Read Japanese Today: The Easy Way to Learn 400 Practical Kanji (Tuttle Languge Library) by Len Walsh (2008-12-15)

I read and consulted a lot of books that should help in reading and memorize kanji. Honestly, for the beginner is a mess.... All the authors that embrace this difficult task propose some kind of special ideas to remember kanjis using "a story behind" that often nothing has to do with the real meaning of the character you want to study. Indeed, you can have tons of this mental pictures or stories used to memorize one kanji meaning but only one among them really work for you for a specific kanji. Obviously, the best choices are spread among several authors and you will be suddenly lost among different books to memorize different kanjis. Len Walsh uses a similar way but he proposes a little bit different background to start with. He explains really simple but statistically relevant rules on how the kanjis present themselves in real casual reading. Then he starts explaining how the building block of different kanjis are built from basic meanings of the simplest one (this is done by various authors). The things that make it different is especially the font type used. The book uses for Japanese a really simple font that avoids completely the attempt to replicate the beauty of the ancient Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. You can guess that this is not so important, but after having tried a lot of this book.... believe me... is crucial. Who love Japanese, love shodo and calligraphy and the kanji are represented in 99% of the case with serifs (or if you prefers with paintbrush effect on strokes) that make the reading of essential part of the kanji more complex and difficult to memorize. On the contrary, the font used here is a wireframe style font with constant with and without stylish decorations. You get immediately the essence of the structural part of the character and can memorize better the skeleton of the same much better than looking to beautiful, bolded and rich representation of paint-brush style fonts. Another important thing is that you can really memorize the most important 400 kanjis in just 10 days of study. Last but not least the book is not organized like a dictionary with boring schemas that repeat themselves across the pages. The description and the character are described in a plain text as if you are reading an essay, not a catalog. This helps a lot the author to freely spend more words for certain kanji where required or introduce gradually rules that are used later in new and more complex kanjis without restrictions due to the schematic approach used by similar books.Be aware, because at the end this approach changed in the new edition of the book. They used a font with serifs and used grids to encapsulate each kanji description. Really a pity because the book is not the same and the feeling in the new edition is the same you have with the other books.So, if you like what I said above, you should look for this version of the book. Not the new one.