A writer named James Heisig, wrote several popular books. Two them are:
• *Remembering* the *Kanji*: A *Complete Course* on How *Not* to *Forget* the *Meaning* and *Writing* of *Japanese Characters*
*• Remembering Traditional Hanzi: How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters*
Both books explain the meaning and / or how to remember the characters, but do not tell you their name. From my understanding the Hanzi & Kanji characters look and mean the same but are pronounced differently. Since character names aren’t listed, is there any reason to buy both books for a student of Chinese that has began studying Japanese?
2 comments
Yes, because Japanese uses a mix of traditional and simplified Kanji.
Also, if you studying Chinese, you are probably studying simplified Hanzi and book about traditional Hanzi wouldn’t be useful unless you are specifically trying to study to like, go to Taiwan.
As someone going the other way (Japanese to Mandarin), no, there’s no point buying both. After going through one book (I’m assuming it’s the Traditional Hanzi book) you should understand the Heisig method if you want to apply it to learning Japanese. Yes Japanese and Chinese don’t use exactly the same characters, but there’s a huge amount of overlap and it’s just not worth your time or money to go through RTK. Learn the characters that are different as they come up.
Personally I have an Anki deck set up with the simplified variant and example words on the front and simplified/traditional/shinjitai + Mandarin reading on the back.
That said, learning to read Japanese is different than learning to read Mandarin, so if you already know traditional characters, I probably wouldn’t bother with separate study of kanji. I’d recommend just learning vocab and when you come across an unfamiliar character Google it to see if it’s a shinjitai variant of a character you know or a genuinely new character.