AGENTS FOR EUROPE, AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST & SOUTH ASIA
TRADE DISTRIBUTOR:
[email protected] / +44 (0)20 8293 0111
[email protected] / +44 (0)20 8829 3002
Kodansha Europe Ltd. www.kodansha.eu
£24 PB
228 x 152 mm 704 pages, 2,300 entries beginner / intermediate
www.turnaround-uk.com
NEW TITLE
MARCH 2014 978-1-56836-526-8
The Kodansha Kanji
Learner’s Course
A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering 2,300 Characters author: Andrew Scott Conning
漢 字 を 理 解
foreword: Jack Halpern, author of The Kodansha Kanji Dictionary and The Kanji Learner’s Dictionary & originator of the System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns - ‘SKIP’ 228 x 152mm; 704 pages, for beginner / intermediate isbn: 978-1-56836-526-8 BIC: YQF 2GJ
£24 Softcover Kodansha Europe Ltd.
The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course is an innovative and highly effective system for learning and remembering kanji, or Sino-Japanese characters. It contains all 2,136 Joyo kanji (Japanese government designation for kanji in common usage) plus 164 of the most useful non-Joyo kanji, specially arranged to maximise efficiency of acquisition. One of the book’s key features is its mnemonic devices—original stories for each kanji that teach you to associate graphical components with images linked to the character’s meaning. With these, students will find it hard to forgot the nuances of the kanji they’ve studied, and more than likely they will even find it easier to decipher the meanings of unfamiliar compounds that contain those characters. Another unique feature is the author’s emphasis on comparing similar-looking kanji as a means of differentiating them. Most kanji dictionaries and textbooks arrange their entries in ways that do not address the needs of non-native learners, such as by traditional radical or by the grade in which the kanji are taught in Japanese schools. The Kodansha Kanji Leaner’s Course uses a unique sequence that presents look-alikes one after the other, and presents the building blocks before the complex kanji they appear in. This book fills an urgent need for a timesaving, yet reliable, kanji-learning system that can be used from beginner through to advanced levels. It is intended for anyone who is serious about learning to read and write Japanese.
• Includes 2,300 kanji entries; teaches the meanings, readings, and usages of all 2,136 government-prescribed Joyo Kanji • Offers clear and systematic guidelines to help in visualising the meanings of the characters as they are encountered • Introduces kanji components in a logical, step-by-step order, with related kanji grouped together • A super user-friendly kanji learning system for ALL learners that is perfectly dovetailed with The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary (978-1-56836-407-0; £30 PB). • Includes full cross-referencing with kanji listed in The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary and incorporates core meanings, charactermeanings, readings, and sample vocabulary from the dictionary • Written by Andrew Conning, in association with Jack Halpern, Editor-in-Chief of The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary and The Kodansha Kanji Dictionary (978-1-56836-4087) who is a highly-respected world authority in the field of Japanese language-learning • 10 original appendices Andrew Scott Conning is a doctoral candidate and Presidential Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He received a bachelor’s degree in languages from Georgetown University (USA) and a master’s degree in social anthropology from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Mexico). He has been active in Japan as a lecturer and university administrator, and most recently as a research scholar at the University of Tokyo.
