A Guide to Writing Japanese Kanji & Kana Book 1: A Self-Study Workbook for Learning Japanese Characters (Tuttle Language Library)

I was using the box set of Kanji De Manga that I received as a gift to learn Kanji and honestly it wasn't helping me that much. I like this one over Kanji de Manga for two main reasons, 1 being that you get a lot more Kanji for the price, and 2 being that when they show you how to put two kanji together to form a word or phrase, it only uses Kanji and characters that you would have already learned, assuming you start from the first kanji in the book and go from there.
I don't necessarily like it for learning Kana, since as far as I could see, the book doesn't cover Dakuten and Handakuten, which is pretty important. For learning Kana I would strongly recommend buying Kana de Manga, though it may feel patronizing if you're older than 8, it's a great book for learning the nuances of the Japanese phonetic writing characters.

This book gives easy to follow instructions for how to write kanji and gives good examples of words in which the kanji is used. When giving examples, it gives the page numbers of the other kanji used for quick reference, which is really useful. The downside is that it does not give the hiragana that follows the kanji, so you have to already be familiar with the various forms the word takes by itself. Thus, I would not suggest it for any new speakers or people just wanting to learn how to write Japanese.

I tried many books, and this is the best I could find. It starts with hiragana. With each character you learn, it teaches you words using combinations of characters you previously learned. The next section is katakana, and it's the same thing: combinations of previously learned characters. The last 75% of this book is kanji, and once again, the combinations are only with kanji characters you have previously learned. The order of the characters differs from the way many text books teach you, but it is well structured.

Some kanji books I've used tried to teach by relating the character to a picture. This might work for young children, but it doens't work for me. I learn by structured lessons.

The majority of the space on each page is made up of empty squares for you to practice writing. This is useful because you should be attempting to mimic the example character. With every square, you will write more like the example. This book will cause your kanji to be complimented by Japanese people because of how neat it is. Also, the more times you write a character, the more times it will be cemented into your head.

Using the index in the back of the book, you can find any character in the book. When I'm writing my homework assignment and I come across a kanji character I don't know (or don't know very well), I look it up in the index and practice writing it about 5 times. Then I move on with my assignment. Look up a character 3 or 4 times and it is yours to keep.

This book will not teach you Japanese. It is designed to accompany a text book, and it's best used side by side with your homework assignments. I recommend this for beginners, and also for those aspiring a 3 or 2 on the JLPT. Do not attempt to learn Japanese without this book. The price is justified.

After hitting a plateau in my Japanese studies, I realized that a solid grounding in kanji was really holding back my progress. I knew that I needed a systematic approach to the 1,945 jyouyou characters and recalled that this series had been used as the kanji textbook at my alma mater, Princeton University, in the Japanese language study curriculum. I worked this two textbook series for about 4.5 years and it has really paid off (e.g., JLPT kanji tests are a snap, even level 1). The ordering, while different from most other kanji instruction orderings, flows nicely and doesn't overwhelm the student with too many similar kanji in a row (e.g., it doesn't group by radical and present every character containing that radical). Granted, some fairly common characters aren't introduced until much later in the series, but this is a small sacrifice for an ordering that flows and supports systematic recall.

If you can speak basic Japanese and can read some characters -- but are coming to terms with the fact that you are going to have to learn the jyouyou sooner or later -- don't hesitate: by this series and get going. If you have zero experience with Japanese and are looking for survival skills in kanji and are living in Japan, I'd suggest using the Helsig approach, which has you learning basic kanji meanings before readings and written style. After all, what good does knowing the readings for "danger: slow down" characters on a sign if you don't know what they mean?

BTW, I often hear students asking why bother investing in learning how to write the characters by hand given that most writing is done on computers anyway. Don't fall into this trap: there is no better way to cement a characters morphology and meaning in your memory than learning to write. It has worked for students of the graphology for millenia -- it will work for you, too.

This book was very helpful in my Japanese studies in that it shows relationships between calligraphy and typed symbols and gave phrase examples to show the meaning and, in some cases, origin of words and symbols.