the one thing most children fear more than anything else is the dentist's chair. Once a child has seen a dentist holding the x-rays up to the light and heard that ominous word cavity... it will not be long before those two syllables get associated with the drill and that row of shiny hooks...." (50)

This example story links the idea of a cavity with the ideas of children and hooks, which happens to be the composition of the corresponding kanji. But Heisig's genius goes further than that.

People who study the mind and how memory works know that the more outrageous and vibrant a mental image is, the better it is retained. You don't remember the mundane happenings of day-to-day life very well; it's the different, the painful, and the spectacular we remember. So Heisig has broken the first book into three sections: stories, plots, and elements. The story part (12 lessons) has a fully written out story like #96 to assist the reader. The plot part (7 lessons) forces the student to provide the vivacity, giving only a general outline of the relationships between the elements. The final part (37 lessons) only lists the ideas themselves in a certain order, leaving the reader to think up his own story. Heisig calls this process "utilizing the imaginative memory."

The first book deals only with linking the kanji to the ideas they represent. The second then links the ideas to their on reading, and then the final links them to their kun reading and talks more about etymology. In my opinion, this book can be very helpful to the student who already knows how to speak Japanese and is willing to devote a considerable amount of time studying the book. The only problem for this kind of student is that it takes a considerable amount of time, meditating on each individual kanji and inventing a story around it -- but surely no more than brute rote memorization does.

If your interests lie in Japanese etymology, I don't suggest picking this book up. While some of the stories he tells about various characters are accurate, the majority are made up of whole cloth and are barely related to the real roots of a character. The price for the trilogy is quite high as well -- some might say too high for a book whose plot one must invent.