Has appeared a new Kanji book that supposes to teach you the readings of the first 300 Kanji.

http://www.lulu.com/content/1635336

This book called "300 kanji with 10000 words" shows you a kanji chart with the readings and meaning and various compounds and every compound is made using the kanji that you are studying at this very moment and another previously studyed kanji.

what do you think of this method? do you think is a good method alone? do you think that is worth if you combine it with "Remembering the Kanji"?

Greetings

The problem is that for it to be worthwhile it kind of has to follow the same progression, and we don't know that it does.

It couldn't hurt, though.

You can learn your first 300 or so kanji using any method(even rote memorization). It doesn't get touger until you reach 500 or so. By then, you'll start seeing kanji that look very similar to ones that you know, but have a different meaning. That's why Kanji starts to become tough.

[ファブリス]

If you look at the index of abbreviations, you can see it comes straight from EDICT.

There doesn't seem to be any mention of EDICT, which has a "attribution" kind of license, not even on the back cover.

Way to go, making money from the people who work on EDICT with a script you can write in 3 hours tops.

To top it off, the "book" that sells 25 dollars, stops at 300 kanji, doesn't even add value by using colour or composition to make things easier to read and process.

In any case, software can do this far better, and besides why pay for that book when you can use a software to do the same lists for you for any of the 10000+ existing kanji ? The next area on this site will support this directly, but I'm sure there are already programs out there who can do something similar. Heck you can simply lookup the kanji in Jim Breen's online "wwwjdic" or into a free Japanese text editor like JWPce loaded with the JMDICT dictionary.

Perhaps the author made it with good intentions, but as far as I'm concerned this is just refurbishing EDICT data with nearly no added value so basically stealing.

Fabrice is absolutely right about the license. Besides, the first 300 kanji and 1000 words can be easily gleaned from online, free sources. I feel justified paying comparable money for Heisig's books, or perhaps another complete system like Kanji in Context, but this barely scratches the surface.

Almost 10 cents a kanji, yikes!

Also, remember that Lulu's essentially a fulfillment service for self-publishers. Since they don't warehouse inventory, they don't have to be picky. Buyer beware!

Also, any book which has numerous gramatical and spelling mistakes by the end of the first page is something to be wary about. As said above, Lulu doesn't check the content of the books people upload so the quality varies drastically.

It's kinda pointless. It's just lists of information that you can find for free online.

I agree and disagree. If the abbreviations chart was taken straight from the edict and all info was gleaned from edict without proper credit given, that's poor form and perhaps illegal. It's all free, so why not give credit where credit is due?

However, if every kanji is based on currently studied kanji, some effort was put forth to assemble a system/pattern, whether it be computer generated or not, it's a new way to look at kanji. Whether it can continue past 300 or not is another matter and whether you find it useful or not is still, yet, another matter.

I'm sure other kanji books will be written, but how much "new" information will it actually tell us about kanji? Not much, I imagine, especially the beginning kanji. Kind of how newspapers report the same news, but different people buy different papers for different reasons. That said, I wouldn't buy it, nor would I buy I book teaching hiragana or katakana. I'd look at it though, if it were on a bookshelf.

Never heard of Lulu...maybe I'll write a book!

The EDICT license is here: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/edrdg/licence.html

Skimming it, t's CC Share-Alike, and Breen asks for a donation if it's used for profit.

Also, this is interesting: "NB: No contract or agreement needs to be signed in order to use the files. By using the files, the user implicitly undertakes to abide by the conditions of this licence." Part of the license is attribution, so...

So this guy is okay as long as he makes a contribution. I reckon that's fair.

Contribution and attribution.

I've registered myself in lulu.com and I have sent a message to the author of the book.

He has told me that the attribution to EDICT is in the "Acknowledgements" of the book and he has promised to put more pages in the preview feature.

But I think that I will not buy it. Do you recommend me any other?

Thanks

I am using this book to learn the readings. I like it alot.

(BROKEN LINK) http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=918

"Kanji Odyssey" looks good but you said this:
Book one is only 20 dollars, its 300 pages and has about 3 sentences per kanji. This book contains about 1500 sentence examples.

So, this book is 20 dollars, 300 pages and 3 sentences per kanji, and "300 kanji with 10000 words" (which I have decided not to buy) is 25 dollars and 655 pages and 10000 examples (33 words per kanji aprox.). Isn't it little bit expensive?

Thanks

[ファブリス]

The old quantity vs quality debate

More seriously, I didn't see "Kanji Odyssey" but I have no doubts that sentences will be of a much greater value for putting the characters in context, plus I guess if the sentence contains the character that also means the sentence contains a word that contains the character. You get the words in context, and grammar to lookup.

As for the other book, think about the word to kanji ratio... either you're a beginner and I don't think you will learn systematically those 10000 words, or you're inertmediate/advanced and you need far more kanji than that.

Also I wonder what kind of process the author used to select the words? Sure... the compound for "woman who lies flat during intercourse" is funny... but on the next page you also learn "man who dress like a girl".. that's gotta be very useful in everyday situation.