James W. Heisig

Part one of a complete course on how not to forget the meaning and writing of Japanese characters. These self-teaching methods help you remember and write by harnessing the power of the imagination.

A Complete Course on Houw Not To Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters

Remembering the Kanji

The past twenty years have seen the publication of numerous translations and commentaries on the principal philosophers of the Kyoto School, but so far no general overview and evaluation of their thought has been available, either in Japanese or in Western languages. James Heisig, a longstanding participant in these efforts, has filled that gap with Philosophers of Nothingness. In this extensive study, the ideas of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji are presented both as a consistent school of thought in its own right and as a challenge to the Western philosophical tradition to open itself to the original contribution of Japan.

An Essay on the Kyoto School

Philosophers of Nothingness

Thomas P. Kasulis

John C. Maraldo

a sourcebook

Japanese philosophy

Following on the phenomenal success of Remembering the Kanji, the author has prepared a companion volume for learning the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of modern Japanese. In six short lessons of about twenty minutes, each of the two systems of "kana" writing are introduced in such a way that the absolute beginner can acquire fluency in writing in a fraction of the time normally devoted to the task. Using the same basic self-taught method devised for learning the kanji, and in collaboration with Helmut Morsbach and Kazue Kurebayashi, the author breaks the shapes of the two syllabaries into their component parts and draws on what he calls "imaginative memory" to aid the student in reassembling them into images that fix the sound of each particular kana to its writing. Now in its third edition, Remembering the Kana has helped tens of thousands of students of Japanese master the Hiragana and Katakana in a short amount of time . . . and have fun in the process.

A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each

Remembering the Kana

Helmut Morsbach

Kazue Kurebayashi

This book will help you teach yourself the writing and reading of all 46 characters each of Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabary from memory. By making use of a method of "imaginative memory," introduced in this book, you will be saved from the order of repetition. Following the method, you will be able to write and read all Japanese Kana in three hours and retain them by means of the incredible mnemonic methods. Instructions at the bottom of each page will ask you to skip backwards and forwards through the book, following the best "learning order." The lessons will guide you step by step through this process. As an added bonus, the book includes a supplement on "Learning How to Remember."

A Complete Course on how to Teach Yourself the Japanese Syllabary in 3 Hours

Remembering the Hiragana

Timothy W. Richardson

At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of Remembering Traditional Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the traditional Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ "imaginative memory" to associate each character’s component parts, or "primitive elements," with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a "story" that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory.

How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

Remembering Traditional Hanzi 1

This book is the second of two volumes designed to help students learn the meaning and writing of the 3,000 most frequently used traditional Chinese characters. (A parallel set of volumes has been prepared for simplified characters.) The 1,500 characters introduced in Book 1 include the top 1,000 by frequency, plus another 500 best learned at an early stage. Book 2 adds the remaining 1,500 characters to complete the set. The lessons of Book 2 have been arranged in such a way that they may be studied either after those of Book 1 or simultaneously with them. Students who wish to focus initially on the 1,000 most frequently used characters in the language can do so by studying Book 1 before moving on to Book 2. Many, if not most, learners will find this preferable. Students who wish to apply the logical ordering found in these pages to the entire list of 3,000 characters from the very beginning can take the more exacting, but also more rationally satisfying, approach of studying the parallel lessons of the two volumes together. The lessons in this book are followed by two short, additional sections, one that introduces a number of "compounds," or characters that are best learned in pairs, and another that adds two "postscripts." The book also includes a number of comprehensive indexes that are designed to facilitate work with both volumes. Of central importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memory. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters. These characters, in turn, can serve as parts of more complicated characters, and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided all along the way. Students are taught to employ "imaginative memory" to associate each character's component parts or "primitive elements" with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through creation of a "story" that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable ways, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping prevent characters from slipping out of memory.

Remembering Traditional Hanzi

Remembering Simplified Hanzi 2

Paul L. Swanson

Nothingness and Desire

Writing and Reading the Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency

Remembering the Kanji 3

Kanji para recordar

"To many scholars in the world of religious studies, Zen is a world apart from the world of politics, and the philosophy of the Kyoto school is a politically neutral blend of intellectual traditions East and West, Buddhist and Christian. This volume challenges those assumptions by focusing on the question of nationalism in the work of Japanese Buddhist thinkers during and after the Pacific War. Fifteen Japanese and Western scholars offer a variety of critical perspectives concerning the political responsibility of intellectuals and the concrete historical consequences of working within a religious or philosophical tradition." "The first group of essays debates the role of Zen Buddhism in wartime Japan." "A second group of essays examines the political thought and activities of Nishida Kitaro, the doyen of the Kyoto school." "A third group of essays questions the complicity of other philosophers of the Kyoto school in the wartime spirit of nationalism and analyzes the ideas of modernity and the modern nation-state then current in Japan." "This carefully documented volume offers a wealth of information and reflection for those interested in prewar and wartime history, Zen, Japanese philosophy, and the problem of nationalism today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism

Rude Awakenings

The six lectures that make up this book were delivered in March 2011 at London University’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies as the Jordan Lectures on Comparative Religion. They revolve around the intersection of two ideas, nothingness and desire, as they apply to a re-examination of the questions of self, God, morality, property, and the East-West philosophical divide. Rather than attempt to harmonize East and West philosophies into a single chorus, Heisig undertakes what he calls a “philosophical antiphony.” Through the simple call-and-response of a few representative voices, Heisig tries to join the choir on both sides of the antiphony to relate the questions at hand to larger problems that press on the human community. He argues that as problems like the technological devastation of the natural world, the shrinking of elected governance through the expanding powers of financial institutions, and the expropriation of alternate cultures of health and education spread freely through traditional civilizations across the world, religious and philosophical responses can no longer afford to remain territorial in outlook. Although the lectures often stress the importance of practice, their principal preoccupation is with seeing the things of life more clearly. Heisig explains: “By that I mean not just looking more closely at objects that come into my line of view from day to day, but seeing them as mirrors in which I can see myself reflected. Things do not just reveal parts of the world to me; they also tell me something of how I see what I see, and who it is that does the seeing. To listen to what things have to say to me, I need to break with the habit of thinking simply that it is I who mirror inside of myself the world outside and process what I have captured to make my way through life. Only when this habit has been broken will I be able to start seeing through the reflections, to scrape the tain off the mirror, as it were, so that it becomes a window to the things of life as they are, with only a pale reflection of myself left on the pane. Everything seen through the looking glass, myself included, becomes an image on which reality has stamped itself. This, I am persuaded, is the closest we can come to a ground for thinking reasonably and acting as true-to-life as we can.”

A Philosophical Antiphony

Tanya Sienko

Students who have learned to read and write the basic 2,000 characters run into the same difficulty that university students in Japan face: The government-approved list of basic educational kanji is not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialization requires supplementary kanji of its own, a large number of these kanji overlap. With that in mind, the same methods employed in volumes 1 and 2 of Remembering the Kanji have been applied to 1,000 additional characters determined as useful for upper-level proficiency, and the results published as the third volume in the series. To identify the extra 1,000 characters, frequency lists were researched and crosschecked against a number of standard Japanese kanji dictionaries. Separate parts of the book are devoted to learning the writing and reading of these characters. The writing requires only a handful of new "primitive elements." A few are introduced as compound primitives ("measure words") or as alternative forms for standard kanji. The majority of the kanji, 735 in all, are organized according to the elements introduced in Volume 1. For the reading, about twenty-five percent of the new kanji fall into "pure groups" that use a single "signal primitive" to identify the main Chinese reading. Another thirty percent of the new kanji belong to groups with one exception or to mixed groups in which the signal primitives have two readings. The remaining 306 characters are organized first according to readings that can be intuited from the meaning or dominant primitive element, and then according to useful compound terms.

Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency

Volume 2 (4th ed.) updated to include the 196 kanja approved in 2010 for general use.

A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters

Remembering the Kanji 1

Verònica Calafell Callejo

La mayoría de los estudiantes de japonés se empeñan en desesperarse, pensando que los kanji solamente se pueden aprender ante una mesa, hincando los codos en ella y escribiendo una y otra vez el mismo carácter, a base de un colosal esfuerzo memorístico. Este libro demuestra que, si se cuenta con una buena estructura y un buen método «imaginativo», el muro que representan los kanji puede derribarse sin tanto esfuerzo... y en este caso, incluso de un modo divertido. Esta obra es un curso cuyo objetivo no estriba solamente en recordar un cierto número de kanji, sino también en enseñar cómo recordar los caracteres. En la primera parte, se proporcionan cuentos asociativos completos de cada carácter. En el segunda, sólo se dan los argumentos de estos cuentos para que cada estudiante añada sus propios detalles basándose en la memoria y la imaginación. La tercera, que abarca la mayor parte del curso, sólo proporciona las palabras clave y los significados de los componentes, dejando al estudiante el resto del proceso.

Curso mnemotécnico para el aprendizaje de la escritura y el significado de los caracteres japoneses

Kanji para recordar I

"The approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Remembering Simplified Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the traditional Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage." "Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memory. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process."--BOOK JACKET.

Remembering Simplified Hanzi

Taitetsu Unno

This collection of papers focuses on Philosophy as Metanoetics, the seminal work of the celebrated Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962).

James W. Heisig

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