Kana Pict-o-Graphix: Mnemonics for Japanese Hiragana and Katakana

I first saw this book in Narita Airport in Japan on my way home one trip but decided to purchase on Amazon for less than airport bookstore price when I got home. It is an amazingly fun way to learn Kana and the "pictographic" style really helps you remember the characters. A delightful book I would recommend for beginners.

this pocket size book is easy to read, easy to carry around, and fairly easy to learn from. His mnemonic devices are well thought out and work for me most of the time. In conjunction with other books on learning hiragana, you will find this book helps the memory hold onto the material.
Get it!

I used it so much when I was in a Japanese class. It was very handy indeed.

This little book is DANGEROUS.

While some of the pictures are helpful in remembering the symbols, they very often make strained associations with the sounds -- and the words they associate as mnemonics are also very often not quite the right pronunciation (and even at times outright incorrect).

The real problem here is that while you might manage to remember many of the katakana/hiragana symbols, and possibly even their pronunciations, the diagrams the author has used to pair them with images tend to bear strong resemblances to actual kanji. This means that when you've managed to figure out kana and start working on your actual vocabulary, you will almost certainly find yourself misidentifying kanji as kana because of the images you've been encouraged to associate with them.

If you're going to stop at kana, this might help you. If you actually want to read or write Japanese as it's commonly written, this will almost certainly provide more setbacks than solutions.

For an actual, practical guide to kana from someone who has also written helpfully on kanji:
Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each (Manoa) (Japanese Edition) (part 1)
Remembering the Kana: The Hiragana / The Katakana

I am the author of Kana Pictographix. Understand I focus on one thing here: remembering the kana and it's associated sound. I don't cover writing technique or the history of the kana. In fact, my visual mnemonics have nothing to do with the etymological origins of the characters. I should also mention that I use American pronunciation because, well, I'm an American. I seem to have touched 'raw' nerve with some Brits on my pronunciation of 'rocket'. Keep a stiff upper lip, yeah?
If you'd like to see samples of this and my new kanji works that include kanji, kana, stroke order and playful graphics, I recommend you visit my website, KanjiPictographix. Cheers.